Sliders DVD Releases (Universal, Mill Creek, SD blu-ray, Restoration) (Page 2 of 14)

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.

I think it's a big deal.  First off, what you've done is a big upgrade.  Second of all, topaz, and other algorithms similar are only going to get better.  If that is in year, what, 3, imagine in 4-5 years what it  will be like.  Maybe it won't linearly get better and maybe it's done 80 percent of its gains.  But I know it's definitely gonna get even better.

When you add some other playing with the colors, saturation etc etc, to the mix (as we know the pilot and first season is a bit "faded") I think something pretty damn superb is possible. 

So yea, I think this opens up the Sliders 2.0 era.   The content can become much fresher and modern.

Yes, but anyone can use Topaz     Hopefully it doesn't require 32 gigs of rams though.

Have you checked out the upscale that's someone is doing on reddit?  I'm curious how you think it compares to yours.  I wasn't sure if you started doing this because  you were inspired by what someone is doing over there or if it's just happenstance.

It would be awhile before Universal does this themselves, because of all those resources.  But the great thing is any very committed fan doesn't have to wait on Universal (which clearly has bastardized the quality of this show) to take matters into their own hands and get a legitimately great looking finished product.

I've done upscales on the dvd stuff in the past using lesser tech, and then ran it  on an xbox that further upscaled it, and then used a tv that processed it and took it even further.   It ended up looking really great but it was just like a test of five minutes of footage and I lost the software and the algorithm settings (a lot of time was spent to pick configurations).

I can only imagine with a topaz upscaled source + a blu-ray player that upscales the content  + a tv with some processing options how good it could look.  It's exciting.  Whenever I have watched the dvds or streaming or comet, the quality makes me feel like I'm watching something from the 70s.  All because of heavy compression, whatever sort of video archiving they've done, and general lack of caring.   This really is a terrific thing for rescuing the footage. 

I'd love for them to rescan the film negatives but there's no way that is happening at this point.  Which irks me because Seaquest got that treatment.  And Babylon 5 just had an upconversion (which looks decent).

"Prince of Wails" upscaling sample: the sliders provide Prince Harold with the Bill of Rights and Wade is asked to stay on. https://mega.nz/folder/5E1WnZxJ#Zgg_4d2jHZTolIin-iSevw
I feel I'm neglecting poor Rembrandt, so next is going to be his performance in "The King is Back."

I believe he's using the same source material, the Universal DVD set. He said that the Pilot looked great after upscaling but everything else looked bad -- undoubtedly because the Pilot does not have the interlacing errors that mar all the other episodes. I only have Seasons 1 - 3 from Universal, but I can confirm that "The Guardian" had the same interlacing error lines across the image that had to be decombed in Handbrake before the upscale in Topaz.

There is going to be a 20 per cent drop in my upscale quality when I switch to Seasons 4 - 5 because I only have Mill Creek for those. However, it'll also be a bit faster because I don't have to deinterlace the DVD rips from Mill Creek. I could buy Season 4 for $20, but I feel like David Peckinpah and Bill Dial's estates should pay me for procuring it. I could buy Season 5 for apparently $150 on DVD, but I would sooner throw that $150 down a drain.

Still image adjustment is possibly a way to upscale a standard definition video: by upscaling each frame of the video into a high resolution still, then running a mass filter on all the stills to increase pixel contrast and improve colour, brightness and remove distortions, then reassembling the frames back into a video with the original audio. However, that’s a bit too much for me, this project is something I need to have running while I’m doing other things.

Rembrandt's concert in "The King is Back" in FakeD HD! https://mega.nz/folder/5E1WnZxJ#Zgg_4d2jHZTolIin-iSevw

"Obsession" in FakeD: The sliders react to Wade's marriage proposal from Derek Bond, and Derek invades Wade's privacy. You can see the skin texture on Sabrina's face. https://mega.nz/folder/5E1WnZxJ#Zgg_4d2jHZTolIin-iSevw

Once again everything looks so great.  I still remember the first time I saw Blade Runner in 4k.  It was like seeing it in a new way.  You get used to it after a bit, but the difference is never more clear that first time, when you are comparing to your last recollection of what the content looks like.   So seeing these with such clarity, crispness, particuarly with the closer shots, is like seeing it for the first time.  It's just "different."   There are some of the fuzzy issues you mentioned when the person's face is afar -- I hope eventually the AI works in corrections for that.  But these really are great.

And the coloring on the pilot actually didn't bother me as much.  Only in the hallway scene when they first come back and Quinn's mom greets them.   But it all looks generally great.  It's just terrific that fans can take restoration projects into their own hands when studios will stubbornly, even if understandably, not.

Some of those looked really great.  Frankly I didn't think the quality on the Comet TV web feed was that bad, while the Peacock isn't great.  It's really down to the bitrate on a lot of these.  If they had released a BluRay it would be perfect.

Any chance you can upscale "Cry Like a Man?"