Sliders DVD Releases (Universal, Mill Creek, SD blu-ray, Restoration) (Page 4 of 16)

egg heads looks terrible on peacock

I think I have PowerDVD so i'll try it if I do. 

yes, I did do a smart stretch when I did an upscale and it mostly worked, but ultimately the more the characters moved to the side of the frame, the more they got stretched.  Which really started annoying me at times.   It looks fine when they are toward the center because no much stretching their

I'll have to see if I can check out power dvd's version to see if it feels better.

Prince of Wales was a fun episode.

it's really cool sabrina was part of such a quality project like that.  and she looks great too.  i mean that was 13 years after the pilot (or whenever it was shot) but it's a very different look.

I'll resume posting upscaled clips later this week.

That was a typo. This is the first time in recorded history that I have made a mistake. Now I know how everyone else must feel.

(That's a joke that the late comic book writer Dwayne McDuffie would make a lot.)

Clinton is on the left and Cleavant is on the right. Clinton's face is narrower and his face has a certain melancholy to it whereas Cleavant's face is wider and his natural expression seems to be a smile. Someone once remarked that there was an irony to Cleavant playing "The Cryin' Man" when he is always smiling.

**

My opinion of Tracy Torme is he finds fault with any piece of fiction that he didn't produce himself (unless it's a Western). I'm just guessing, of course, I don't truly know him. In an offline podcast, Torme said that he often avoids reading fiction because he doesn't want his own writing to be influenced by others.

Torme is extremely talented and his personal tastes are largely in sync with most fans. Also, the bulk of the series is riddled with stories that neither Torme nor the fans wanted to see.

However, there is a distinction between personal taste and technical proficiency. "Season's Greedings" is a capable, professional product even if Torme disliked it. In contrast, most of Seasons 4 - 5 are witlessly unprofessional and inept and definitely not what Torme or fans wanted to see. Writing should be evaluated in terms of what the author set out to accomplish and how well they achieved it, not whether or not Tracy Torme would like it.

I imagine that Torme would have been perfectly happy to buy your story ideas for SLIDERS but then rewrite them entirely to suit his own sensibilities and preferences if you'd been alive and in the industry when SLIDERS was on the air.

**

No subsequent episode of SLIDERS ever explained how the Kromaggs of "Invasion" had decades of interdimensional conquest but were only given the sliding technology between "Pilot" and "The Other Slide of Darkness." In fact, the Season 4 Kromagg arc contradicts "Darkness" as the Kromaggs had sliding before Quinn was even born and apparently shared a homeworld with humans.

The simplest explanation is that Smarter Quinn was insane and fabricating false memories and delusions. That's what I went with in my own SLIDERS writing. As for how Smarter Quinn recognized our Quinn -- if I had to come up with an explanation, it would be that most Quinn-doubles have a scar above their lip. This is a scar Jerry O'Connell sustained at the age of 11 that necessitated 74 stitches. Perhaps this happened to Quinn as well when he was attacked by a dog at a pound (as Quinn and his mother may have gone to a local pound to see if the runaway Bopper had been found).

Perhaps Smarter Quinn has noticed that while the majority of Quinn-doubles have scars, the scars are all subtly different in depth, length and angle. Perhaps Smarter Quinn always takes care to memorize the scar placement on each double and assign it a numerical value based on depth, length and angle which he then uses to identify and distinguish his doubles.

Some people of certain mindsets of total validity will read this theory and reasonably think, "That's ridiculous. The scars are totally identical because Jerry plays both doubles and you want people to think that Quinn can somehow tell the difference? Does Quinn have Superman's microscopic vision now? I get that Quinn Mallory is your very favourite character, but how many more superpowers do you need to give him?"

That would be fair.

If I had been a writer on Sliders when it was on, or if somehow I was involved in the bringing back of sliders today, I’d probably be the Scott Smith Miller of it all where I can fabricate the idea but can’t write the script lol.

Well of course. Whether or not Torme liked Season Greedings, it’s a good episode. There are probably some other good episodes that he doesn’t like personally. I would think if you were the creator or author of a piece of work, you would have a certain mindset of how things are supposed to be and anything derivative from that mindset wouldn’t suit you.

Well first of all your 'Smarter Quinn being insane' theory is pretty valid and makes a lot of sense. The only thing that I would find funny is that Smarter Quinn is not in the right mindset so he creates false memories of giving an alien nazi race sliding tech, yet he has microscopic vision to be able to analyze a specific scar on his doubles faces.

I always find it interesting how you’re able to come up with all this backstory info and explainations for the littlest details. I bet you probably have an explanation for all the different cast changes of Quinn’s parents lol.

Lol, I get it. You were trying to say that fiction is created by flawed human beings and that almost everything made is bound to have continuity errors that don’t have simple explanations.

Back on that one point, it is really weird considering I’m pretty sure Mrs. Mallory in Genesis even said “your real parents are our duplicates.” (Or it was said by the Kromagg Prime Michael Mallory) and then Quinn is able to have a different mother altogether yet look exactly the way he should. Your “glitch in the Matrix” explanation probably makes the most sense to that. Out of universe, it’s possible David Pechinpah didn’t like Linda Henning or something like that.

The only time continuity errors really become an issue is probably when writing fanfiction. In Forgiveness, I needed to give a date for the first slide. Well in the pilot it’s September something 1994, yet it’s 95 in Summer of Love. I just used the September date in 1995 for that part. It wasn’t a big deal lol.

Probably the more complex explaination is that he knew Kromagg Prime Mrs. Mallory would be an on-going role and if he didn't like Linda Henning, he hired a new actress, while still kept her in that episode to explain her off in a way. But that's giving a little more credit then is needed to Peckinpah.

Sadly, I won't be able to try this software. I thought about downloading it, but ultimately didn't because my gaming laptop is currently upscaling all my DUE SOUTH DVDs to 720p and I can't stop it right now to try a different software. Maybe you could take a run at some of the SLIDERS episodes.

Anyway. Get ready to see clips of Quinn and Wade's first date tonight in FakeD. :-D

And one Nvidia graphics card reinstall later, we are back! Presenting Quinn and Wade's first (and last?) date in FakeD: https://mega.nz/folder/Ph5GBYxQ#KAHjapDSD1ReV3kWVSmNAg

The finale of "The Weaker Sex" in FakeD where Arturo tries to lose an election.
https://mega.nz/folder/Ph5GBYxQ#KAHjapDSD1ReV3kWVSmNAg

There was a huge gap between recent sample updates because -- I'm actually not sure. I updated the driver to my Nvidia graphics processing unit and for some reason, Handbrake lost the ability to do GPU-enhanced video encoding. Instead of using the graphics card, the computer was using the Intel processor which was way too slow for daily encodes. I had to start from the earliest driver available and keep uninstalling and reinstalling each successive driver until I finally found the one that Handbrake could use to access the GPU.

Interesting to see Quinn and Wade have their first date in "Last Days" and then in "The Weaker Sex," Wade is apparently referring to Quinn as her boyfriend and Quinn is drying her hair after a shower. We somehow go from this to "Luck of the Draw" where Wade no longer wants to be romantic with Quinn for reasons known only to Sabrina Lloyd (which is to say, we know why Sabrina Lloyd didn't want to keep the romance, but we don't know why Wade wanted to end it).

It's also noteworthy that despite Quinn and Wade apparently being quite romantic in "Last Days" and "The Weaker Sex," Rembrandt was totally surprised to learn that Quinn and Wade had a romantic date in "Last Days" when it's mentioned in "Gillian of the Spirits."

I would guess perhaps they tried or attempted a romance once more between Weaker Sex and Luck of the Draw but ultimately they (well more so Wade) decided it wasn't a good idea while they were busy sliding from world to world. Plus they wouldn't get much alone time with Rembrandt and Arturo around a lot. I always just thought that she only told the lady at the company that Quinn was her boyfriend even if they never established it fully because it would have been easier to get him a job that way.

Well I don't know Remmy but it's possible he saw them being cute together and was secretly shipping them lol. So then when he hears that they had an actual romantic encounter, he's like "yeah my friends are getting together, finally." Their romance in Weaker Sex was also a lot more subtle. All that happened was Quinn drying Wade's hair while they talked to Arturo. There wasn't anything more to it (that we know of).

There's something I really like about the feel of that episode.  Not sure if it's the directing, production design, wardrobe, cinematography etc but it feels a little..... cinematic?  The way the 80s/90 comedies felt.

yes, it's fair to say it is very troupe-y.  john landis really disliked the Rembrandt character where tracy thought it was over the top political correctness to criticize.

it's not really my place to say either way -- i'm pretty sure there'd be folks within the black community who would laugh at it and folks who would be offended. and the former may be a bigger group of people but if people are really offended, and there's enough of them, then their feelings have to matter, even if outnumbered.

i don't look at the episode with any sort of shame but i think people have a right to have a conversation about it and they should be listened to.  but right now, i have yet to hear of anybody having that conversation around that episode that who are within the black community.  it's obviously very old content and i think that sort of conversation would take place  if it were a new show on a platform like netflix.

I've decided to attempt another upscale from 480p to 720 on the first season of SLIDERS (Episodes 2 - 9). The results of AI upscaling on the Pilot and Seasons 2 - 5 have been pretty good. While Universal and Mill Creek overcompressed the video files to fit more episodes on fewer discs, underneath the blockiness was film grain in which AI video upscaling could read and rebuild detail, so that from Season 2 onward, you could see the texture of the sliders' jackets and a crisp rendering of Rembrandt's hair and the scar on Quinn's face. The pilot was also scanned at a strong bit rate where the subsequent episodes were overcompressed for DVD.

However, Episodes 2 - 9 of Season 1 seem even further compressed than Seasons 2 - 5. Upscaling on these episodes has yielded an image that remains fuzzy and blurry in stark contrast to the strong results of upscaling Seasons 2 - 5. Compare a shot from the Pilot episode (left). This same shot is used in the credits of the remaining Season 1 episodes (shown on the right). You can see that the image quality is severely reduced.

I'm not sure why this over-overcompression is specific to Season 1's episodes after the Pilot. I can only guess that Universal's home video department compressed the Pilot to a reasonable bit rate only to be told that Season 1 would be released on one disc or two single layer discs. Perhaps that's why the remaining Season 1 episodes were encoded to be so small, only for the home video department to decide to release Seasons 1 - 2 together in one set on higher capacity discs, leading to a higher bit rate after Season 1.

I'm told that the German blu-ray release (all 88 episodes in standard definition on blu-ray discs) has the least amount of compression and is a marked improvement on the Universal DVD releases, and I have been able to buy a used copy off eBay. It will take anywhere from 6 - 8 weeks to arrive by post.

I'm hoping that the blu-ray will contain decent standard definition files for Episodes 2 - 9, or at least files good enough for AI upscaling them to bring them to the same level of video quality as the AI upscales on Seasons 2 - 5.

Actually, I was thinking about sending you a blu-ray set so you could review it on your Slidecage blog. :-D

great news

I suppose it's possible, although I think  I've also heard the german dvd-on-blu-ray copies were perhaps better.  Or perhaps I am thinking of the Sliders reruns in germany on NITRO.  Or maybe I am thinking of re-runs on The Hub.

You can email the german sliders site:
http://www.sliders-dimension.de/

here's their review, which translated seems to indicate its a bit better than the dvds
http://www.sliders-dimension.de/DVD/com … cb_de.html

I'd like to learn more about the Australian release too!

I had a nightmare last night that my grandfather rose from his grave to slap me for buying a standard definition blu-ray set that conceivably has the same problems as the Universal set.

It's unclear which episodes the German site reviewed to compare the blu-ray to the DVDs, so we don't know if the video quality is better or worse or equal.

I'm still in the process of upscaling "Summer of Love," but I've been further exploring the Turbine Medien blu-ray set and... it's interesting. Season 1 on the blu-ray looks good, certainly better than the Universal DVD releases. However, Season 1 on this blu-ray set does not look as good as Season 2.

I skipped ahead to "As Time Goes By" in Season 2 (all of Seasons 1 - 2 are on a single blu-ray disc). "As Time Goes By" is a quantum leap forward from the Season 1 video quality: I can make out every strand in Jerry O'Connell's hair, I can see the texture of his skin right down to the details of the scar on his face. And this isn't a high definition image: it's a 640x480 pixel image that my blu-ray player is simply stretching to 1080 pixels high. This 640x480 pixel video of "As Time Goes By" is actually superior to my 720p AI upscale of the Universal DVDs because there is so much more texture detail in the image. (I'm still not sure if upscaling this 640x480 picture to 720p via AI would necessarily make it better; it might be numerically at 960 x 720 pixels in the video file, but it might not look any different from simply stretching it.

When watched at living room-TV distance and with the backlight reduced on the HDTV, the "As Time Goes By" blu-ray SD looks close to blu-ray HD. Turn up the backlight in full and get up close and you can see that it's not quite as sharp, of course.

The blu-ray versions of the Season 1 episodes -- including the pilot -- are not at the same standard as what I've seen of Season 2. They do not look like near HD files on my HDTV. They have a fogginess, they lack the crystalline sharpness of the Season 2 episodes. Season 1 episodes on the blu-ray look like a decent DVD (as opposed to the Universal set looking very poor and the Mill Creek set being a blurry set of blocks). The pilot episode on both the blu-ray and the DVD have the same level of video quality which means that an upscale will be able to sharpen up the Season 1 episodes quite effectively and create good 720p files.

However, Season 2 on this blu-ray looks so good that AI upscaling any of the Season 2 blu-ray episode files seems totally unnecessary to me at this point, at least to the degree that I was doing it. Topaz has alternate algorithms for higher quality SD files; the Season 2 blu-ray might benefit from being boosted to 1080p or even 4K via AI upscaling.

I'm not sure why Seasons 1 - 2 look so different. Certainly, Seasons 1 had Peter Woeste as the cinematographer and Season 2 had Robert Hudecek. Woeste liked gray midtones, Hudecek preferred high contrast and shadows. Woeste's photography is more painterly and artfully in soft focus, Hudecek likes sharpness. But the massive difference in visual quality can't just be stylistic. For years, it looked like Universal and Mill Creek's overcompression was why Season 1 looked so bad because everything other than the pilot looked bad.

However, the blu-ray isn't overcompressed. Each episode is at least 1.6 GB large. I think that Season 1 used a film to tape transfer process that significantly muddied the results; it wasn't noticeable on original broadcast on a cathode ray tube television. But it's clear that not every film to tape transfer process is built equally: the original LOIS AND CLARK broadcasts had pretty decent 35mm photography even after the tape transfer, but any time there was a special effect, the video quality would drop into blurriness as though a lower quality video suite were now in play.

I think Season 1 must have used a different process from the subsequent seasons for the film to tape transfers for editing and effects. A process that yields poorer results, a process that has left the original master tapes of SLIDERS in Season 1 with a fogginess that is not due to overcompression (although the overcompression made it blurrier).

I think the AI can clear most of that away the way the AI could present a very sharp 720p version of the pilot using the high bit rate of the Universal DVD's version of the series premiere.

Anyway. I think my upscales of Seasons 2 - 5 are totally worthless. People should just buy this blu-ray from Germany. My Season 1 upscales might be worthwhile, though.

I've played the raw blu-ray video files on my computer and I can assure you that the excellent SD video quality of the Season 2 episodes isn't from my player or TV. Turbine's video quality is just that good. :-)

Why are the blu-ray files so good while the streaming versions are so terrible?
My theory: Turbine Media Group acquired copies of the master tapes from NBCUniversal and created their own digital files from the tapes. I have never seen The Hub's broadcasts, but if the quality was superior to streaming services and the DVDs, they may have done the same.

Bargain Bin Operation: Mill Creek said they didn't have the resources to do their own scans of the master tapes, but Mill Creek is a low budget operation. They cram whatever files they get onto as few discs as possible for the lowest price point possible. As you said, their SLIDERS release was for people who vaguely remembered the show and would pay the discounted $20.

Even Mill Creek's blu-ray releases, described as adequate in various reviews, compress as many episodes onto as few discs as possible (although reviews indicate that the compression isn't too damaging as the HD files have margin for reduction).

A Different League: In contrast, Turbine Media Group is a big budget prestige operation; their website sells blu-rays of classic horror movies from the 1970s to 1990ss in HD and 4K with steelbook packaging, vintage packaging art that's had digital aging effects to create a sense of authenticity.

Rescans and Remasters: Turbine advertises new releases of films where they have done their own 4K transfers and sound remasterings of DRAGONHEART, AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON, TWISTER, CRASH by David Cronenberg (and with Cronenberg's supervision). Not all of their blu-rays claim to be new transfers, however. It looks like they do remasterings if the files they've received are not up to their standards. Even for the blu-rays where they seem to be using the studio's files, they have Turbine-exclusive commentaries such as with CANDYMAN, THE HILLS HAVE EYES and AMAZON WOMEN ON THE MOON.

Existing Infrastructure: This tells me that Turbine has a facility for rescanning film negatives and videotapes into high quality digital formats, remastering sound and audio, and recording audio commentaries, and they were able to put SLIDERS master tapes through their in-house processes rather than taking whatever NBCUniversal sent Mill Creek and Netflix. It would definitely have cost Turbine time, but they wouldn't have had to rework their operation or purchase new equipment because they were already using that equipment for their remasters of TWISTER and whatnot.

_________________________________________

Season 1 Restoration
It takes 10 hours to upscale each episode of SLIDERS and that's after taking some time to copy the files to my hard drive and convert them to constant framerate with progressive video. Season 1 on the blu-ray looks like a good DVD transfer: clear but lacking in fine detail and a little fuzzy. That fuzziness is accentuated when stretching the image from 480 pixels to 720p; I think Topaz can likely reduce that. It's going to take me about 3 - 4 days.

The Pilot looked like an okay DVD video. Upscaling made it a very good DVD video. I expect the rest of Season 1 when upscaled will fall in line and look like good DVDs. That's nice, but not at the same level as the Season 2 blu-ray SD episodes which surpass the limits of DVD quality.

An Impromptu Scale
Let's create a scale of HD video quality. We'll put a blank screen at 0 out of 10. And we'll consider, say, a 1080p blu-ray of the latest Marvel movie at 10 out of 10.

Abysmal to Poor: I would put the Mill Creek DVDs at 1 out of 10 which is to say that there is a video image and it qualifies as being more than a blank screen. I would rate the Universal DVDs at 3 out of 10; they're viewable but blurry and covered in compression artifacts.

Middle of the Road: I would rank the Universal DVD version of the Pilot episode and the blu-ray version of Season 1 at 5 out of 10. Not overcompressed, decent enough DVD quality, but still on the blurry side.

Better Than Average: I would put my upscale of the Pilot and Season 2 - 5 episodes at 6 out of 10: serviceable, not distractingly poor, nowhere near a 1080p Marvel movie release, but certainly more good than bad.

Very Good: However, I would put the blu-ray SD release of Seasons 2 - 5 at 7.5 out of 10 in terms of HD presentation. They are still not HD, but the flaws of SD on an HDTV are largely absent and all the merits of sharpness and detail and clarity are strongly in evidence. Put your face up to the screen and you can see it's blurrier than a true HD image and short of the crystaline quality of CAPTAIN MARVEL or a Netflix episode of RIVERDALE -- but who actually watches TV that way?

I can get the other Season 1 episodes to 6 out of 10 with Topaz. However, it's really just for my own personal viewing. Season 1 on the SD blu-ray looks good enough and most people who'd play SLIDERS on blu-ray have a player or TV that can sharpen up the image.

_________________________________________

Future AI Upscaling
Once Season 1 is finished, I'll certainly AI upscale "As Time Goes By" to 4K. However, it could take 24 hours and my expectations are not high.

Topaz upscaling does not actually add detail to the video. Instead, it removes flaws. When you stretch the Universal DVD version of the Pilot or "As Time Goes By" from 640x480 to 1080p on an HDTV, you get an image that is stretched to the point of blurriness and the blocky artifacts of compression are even more present.

Cleanup: Topaz removes these distortions of stretching and compression with clever combinations of increased pixel contrast that's applied specifically to different categories of texture. Topaz's result is still a stretched image, but with all the blur and artifacts alleviated with pixel contrast and deblocking so that it resembles an HD image on an HDTV. However, that high definition look is an illusion; Topaz is not adding any detail, it's just clearing away the obstructions that distract from the detail underneath the stretch and compress.

The fogginess of the S1 episodes even in an uncompressed format is, in its way, a form of compression. It's from crunching down a 35mm film image to a standard definition videotape. And Topaz can alleviate some of the fogginess of the poor quality film-to-tape transfer in S1.

Hitting the Ceiling: In the case of the S2 - S5 blu-ray files: there is no fuzziness. There are no artifacts of compression. I don't think Topaz can do any more cleanup because the image is already clean. It's a standard definition 640x480 image, but the detail and depth contained within those 640x480 pixels are sufficient to scale to an HD screen without blurriness. The SD blu-ray version of "As Time Goes By" has more film graininess than the upscale. Within that SD graininess is texture that shows you pores in the actors' skin and their individual strands of hair.

I don't believe Topaz can improve this image. Topaz tends to smooth out grain in video files when upscaling them, extrapolating and increasing the pixels around the grains to create the illusion of detail, and ultimately producing high resolution video files that lack film grain texture. Topaz would likely, in bringing these files from SD to HD, cover all this detail with a waxy sheen. I suspect that the blu-ray video files, outside of S1 needing a sharpening pass, are best left alone.

My view: S2 - S5 on blu-ray are the best possible digital versions of the standard definition master tapes. They can't be improved by our current level of AI upscaling technology; at this point, the only improvement would be to rescan the original film to 4K and rebuild HD versions of the episodes.

(It'll be good to find out for sure, of course.)

Standard Definition Detail: Also, my upscaled video files, for wider shots, often had a watercolour blurriness because the AI couldn't lock onto any fine detail in order to increase it from 480 pixels to 720p. Examples include Arturo-2 holding his book in "Prince of Wails" with the text being unreadable; the stairs to Quinn's front porch in "Into the Mystic" being a mess of overlapping lines, or the sliders standing at a distance at the end of "Time and Again World". The upscale made these shots look like garbled video data. But in the blu-ray SD version, these shots look deliberately soft focused.

The blu-ray is just better. The DVDs have been garbage; my upscales have been garbage with some polish. Get the blu-ray. :-)

I will try AI upscaling the blu-ray SD version of "As Time Goes By" to 4K. It will take at least a day. But based on what I'm seeing, the results will probably be the same as having Handbrake stretch the image to 4K in 20 - 30 minutes and it will lose image detail and fail to gain anything.

"Summer of Love" is looking well after the upscale, having gone from okay DVD quality off of the blu-ray to being a good DVD. Still nowhere near the splendor of the S2 - S5 episodes, but it's good enough.

It looks as good as my other upscales -- clear and clean (and a bit 'waxy' post-upscale) -- but it does not match the look of the Pilot upscale.

Left: SD blu-ray file. Right: Upscaled to 720p blu-ray file.

In fact, looking at the Pilot and "Summer of Love" on uncompressed blu-ray, it's become clear: the Pilot and "Summer of Love" have very different standards of video quality. The Pilot does not have the soft focus look of "Summer of Love" and subsequent Season 1 episodes. I'm not sure why.

Yes, there's a different cinematographer for the Pilot (Glen Macpherson), but MacPherson still seems to gravitate to low contrast, gray-oriented filming like Peter Woeste. My guess -- and it is just a guess -- is that the Pilot used one particular method for film to videotape transfer -- then the rest of Season 1 used a different method, one that created the blurriness from "Summer of Love" to "Luck of the Draw."

Left: SD blu-ray file. Right: Upscaled to 720p blu-ray file.

I wonder if it was deliberate in that the film to tape process for Season 1 after the Pilot seems to have smoothed out the grain texture of the 35mm film. The Pilot episode had occasional flickers of dust and scratches across the image that makes it so distinctly filmic. "Summer of Love" to "Luck of the Draw" are so smoothed out that it could be deliberate; an effort to present a clean image where all the dust and scratches of film have been almost airbrushed away.

It wouldn't have been particularly noticeable on a cathode ray tube television; in fact, the Pilot and "Summer of Love" didn't look any different to me when I watched it on the SPACE channel in the late-90s aside from the absence of dust and scratches after the Pilot. But in a digital format, the smoothing is deeply destructive because it destroys the film grain that, in high definition, presents fine detail.

Left: SD blu-ray file. Right: Upscaled to 720p blu-ray file.

I guess the Season 2 team went back to a film to tape method that left the grain alone.

In the original upscale I did of "Summer of Love," you couldn't make out anyone's hair: the Professor's beard and the top of Rembrandt's head was just a vague, dark, digital fuzziness. Now the hair is distinct and defined. Everything still has the soft-focus look of all the S1 episodes, but it's still more in-focus and closer to the Pilot episode without being a match for it.

Left: SD blu-ray file. Right: Upscaled to 720p blu-ray file.

love this entire post... will be re-reading it many times over.

just so i am understanding correctly, is image on left your original upscale (off universal dvd), right an upscale off the german release?

I always thought though universal s3-s5 releases were not so "dated" looking besides the 4:3.   Especially 4 & 5.

But these look really really good.

I have edited a previous post to clarify that on the left is the blu-ray SD image and on the right is the blu-ray image upscaled to 720p.

Regarding the post-Pilot Season 1 episodes: I've been able to look at the blu-ray SD version of "Summer of Love" more closely after upscaling it to 720p. A bit like looking at the video through a magnifying glass. I've realized that some of my previous comments on the Season 1 video quality were incorrect.

A closer look at the upscaled blu-ray version and comparing it to the SD blu-ray version makes it clear: the quality of "Summer of Love" is not at the same level as the Pilot on the blu-ray. The Pilot is very sharp and filled with detail from 35mm film. All the episodes from "Summer of Love" to "Luck of the Draw" lack that detail; they have a soft-focus look. It cannot be due to file compression because the files are around 1.6 GB each and have the same bit-rate as the Season 2 - 5 episodes and S2 - S5 look really sharp. The problem with Season 1 episodes is clearly in the master tapes themselves.

It appears that after the Pilot, the remaining Season 1 episodes were shot on film, then run through a film-to-tape conversion process that smoothed out the dust, scratches and grain on the 35mm film. Because the grain has been severely filtered out of these post-Pilot S1 episodes, there is a lack of fine detail and sharpness. Grain is what contains all these fine details. This is why the eight episodes after the Pilot have always been blurrier than the other 80 episodes surrounding them; it's present on every DVD release before this blu-ray set and it's present in this blu-ray set as well.

I have seen this anomaly before in LOIS AND CLARK on broadcast and in the DVD release. The 35mm film for LOIS AND CLARK looked like 35mm film (sized down to videotape) until there were special effects. When LOIS AND CLARK had scenes needing post production events (composites, video effects, background replacements), the film for those scenes was put through a different film to tape process that filtered out the grain (and dust and scratches) and also blurred the image.

Presumably, this 'cleanness' made it easier to add and overlay effects onto the footage.

I am not sure why SLIDERS' post-Pilot Season 1 episodes were subjected to this process for all scenes whether they had effects or not. It may have been an attempt to simplify production by having all film sequences transferred to tape in the same way regardless of whether they needed special effects or not.

It may have also been an aesthetic decision to clean up the shots by removing noise, dirt and scratches from the 35mm image with the thought being that for broadcast TV on CRT televisions, the loss of sharpness would not be perceivable to the viewer.

The Pilot episode has a lot of brief artifacts appearing across the image: specks of dirt and dust, small scratches across the negative. It makes it look like a movie. Someone processing SLIDERS at the time may have considered that a flaw. The next eight episodes look very denoised and despeckled to me with far fewer instances of dirt, dust and scratches. It shifts the 35mm film more towards the look of videotape.

Thankfully, there is a small amount of grain in the S1 episodes that remains present and the AI upscale has been able to give the image a slight boost in sharpness to make it look a bit more defined as a 720p video. It isn't perfect, but it's a nice step up and meets the quality of my upscales for Season 2 - 5 -- even if it doesn't meet the quality of the Season 2 - 5 episodes on the blu-ray.

It looks like with Season 2, SLIDERS changed its film to tape process; beginning with "Into the Mystic" (or "Time and Again World" if you prefer), dirt and dust and scratches reappear across the 35mm image. In addition, there is also graininess again once Season 2 starts.

A lot of studios and viewers see graininess as a flaw. As an obstruction over the image. Part of that is because modern audiences are used to digital video which doesn't have that graininess except when it's added as texture. But in film, the image is made of grain and reducing it is to reduce the rough texture of Rembrandt's hair or the wrinkles on Quinn's shirts or the muff of Wade's jacket or the pattern on Arturo's suit jackets.

I think that the SD blu-ray has the best possible scan of the master tapes. I just noticed: they aren't actually 640 x 480 pixels, but 20 per cent larger at 768 x 576 pixels.

The blu-ray S1 episodes are not as overcompressed as the Mill Creek/Universal S1 files, so yes, the upscale is a massive improvement on my previous efforts. My S1 upscales before looked poor; they now look very good (but not great). I've actually deleted all my S2 - S5 upscales. The blu-ray has made keeping them unnecessary. I'm just going to keep the upscaled Pilot (no need to run it twice) and the new S1 upscales.

My suggestion for Universal would be to scan the videotapes of S1, upscale it to 720p, then run it through the AI again but not increase the resolution. This would be specifically to have the AI reapply another round of texture-specific sharpening (and it would be another 15 - 20 hours on my hardware.)

It's also possible that I can run the upscaled files through a Handbrake sharpening filter. I can't do it right now, however, because Handbrake uses the graphics card and the GPU is presently occupied with upscaling the rest of Season 1.

My guess: Turbine licensed SLIDERS from NBCUniversal and requested the master tapes, which they scanned to digital files at their own facilities. However, I don't believe Turbine would be required to provide NBCUniversal with their digital scans; Turbine did it on their own equipment for their own release of SLIDERS and is only obligated to pay NBCUniversal the licensing fees and sales percentages.

I imagine NBCUniversal wouldn't be allowed to use Turbine's files without paying Turbine a fee for the resources and labour that Turbine put into rescanning the tapes on Turbine's equipment -- and NBCUniversal likely doesn't wish to pay Turbine for their work and isn't going to use their versions for streaming services when NBCUniversal's DVD files won't incur any further fees.

The term "master tapes" may be an overstated misnomer. I think it unlikely that each video master of each episode of SLIDERS exists solely on a single cassette per episode.

There must be multiple videotape copies of the final edit of each episode. Copies would have been needed for review, for affiliate broadcast, for overseas airings, for advertising to cut ads and create create lower resolution copies to send to press, for archival purposes should production need a clip show.

Are there 100 cassettes for each of SLIDERS 88 broadcast hours? Probably not, but the number has to be more than one even if it's less than 100. Before digital files, there must have been a sufficient number of the cassettes to send to different locations for airing and conversion to alternate standards of broadcast and for NBCUniversal to send copies to companies like Turbine seeking to produce home video products while still having quantities remaining.

I think there would have also been some expectation, perhaps even contractual, that these tapes would be returned to NBCUniversal upon expiry of syndication and affiliate broadcast requirements. Surely the Canadian SPACE channel and Canada's Global TV aren't keeping SLIDERS videocassettes still. These wouldn't be cheap, consumer grade VHS tapes; this would have to be something like Betacam or U-Matic or DV cassettes. NBCUniversal might contractually require Turbine and such to pay penalties in the event that these materials are not returned upon a set deadline.

There may also be, from an accounting standpoint, value in retaining multiple copies of video masters because they can be assigned a dollar amount, that NBCUniversal can use to present the SLIDERS property as one of their many assets that adds to their company being worth a specific amount of money should they be courting investors or seeking to be purchased.

That said, a fan editor whose name I won't give -- he apparently managed to acquire copies of videocassettes of WONDERFALLS, LOIS AND CLARK, XENA, HERCULES and other 90s and early 2000s shows. He spent tens of thousands of dollars buying them. He seemed to have found former staff members at broadcast affiliates and home video distributors and marketing firms that had kept the tapes (so maybe they're not always returned). He scanned these tapes to digital formats and ran them through AI upscaling. He crowdsourced for donations to buy more of these master tapes and, I guess, was issued a cease and desist by various studios because he abruptly shut down his crowdsourcing and went dark.

Now, these were not NBCUniversal productions. But I don't think this hobbyist fan would have been able to get master tapes if the industry standard was to only have masters existing in a quantity of one; there must be more than one. But probably less than 100.