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RussianCabbie_Lotteryfan wrote:

TemporalFlux wrote:

With today’s nominations, we now we have a Sliders type movie that stands to sweep the Oscars.  How much longer can Universal ignore what they’re sitting on?

They keep waiting on a prestige creator / showrunner

I guess they’re not interested, but I still think Seth McFarlane / David A. Goodman would be perfect.  Seth has a development deal with Universal right now

Probably, SLIDERS reflects how it came from creators who had previously worked on the NAKED GUN series and SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE -- comedies and parodies. In contrast, THE X-FILES was based on KOLCHAK: THE NIGHT STALKER and inspired by the Watergate scandal; THE X-FILES was a criminal procedural in a world of horror while SLIDERS was a dramedy drawing on the talent of sketch comedians.

IOh, in X-CAST, I've just come to the segment where Carter says he wasn't aware that Gillian was quitting until he read about it on the internet at which point he decided to create a cliffhanger with Skinner getting run over -- except Gillian didn't say she was quitting until well-after that episode had been filmed.

I think that AI has its place as an assistant. When writing my fanfics, I had a lot of help: Transmodiar helped me better understand the screenplay format. Nigel Mitchell came up with all the alt-world concepts. Slider_Quinn21 made my last script readable, something I struggled with due to the densely layered plot.

I think it'd be great to use AI to determine if the writing is sufficiently visual, to accumulate scene description details for a human writer to select, to offer dialogue suggestions drawing on machine-learning to review every line of dialogue ever spoken by Jerry, Sabrina, Cleavant and John in any production to create a reference base of their specific vocal mannerisms.

As it stands, any 'writing' from AI is just pulling words from pre-existing content, using thesaurus-algorithms to paraphrase the nouns and verbs and adjectives, rearranging the clauses by assigning importance to any sentences with key words relevant to the query, and presenting a mismash of semi-random content that has been given a bit of polish to somewhat hold it together. An AI episode of SLIDERS would just be inserting the character-names into a STAR TREK or STARGATE screenplay, moving around the language and replacing and paraphrasing names and descriptions.

AI stands for artificial intelligence, but as it stands, it's not really that intelligent. I'd call it assistive iteration; it's not creating, it's just repeating, recombining and repackaging content from different sources, and all those sources were first written by a human. AI is a useful tool to algorithmically review your own writing to determine if your writing is clear, readable, consistent, meets formatting requirements and to gather research, but as a writer, AI basically the Season 3 staff of SLIDERS ripping off popular movies.

If you look on some of the AI-generated plots for SLIDERS on Reddit, the stories are obviously just LEGENDS OF TOMORROW, STARGATE and STAR TREK synopses that have been randomly recombined.

https://www.reddit.com/r/SLIDERS/commen … r_sliders/

The explanation is that we as an audience were almost role playing as Sliders.  No matter how strange or awful the slide was, we kept jumping into the vortex each week hoping that the next slide would bring us back home to the show we used to love.

RussianCabbie_Lotteryfan wrote:

I honestly don't remember thinking it was as well done as I did on the last watch.  Maybe my age.  Either way was quite an interesting story.   Far better than the super hero schlock of today.

I fundamentally disagree with this on every level. The entire thesis of THE X-FILES seems to be: you can't make a difference. No one can make a difference. Mulder can't do anything about the alien invasion except talk about it. Scully can't seem to get anywhere in her career: no matter how many times she gets fired or quit, she ends up working at the most disdained department in the FBI.

Even the evil characters can't seem to accomplish anything on THE X-FILES. The alien invasion is never coming; the Syndicate is constantly referring to how "the date is set" and "they're coming, they're here, they've been here for a long time, they're only coming back" and then Season 10 went and declared that the alien invasion was never happening at all and all those ominous, mysterious men were wasting their time.

In addition, THE X-FILES also seemed to be unable to grasp the concept of education. Mulder and Scully never seemed to collate and accumulate their details on the monsters or the Syndicate: by Season 11, they were as incapable of stopping monsters as they were in Season 1.

This is the antithesis of a superhero movie. The superhero movie declares: we can all make a difference and anyone can be a hero. Even the most obnoxious or easily dismissed or ordinary can be heroes. Tony Stark is a drunken moron tripping on ego and liquor; when stripped of his wealth and luxuries and forced to survive, he discovers he has what it takes to battle war itself.

Dr. Donald Blake seems to be a crazy person who thinks he's the Norse God of Thunder and here to help people; it turns out he actually is Thor. Steve Rogers is a washout and a reject who can't find shoes small enough to fit the feet on his frail frame; he is determined to battle Nazis and is given a body that is as strong as his decency of character. Everyone has it in them to be a hero; it's just that not everyone looks hard enough or digs deep enough to find it.

And I know what some will say: well, that's a fairy tale. THE X-FILES is far more realistic (because yes, a TV show about aliens made of black oil colonizing the Earth with bees and supersoldiers is truly very grounded), THE X-FILES' cynicism is believable. But cynicism is easy. Despair and depression and giving up are the easiest options for a person and for a storyteller. It is much harder to tell superhero stories than it is to tell X-FILES stories.

One of the hardest parts of writing the TV show SUPERNATURAL, I think: it has to be finding a way for Sam and Dean to find some solution to beat the monsters of the week, to defeat Lucifer, and to, in the final season, take on God Himself. But THE X-FILES takes the easy way out by never having Mulder and Scully triumph.

Writing THE X-FILES is shooting fish in a barrel: raise mysteries and don't resolve them, create monsters and don't find a way to stop them, have two lead characters passively wander through the story and accomplish nothing whatsoever. Superheroes take much more talent.

I cannot stress enough in the name of Quinn's cat, Wade's teddy bear, Rembrandt's shiny suit and Arturo's bow tie that the opinions of ireactions are not the views of Sliders.TV.

I don't recall doing more with Turbine's Season 2 beyond the second Daelin segment of "As Time Goes By", and I lost my enthusiasm for upscaling SLIDERS because if Season 1 doesn't look good, what's the point of upscaling any other episode? I also didn't work on it enough to figure out if AI upscaling was any better than on-the-fly smoothing and sharpening. However, it looks like Season 2 does upscale really well and benefits from AI upscaling and not just some non-adaptive filters.

I did attempt to upscale every Season 1 episode with Turbine at which point I realized Turbine's Season 1 video quality was actually worse than Universal's Season 1.

I'm just doing some experiments out of curiosity. I have the feeling that Topaz won't be able to do much with the Turbine versions of Seasons 3, 4 and 5 since those benefitted from advancements in digital videotape while Season 2 was using digital videotape in its earliest form.

"As Time Goes By" finished. I can report that the AI-upscaled Turbine file looks astonishingly good and well beyond on-the-fly filters for SD upscaling. Topaz has resolved the mild fuzziness and transformed all of the blockiness in the Turbine file into crisp, crystalline detail. Also, the new grain effect prevents the waxy look of earlier upscales.

Turbine has added film grain texture to offset the waxy effect of my previous upscales. I was really impressed by how the Pilot episode, being shot and edited on film, could be AI-restored to 1080p and its original film look thanks to Topaz's new film grain feature. This 720p version of "As Time Goes By" looks as crisp as the film-look of the restored Pilot, although I did have to up the grain layer by 25 percent. I don't think a 1080p upscale would quite as sharp, however, as "As Time Goes By" was shot on film but transferred to 1996-era 540 line videotape.

The AI upscale definitely looks better than the Turbine version on an upscaling TV. The small, blocky texture on the the Turbine image looked nice at living room distance; it looked like film grain. However, the AI has converted that into sharper detail and texture: the grainy approximation of texture has become actual texture for dirt on the ground, for the actors' skin. It captures the sharpness of HD quality at edges, although it still doesn't have the fine detail of a true HD image. The wide shots still have a bit of telltale AI-imprecision although the grain effect has offset it so it doesn't distract. 1080p would probably make the lack detail and the wide shot issues more prominent.

Currently upscaling "Season's Greedings". I don't know if Turbine can this one better than the TV's on-the-fly upscaler, however. Season 3 seems to be using a 1997 digital videotape format for editing and effects that seems to capture even more of the original film's detail in a downscaled state.

It's truly ironic: each subsequent season of SLIDERS seemed to get crisper, sharper and more detailed even as the writing production became clumsier, shoddier and shabbier. The better SLIDERS' image quality became, the less it had to show.

Enjoy RCLF. You put season three into my head and now i'm looking through a terrabyte drive for a hotel bar that may or may not exist.

The only people to treat the 'maggs right were the people at inkworks.

One of my favourite movies is TOMORROWLAND, scripted by Damon Lindeloff. There's a part where George Clooney's character snarls, "Do I have to explain everything? Can't you just be amazed and move on?"

That is, I feel, quite reflective of Lindeloff's approach to LOST if I understand Slider_Quinn21's summary correctly.

(Note: TOMORROWLAND is probably nobody else's favourite movie.)

which chatbot are you using?

Making the minifigures, isn't that hard, but the bar/inside of the hotel was created somewhere in 2015, it's probably among my other lego creations. I'll look into it after finishing the sets/figures for season 1 and 2. Rembrandt me in a few months.

TNG was shot on 35mm film for all seven seasons. But admittedly, not every 35mm film stock is the same. If you ever have time, download and watch the 4K77 version of STAR WARS, a digital scan of a theatrical print of the 1977 movie. The movie was shot on four different kinds of film depending on whatever was available and what was needed for layers of effects, and all four are rather mismatched in how they capture light and how much grain is on the image.

TNG could have changed film stocks between or even within seasons. And certainly, the lighting shifted throughout the seasons, lenses and cameras improved every few years, and colour processing techniques advanced (although the HD remaster would have had to do colour processing all over again as they rescanned the original film).

Netflix's high bandwidth streaming is probably higher bandwidth now than it was in 2012. They didn't even start 4K until 2014.

Why would TNG look different? The HD remaster was released 10 years ago. How did it look better? It's unlikely CBS and Paramount have done anything to improve it ever since the TNG remaster was a financial loss.

Hypothetically, it could be your 2022 TV being better than your 2022 TV, but you haven't mentioned it.

Two possibilities come to mind: the video was reprocessed for high dynamic range for increased shadow and brightness detail. The other possibility: the 2012 release was compressed for digital broadcast and streaming which meant some blur and loss of detail, but in 10 years, improved internet speeds and video compression codecs have led to more or all of the HD video detail finally coming through.