Sliders DVD Releases (Universal, Mill Creek, SD blu-ray, Restoration) (Page 1 of 5)

WOW!!!

We need to write Mill Creek and start a campaign!

And we should push for scanning the masters for a true blu-ray not just an upconversion/cleanup of the current discs.

From the article:

"Mill Creek can only work with the versions of the episodes that Universal sends them, so their hands could be tied. We'll have to wait and see; stay tuned!"

So I'm guessing it would be an upconversion/cleanup job.  Because we can assume universal doesn't have a digital scan in 16:9 bluray format, right?

If it's anything to note NBC Universal Store removed the Complete Series set from their website about a month ago. Season five was also removed, I asked them and they said they have no release date for that season.

I feel it's either going to be a good blu ray transfer or a kick in the shins with yet another DVD re-release. A shoddy up conversion/cleanup just seems pointless.

I may be wrong but looking at their site, I don't get the sense they'd engage in this sort of thing.  I'm hoping though they can get some help from universal on this and just get good digital files from them.

The article states that decisions haven't necessarily been made by Mill Creek yet so the more we can get fans to reach out to them asking for a high quality master transfer, the more they'll realize this is what fans are really looking for out of a re-release.

That said since universal didnt bother, I'd take a good upconversion job, but it wont quite be the same.

Thanks. It's very important we let them know what we want.

From the article:

My biggest question would be was Sliders shot in widescreen, like the X-Files and no one knew until years later till the HD versions were released. Mill Creek has Airwolf on blu ray and they also have Knight Rider HD but failed to put it on BD as TVShows on DVD says:

They also done a That 70s Show BD, in the trailer they keep bantering how it was transferred from the original film negatives: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6AIGQN3p1w. Who knows who done the transferring though.

Unless there's any new material not released on the original DVD sets, I doubt I'd buy a new DVD release (I don't have a blu ray player at all), other than a season 3 with single sided discs.

For a show that everyone seems to think is forgotten, it sure has a lot of life in it on streaming licenses and DVD releases.

Star Trek TNG BD is still 4:3.  For Sliders, they had to use a higher quality transfer for the The Hub HD broadcasts.  These were far superior to the DVD's IMO.  It may simply have been professional upscaling from the masters used for DVD.  What was the quality of Sliders on Netflix or whatever streaming service had it, when it was on there?  On BD, you'll at least get a better bit rate, which will look far better than DVD.  As for extras, I wouldn't hold my breath.

I watch most of my 4:3 DVDs in 16:9 with non-linear stretching using Cyberlink PowerDVD. I think you would be very impressed by the conversion. There is no distortion. The cropping is slight and barely noticeable. The result is an image that fills the screen without much, if any, loss of picture and the shot composition is actually enhanced because there is no distracting pillarboxing.

Out of luck on the blu-ray
http://www.tvshowsondvd.com/news/Slider … ries/22442

Hopefully, all the episodes in the new release will be the same quality as the Pilot instead of having the Pilot in a high bit rate and all the other episodes at a low bit rate.

I ended up doing the smart stretching based on your recommendation. It was great for getting a sense of what a 16:9 scan would look like, but I think I may go back to 4:3.  From what I saw, every time characters weren't in the middle of the frame (eg when they were on the sides), they stretched too much, and their width changed as they moved through the frame.

I'm pretty frustrated with us likely not even getting simulated HD with this release, but hopefully as you say the source files are of better quality. I am not holding out hope. Perhaps I am mistaken but even on Netflix the pilot seems to be much higher quality than other episodes from season 1. I think universal just sent Netflix the ones they had on hand for the dvd and will do the same with Mill Creek.

I'm going to try to post my clips of my upconverted pilot at some point, somewhere. If we can get quality enough source files for the episodes, I might just try to do a blu-ray myself, because I have no faith in the likelihood Universal bothers with giving us anything new anymore.

Oh thanks!

You mean this one?

http://earthprime.com/video/making-of-sliders-sfc

Not sure if you have these, Season 2 EPK:

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x43bem … -part-1_tv

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x434ln … -part-2_tv

Aaron had posted this in another thread.

I have "The Good,the Bad and the Wealthy" & California Reich on my tivo premier.
but i dont realy have a good way to transfer them to anything else

Looks better than season 2 dvd's, but these are the ones from 2004 in the floating DVD case, they had like 6 episodes compressed on one DVD something new at the time where as previous to this release usually there would be 3 hrs on a single dvd vs the 5hr + on these dvd's.

Saying that the HUB Broadcast looks better, as said before their are black bars on the left and right of the screen being that The HUB was an HD only TV network.

The DVD has more grain...The HUB images look slightly better.

Is it a drastic difference "No", I am playing the DVD on a bluray player with a DVD up-convert so I am getting the best version of what the DVD could offer.

The HUB was the only network to try Sliders Reruns and they aired them in order with the best quality possible...I wish it would of worked but we had an extra year of so of new eyes getting to see Sliders again.

I checked it out on Netflix, Netflix looks better than DVD, HUB still looks better.

My guess is the new release coming out may look better single layer disk, etc. The problem If you got the hub episodes is the bottom of the screen hub would take up to advertise what was coming up or contest, so you would end up with an network logo on all episodes.

I would guess if the new release dvd sells good the only thing left to do is a bluray conversion.

I would guess the last couple rereleases had some sales for their to be a complete season rerelease with episodes in correct order...tthis is the 1st time anyone has 5aken the time to do this on dvd...with it being a new conversion it may have less episodes or a better conversion.

The show was shot on film but the badly done special effects would have to be redone..would be nice to get a star trek classic series or sting bluray redo but I can't see anyone spending the money....maybe could talk amazon into it as an exclusive on demand project.  I t would be cheaper than a 13 episode show and their is a built in audience

Is there anyone in this thread that doesn't already own the series on DVD - or can catch it on Netflix? What is the audience for this release at this point?

I think this article, speculating in April about what Mill Creek's Quantum Leap release would be like, highlights their business model:
http://www.tvshowsondvd.com/news/Quantu … nd-2/22175

If we look at the Sliders release by MC in 2016, it's suggested retail price is $45.  The Universal one in 2014 was what, $150 or something?  So MC is really offering this at the fraction of the cost. Of course, people do have options to buy season sets individually on the cheap or get the 2014 release used.  Who knows how well this will do, as long as Mill Creek didn't pay much for the license they should be ok, I think.

I emailed Mill Creek and asked about the video quality on the new set and they wrote back to spend three paragraphs saying NOTHING WHATSOEVER. I don't think they know what the video quality will be; maybe they don't have the original DVD release to make a comparison.

If the new release isn't compressing six hours of video onto one disc, I'll buy it. Netflix Canada doesn't have SLIDERS. Even American Netflix is missing some episodes for reasons unfathomable but are probably due to the Dr. Geiger's Combine experiment warping spacetime and corrupting reality into a twisted incarnation filled with horror, madness and loss.

I'd like the episodes in the correct order. I'd like a decent quality version of "As Time Goes By" to watch endlessly. I'll never watch anything past Season 2 except for research purposes. The lack of simulated HD isn't a huge problem.

I do think that Mill Creek could have done a blu-ray release with the techniques I've explained. However,  my PowerDVD software player can do the upscale for me.

A blu-ray release could store the video at the highest possible quality, but I imagine even if you maxed out the bit rate, the video quality would not be any better than video at the upper limit of DVD storage. Universal's masters are undoubtedly in standard definition. So long as Mill Creek doesn't overcompress the way Universal did, it should be fine.

If the HUB could get the digital materials to do a decent semi-HD upscale, I see no reason not to think Mill Creek couldn't benefit from the same. It's possible that Netflix and Universal came to the streaming arrangement before Universal had a department and a procedure for handling HD broadcast on shows only stored as standard definition on their masters. The Professor would tell you to expect nothing but hope for everything.

There's no way the HUB could have done the HD upscale unless they were given the raw materials from Univeral to do it in the first place.

I'm away now, so I don't have access to my DVDs for a screen shot, but here's an example of the netflix pilot vs. a pilot upconverted off the dvd file (stretching for 16:9).

Yea.  The netflix is putrid.  With good source files (like the pilot dvd), as ireactions has said in the past we can get a decent picture using software that algorithmically fakes HD. It fills in empty lines of resolution in going from SD to HD, deals with noise, colors, sharpness, etc.  I have a family member who has done this stuff before and did it for me with this material.

It looks tremendous on an 60 inch tv and was even able to get it looking pretty good projected at 150 inches (but it required my playing it using power dvd's own video enhancement setting).

I think the best way to imagine a SLIDERS blu-ray release from Mill Creek is to put your hands over your eyes and let the empty blackness of nothing fill your sight. It's not going to happen. However, AIRWOLF is interesting in that the 1080p transfer really achieves nothing; there just isn't enough detail in the image to make it worthwhile; I suspect SLIDERS would be about the same.

I am concerned to examine Mill Creek's site and see that they are storing 88 episodes on 15 discs. The previous complete DVD set had all the episodes on 22 discs; does this mean Mill Creek is compressing the video even more than the last release? It's possible the disc count is just preliminary, of course, given that Mill Creek's customer service reps couldn't answer a single question about the DVD.

There was less speculation over the contents of the fourth and fifth seasons than there has over this cash-grab DVD re-release.

Are you referring to the complete series packaging, or the individual releases? I never got or even saw in person the complete series (with its price tag and lack of incentive to get, I didn't pay too much attention). The original releases were horrid (except season 4). Seasons 1&2 packaging with the floating discs in stirafoam for $80ish was awful- and when I thought it wouldn't get worse - double sided discs in a package where disc overlap for season 3. 4 was just right but 5 could've been better- putting Remmy as the main picture instead of Mallory on the cover, and having release dates for the episodes and an animated menu would've been nice.

What was the original complete series packaging like?

Anyone else notice TVShowsOnDVD 'some of them coming to blu-ray shows' that well they've all been recently announced to DVD-none to blu-ray.

I'm close to buying another DVD case for the upcoming set. If you take a look at the recent release of Mad About You from Mill Creek it doesn't bode well: https://www.amazon.com/review/reviews-l … B01CIS85YE

I thought miami vice and knight rider got bluray?

In Germany, a distributor is releasing a Standard Definition of Sliders on Blu-Ray - so the complete series is packaged on just four discs.

The audio has an English option and it ships to the U.S.  It's also about the same price as the Mill Creek Entertainment DVD release.

https://www.amazon.de/exec/obidos/ASIN/ … derssli-21

It comes out in September, about a month before Mill Creek's release does.

On one level, I think the idea of watching Season 1 in the wrong order for no reason whatsoever is absolutely baffling. On another, I did get a whole novella out of the wrong order, so sure. I wouldn't want SLIDERS to be immortalized this way, though.

I think it's just the production order that puts "Stoker" earlier. There is no reason "Stoker" needs to be seen before "Dinoslide," but there's also no reason see "Stoker" or "Dinoslide" at all. *shudders*

To me, "Stoker" is another exercise in mutilating a once-great science fiction series into an unprofessional abomination of hackwork and stupidity -- and I am dreading rewatching it. I have to, you see, to finish my final SLIDERS script. I'm putting it off for as long as humanly possible, but the script pages where I must describe the rock star vampires accurately comes closer and closer and I am terrified at the prospect of having to sit through this miserable insult to the intelligence that masquerades as a professional product.

I'm also going to have to rewatch "Dragonslide," "The Fire Within," "Paradise Lost," "The Last of Eden," "Sole Survivors," "The Breeder" and "This Slide of Paradise" and I honestly don't even know if I'll come out of this alive.

Back in 1999 I actually thought that Season 4 was where the show "Jumped" but after rewatching the DVD's I actually found an appreciation for Season 4. It was at its best with just the three sliders. the first few Colin episodes were not that bad but by the end of the season it fell flat (with The Chasm and Roads Taken being the nadirs of the season)

That being said, I agree that Season 3 IS THE ABSOLUTE WORST. This was when the show  jumped the shark  right after "The Guardian" aired.  Sure there are some roses in this bed of thornes , Dead Man Sliding, Seasons Greedings but for the most part this season came down to a lame attempt to turn a cute quirky Sci fi series into The X Files (FOX's proudest ship in the FOX fleet)

These days, I find myself looking at Seasons 3 - 5 as a picture of David Peckinpah's addiction reignited after his teenaged son's death made him relapse after two decades of sobriety.

Season 3 is the cocaine high. Everything's mad and random and crazy and driven by one's basest impulses in any direction -- nightclubs and sex and explosions akin to riding the top of a supersonic train or high-excitement motorcycle chases -- but with an ugly, dehumanizing edge if you look closely where people and relationships don't matter, only the thrill of the drug. People who seem to be a buzzkill get dumped in the trash or blown up.

But then the high isn't enough and the addict wants  drugs that go even deeper into the psyche to feed the need for escape -- the miserable monster movies that were "The Breeder" and "Stoker" and "This Slide of Paradise" are a heroin injection, going into depressants that leave one in a state of euphoric bliss. But in truth, anyone sober looking at the heroin addict would see human body that's little more than a corpse that isn't dead yet.

Then we come to Season 4, where it's now all about combining heroin and cocaine into speedballs, resulting in more euphoria that is, however, socially vacant and emotionally dead; there's no real friendships or relationships through heroin and cocaine. The physicality of the bliss these drugs induce has no emotional love or care or fondness or compassion or heart behind it; the body may feel joyous, but the spirit is deadened and empty, much like Jerry O'Connell's performance.

And then we come to Season 5 -- the drugs aren't for pleasure anymore. The constant anesthetic use has created tolerance and painful withdrawal symptoms in their absence; injecting and inhaling has simply become the joyless routine of "The Great Work" and "Java Jive" and the isolating nature of the drugs has left Peckinpah bleak, adrift and alone, going through the motions without even the extremity that made Season 3 a compelling trainwreck. Season 5 is just filling out the time to get through 18 episodes. Then the show died and David Peckinaph had nowhere left to direct his grief aside from his veins. Shattered and alone, he plunged speedball after speedball into himself until his heart gave out. I have nothing but sympathy for the poor man. Peckinpah and SLIDERS on his watch are symptoms of a terrible disease.

I once pondered where bad TV producers go when they die. Temporal Flux says they go to development hell. Most SLIDERS fans say they burn in actual hell. Informant remarked that regardless of whether Peckinpah is in heaven or hell, what he left behind is many terrible hours of television. Those hours speak to how truly sad, lost and alone he must have been.

Anyway. My final SLIDERS script will be a tribute to David Peckinpah and the ideas he introduced into the show.

The Complete Series DVD has been pushed back till October 11th 2016. http://www.tvshowsondvd.com/news/Slider … ries/22692.

Well, the wonderful folks at Mill Creek decided to give us episodes half the file size of the old season 1 dvd.  It doesnt look half as bad but is a downgrade.

Of course, the price is fantastic.

You're welcome.

Marred? How DARE you. Pasadena is a wonderful city with wonderful people! (At least until 2023, when I move and it all goes to shit.)

Woke up minutes ago and felt a manic impulse. Work for some reason has AI video upscaling software that I installed on my home workstation. I leapt out of bed, dived for my PC, and started an upscale on the Mill Creek rip of "As Time Goes By." Perhaps by this time tomorrow night, I'll have the greatest hour of television ever made in glorious 720p. Back to bed.

Well, it's a dramatization. If we're going to nickel and dime it: you told me "The Guardian" was filmed near you -- but the joke about a plaque commemorating  "Arturo-jumping" was a remark you posted on the forum followed by the disclaimer, "Not really," and I thought (internally), "YOU MONSTER!"

**

I don't know why I made a rip of the Mill Creek DVD for upscaling. I also don't know why I used the fastest possible setting on Handbrake which cost some detail for a faster encode. What strange choices in the middle of the night. I should have ripped the Universal DVD set -- which I had to dig out of The Box of Sci-Fi Channel news clippings that the Sci-Fi Channel inexplicably and nonsensically sent to Matt at his request. (Why did they do this? And at their own expense, too! TF snarked that people should ask Sci-Fi for a stapler and maybe they would have gotten one. After I went through it, EP.COM got 16 new articles for the Article Archive out of it.)

Anyway. Upscaling "As Time Goes By." The Mill Creek set was even more compressed than the Universal DVD set, and the image is fuzzy, which gave the AI video enhancement very little to work with over the course of a 11 hour upscaling process. The result was a 720p high definition file that looked... like a decent standard definition version of the episode.

Onscreen text like credits were now smooth and clean instead of smeared. Signs like "Vancouver Ice Cold Storage" at the start of the episode were now crisply legible. In moderately-lit scenes, faces had more skin texture. In brightly lit scenes, everyone's overexposed faces remained overexposed and without detail and there was a faint waxiness to the image where the blocky, pixelated quality was now smoothed out and certainly an improvement.

It looks presentable on my 55 inch HDTV whereas the original DVD from Mill Creek was a mess of jagged edges and squares that vaguely resembled an episode of SLIDERS. If Mill Creek had fit the 88 episodes on 24 discs instead of 15, it'd probably look a bit like this upscale. The results are definitely better than the Universal DVD version of "As Time Goes By."

The Universal DVD set itself is maybe 20 per cent sharper than the Mill Creek discs -- but is badly marred by interlacing lines, likely because the original master tapes are interleaved video, and when Universal converted them into digital formats for DVD, they neglected to deinterlace and decomb their video before mass producing the discs (except for the Pilot episode, for some reason).

They seem to deinterlaced their digital assets before handing their materials to Mill Creek.

Anyway, I'm running an upscale on the Universal version of "As Time Goes By" which should offer the AI more to latch onto, so we'll see if that's a leap forward or just a lateral move. I'll report back tomorrow night.

Honestly, I think it was just a matter of asking at the right time. I think I contacted the SCIFI offices while they were in the process of moving/downsizing and were more than happy to take their box of crap and get it off their hands. As you said, it was mostly garbage, but it did come with season 4 and 5 press kits (including slides, etc.) and some other stuff that hasn't surfaced on Earth Prime but is scanned. At least you are an independent confirmation that I did get the box and was not talking out of my ass, as was inferred in days gone by.

What software do you have access to? I've thought about doing upscaling too - the DS9 tutorials look pretty cool - but don't have a PC with the right software available.

Finished the upscale of "As Time Goes By," first decombing the Universal DVD, then upscaling it to 720p.

It looks like a really, really good DVD. A bit waxy still, but surprisingly more skin texture and detail than I expected -- Jerry O'Connell's scar does render nicely (although you're still not going to see the hairs in his nostrils or the stubble on his chin).

Eight point five out of ten for DVD.  I'm happy watching this on a 55 inch HDTV. This is the DVD release that Mill Creek and Universal should have made.

(Five-point-two-five out of ten for blu-ray.)

You're doing the Lord's work. The video starts of kind of blocky/artifacty but it smooths out soon enough. It would be very interesting to take the Universal discs and run them through a slow upscale process, maybe color time some of the episodes so they're not so inky. Not that I have time for that.

If you get settings fine-tuned, can you share them so others can work on the project?

That's the first Sliders I've watched in years; thanks for making it a scene worth watching.

"The Guardian" looks good with my process: MakeMKV to rip the DVD (as Handbrake can't seem to read the Universal DVD). Then open the file in Handbrake, set the quality output to Production Standard and switch on the video deinterlacing to remove the horizontal lines across the image. Then upscale in Topaz with Artemis-LQ and a custom resolution of 960x720. The resulting file is 2GB. For storage, I'll probably need to shrink the files to 700MB or so (and lose a little video quality)

Here are the boxing scenes. Also, here's the "As Time Goes By" Daelin-2 sequence on GoFile to download the MP4 instead of streaming it off Google Drive:
https://mega.nz/folder/5E1WnZxJ#Zgg_4d2jHZTolIin-iSevw

Next in the queue: I'll be upscaling "Time and Again World" tonight (because I want to see the bridge scenes in FakeD). Then I'll do "Into the Mystic" (because I want to see all the beautiful shots of the sliders in the Sorcerer's home) and "The King is Back" (because I want to see Rembrandt's concert in FakeD). Then "Gillian of the Spirits" (for Quinn saying good-bye to his friends) and "Prince of Wails" (because I love Robin Hood) and then "Obsession" and the Pilot.

After that, I'll do "Double Cross" and "The Prince of Slides, "Season's Greedings" and "Murder Most Foul."

I'll move to the Mill Creek set for some Season 4 - 5 episodes: "Virtual Slide," "World Killer" and "The Alternateville Horror," "Slide By Wire" and "Way Out West," "Applied Physics," "New Gods for Old, "A Current Affair" and "The Return of Maggie Beckett."

I think that covers all the episodes I really want to see again on my HDTV, so I'll fill in the rest of Seasons 1 - 2 that I missed before and then have Seasons 1 - 2 and a few select episodes after that in FakeD.

I wish there were some way for me to share the full results with everyone, but my legal department has advised me not to open that door.

Here is the Constitution handoff and slideout from "Time and Again World" in HD. Note the limitations of AI upscaling: wide shots are fuzzy because there isn't detail to enhance, the bridge against the dark sky is crushed into blackness. But medium shots and closeups of actor's faces -- that's where the AI works its magic best.

https://mega.nz/folder/5E1WnZxJ#Zgg_4d2jHZTolIin-iSevw

Here's "Into the Mystic"'s scene of Quinn unmasking the Sorcerer and the sliders' homecoming. I ripped it from the fully upscaled episode using Handbrake, the sample re-encoded in their HQ720 preset. https://gofile.io/d/yuKsqB

Well. Let's not go nuts. The stairs on Quinn's house are clearing giving the AI a lot of trouble in the upscale. The Sorcerer scenes suffer badly when there are high levels of light that blow out the character's faces in the highlights.

It is probably fixable and I know Transmodiar will have thoughts, but I'm going to refer back to what Transmodiar said when I told him how terribly my first draft outline of SLIDERS REBORN had turned out -- let's just aim to get matters from terrible to adequate.

I'm curious - have you thought about upscaling to 1080 and then re-compressing down to 720? That might help a bit with some of the fuzziness.