Sliders DVD Releases (Universal, Mill Creek, SD blu-ray, Restoration) (Page 6 of 16)

Pretty sure the bits we are referring to are different (and may only be showing up for me)  I'll try to post a screen shot later to show.

Btw pretty interesting thread here started by turbine
https://forum.blu-ray.com/showthread.php?t=297118

Here's what I mean regarding pixelation (Goodfellas).  Not really seeing it in "Rules of the Game"

In some cases maybe it's just upscaled grain.  In other cases not really sure what's going on. 

The universal dvds are just more "hazy" where it fails where in this case it's sharper and more boxy/pixelated.

I took some screencaps from my MKV backup of the blu-ray for you to review.

I was rewatching "As Time Goes By" on the SD blu-ray and I have to say, in my opinion, my upscaled version really does not compare. The SD blu-ray lets you see all the weathering on Dennis MacMillan's face and the texture of Quinn and Daelin's flannel. The upscale was smooth and attractive, but overly airbrushed.

However, I think it was also a mistake to use the Artemis Low Quality setting on the upscale; the Artemis High Quality preset would have cleared away the blockiness of the DVD compression but left the film grain texture and the fine detail largely intact (although it would still seem a slightly more airbrushed). I think the Low Quality setting is best for deblocking severely artifacted video (like on the Mill Creek discs), but the Universal DVDs were not as bad as that.

Why do you have so many TVs!?! :-D

The 2004 release was made for CRT televisions. The Mill Creek release was not really made with any thought to how it would be viewed; it was just to have bargain bin product to sell. I sometimes wonder if modern HDTVs should offer a diode/scanlines filter for older content.

It's curious. On the whole, I find that the blu-ray's SD episodes for S2  - S5 look better than my upscales. However... the pilot is an odd case. My upscale looks better than the blu-ray version; the blu-ray version is a bit fuzzier and less defined than my upscale (made from the Universal DVD). The pilot is the only upscaled episode I still have on my hard drive.

Comparing the Universal DVD's pilot to the blu-ray version of the pilot side by side -- I'd say I find the Universal DVD a bit brighter, almost like during the scan to MPEG for the DVD, Universal's home video department brightened the image slightly. In contrast, the blu-ray version, taken from the PAL master, is a bit darker and has less apparent shadow detail. My upscale looks better than the blu-ray, but I'm going to try upscaling the blu-ray's pilot tomorrow just to see what happens. I can't do it right now, unfortunately, as I am re-upscaling BIRDS OF PREY's pilot episode with the Artemis HQ preset.

I'm looking in on some of the frames as the Pilot (SD on blu-ray) upscales via Artemis HQ from 576p to 1080p. (I converted the video from interlaced to progressive already.) After upscaling BIRDS OF PREY from DVD, it became clear that the Artemis HQ preset will lift off blockiness caused by scaling or compression, but it doesn't smooth out artifacts and seeks to resolve grain-based detail into pixel-based detail.

Looking at the PAL Pilot through the Topaz magnifying glass, it's clear that the Pilot, while sharper than the other Season 1 episodes, is not as sharp as the Season 2 - 5 episodes either.

My hypothesis is that the Pilot was also edited on a lower grade of videotape than Seasons 2 - 5, but the format was still better than the post-Pilot S1 episodes. I'm thinking that the Pilot was edited in Betacam SP or some other format with about 340 lines of resolution. That could be why the Pilot looks approximately 20 per cent less sharp than, say, "Into the Mystic."

The post-Pilot S1 episodes seem to have been edited on tape with even fewer lines of resolution, likely U-matic, Betamax or 8mm videotape (250 lines of resolution) which would explain why those episodes look only half as crisp as S2 - S5 episodes. And I would guess that from Season 2 onward, the show was edited in a DV or DV equivalent format with around 540 lines of resolution which is why the film grains are so visible afterwards and why the image quality takes such a drastic upswing.

I'm very, very, very mildly torn on this.

On one level, I think it's ridiculous to think that a TV show made decades ago can ever be made to look 'modern.' I also have a certain low level exasperation with 70s and 80s young adult/middle-grade novelists Lois Duncan and Gordon Korman who would, every few years, revise their novels to replace teletypes with fax machines and outdated musical references with current hits -- all of it completely pointless and futile. Stories set in the 'present' eventually become period pieces; the plots of PRIDE AND PREJUDICE and ROMEO AND JULIET would not happen with instant messaging and cell phones. It's fine for art to be a product of its time.

The poster child for futile efforts to keep dated works looking 'modern' is George Lucas and his asinine Special Editions which tried to make STAR WARS look like it was filmed in the 90s but only ever looked like a 70s/80s movie series with 90s effects clumsily pasted on top of the frames. These older films and shows and novels don't need to be forced into relevance for a new audience; they found their audience when they were originally released or they failed to do so.

But all you're suggesting is increasing the colour vibrance. I don't think it's harmful to SLIDERS, but I do feel that the low contrast, low saturation look of Season 1 is effective. Parallel worlds don't look like fantasy environments nor do they look like the overpolished TV commercials that Season 3 of SLIDERS often resembles. It's not a theme park version of reality; Season 1 looks like actual reality. Reality can be drab, lacking in rich colours, unpolished and that makes Season 1 all the more real.

And yet, this is instantly undermined with Season 2 which goes for a high contrast look. The colours aren't artificially amped up like in Season 3, but the increased contrast means more saturation.

Season 2 is my favourite visual look for the series with some real effort in making the image more delineated in terms of light and shadow. This is distinctly less unmodified than Season 1. So yes, Season 1 does look great when you raise the saturation a bit. And it would be great for an HDTV presentation.

This leads to another question that may or may not have an answer: is the gray, washed-out look of Season 1 deliberate? Is this actually what was intended by cinematographers Glen MacPherson and Peter Woeste? Or is the lack of colour a failure of videotape? Did the 35mm film, when transferred to what looks like a 240 lines of resolution tape format, lose colour detail and richness in the process? The fine detail and film grain of the image has clearly been muddied; has the chroma data also been diminished by the videotape format as well?

There is no way Season 1 was meant to look like it's in perpetual soft-focus like it does on the PAL masters. So was it also supposed to look like it was desaturated to gray tones?

If Season 1 had been edited on DV instead of U-Matic or such, would it look like Season 2? Was Season 1 actually supposed to look as high contrast as Season 2?

I don't know.

Well, I would describe myself as a 'purist' of sorts in that I like film grain. And I sought out HD versions of the STAR WARS series without any of the 90s CG revisions.

However, having reviewed the SLIDERS PAL masters obsessively and intensively, I am no longer certain that the washed out look of Season 1 is in any way 'pure,' in any way faithful to the intention of the directors, cinematographers, lighting technicians, editors and storyboard artists (unless their intention was to create a fuzzy, out of focus, blurry storytelling product in a visual medium). I would support increasing the saturation to make it more suitable to HDTV presentation.

If we could just find some way to sharpen up these masters...

Regarding the upscaling process -- I got some nice results from AI upscaling the BIRDS OF PREY DVD's TV pilot with the HQ video preset. Most of the compression artifacts are gone and the grain remains -- but blurred out backgrounds still have a certain flickery blockiness to it. And when upscaling on the LQ preset, everything looked great but a bit too smoothed out. I'm wondering if a two pass approach is best: use the medium quality or HQ preset to deblock/de-artifact the video without increasing the resolution at all, and then run this new version through the HQ preset to bring it to 1080p.

None of this is necessary for SLIDERS, however, because the blu-ray's version of the PAL masters have no compression artifacts. That said, I am AI upscaling "Into the Mystic" to 1080p; I'm interested to see how well all that Season 2 grain converts to pixel data.

Well, the issue with the low and medium presets: they remove compression artifacts but add additional pixels to the grain and smooth it out, creating an overly airbrushed, waxy look to the picture. I'm not entirely sure what the results will be if no additional resolution is sought. The idea would be to remove all compression artifacts while leaving a grain-equipped image that Artemis HQ can bring from SD to to 1080p, and it's possible that the results would be better as the algorithm wouldn't be trying to work around compression artifacts on the second pass. But it's possible this would produce the same results as a single pass on the HQ setting.

**

I've been reviewing the upscaled version of the Pilot, this time the SD blu-ray file, AI upscaled via Topaz's Artemis HQ preset to 1080p.

It isn't that different. At times, I thought that the upscaled-from-Turbine version was not as sharp as the upscaled-from-Universal version. But upon closer inspection, the Turbine version is just a little darker than the NTSC versions we've been seeing. The colour is also more blue-green in PAL than the red-green of NTSC.

I think it's probably because PAL is a different colour system from NTSC, but also because the DVD compression will reduce colour range while the blu-ray had no need to compress anything.

The 1080p image doesn't look that different from the Universal version upscaled to 720p and scaled to 1080. It's been a lateral move.

Actually, I was mistaken. Watching the upscaled Pilots in motion, I didn't see much difference, but when taking screenshots, it's become clear: the upscaled SD blu-ray is fuzzier than the upscaled Universal version.

I'm not sure if it's because the SD file is fuzzier or if it's because the algorithm I used this time, Artemis HQ, isn't trying to extract and augment detail as much as Artemis LQ, or if it's because I went to 1080p this time instead of 720p.

Artemis HQ is the right choice for the grainy Season 2 - 5 blu-ray episodes, refining existing detail into pixels, but it might be wrong for the Pilot file; maybe AI sharpening is desirable.

Well, looking at the un-upscaled files direct from DVD and the blu-ray:

The Pilot on the blu-ray is blurrier. And the problem seems to be specific to the Pilot. It looks like for the PAL master of the Pilot, Universal took the NTSC version and simply stretched it from 640x480 to 720x576, meeting the PAL standards but losing image quality.

I'm currently finding it difficult to tell if the other Season 1 episodes suffer from the same problem. They are slightly better on blu-ray than on DVD, but it's possible that the blu-ray versions are only improved because they're not as compressed and have also been stretched from 640x480 to 720x576.

But it's just as possible that the Universal DVD versions have, under that compression, better (but still bad) versions of the Season 1 episodes and those are the files I should have upscaled to HD via the Artemis HQ preset. They looked okay (but not great) on Artemis LQ but the blu-ray SD-files were were smeary and awful after Artemis LQ. Maybe the DVD files are a better starting point for Season 1 with two Artemis HQ passes, one to de-artifact and one to AI upscale.

However, Seasons 2 - 5 blu-ray versions look good and have more film grain than the DVDs, so if they were stretched, the videotape image had sufficient film fidelity to withstand it and not suffer for it.

Well, the Artemis HQ setting is designed to not try to change the video aside from making it a larger size without introducing any new flaws. As a result, it does some de-artifacting (to offset creating any new artifacts) and some denoising (to offset inflating the existing noise), but it doesn't sharpen like the LQ and MQ settings.

This might be best for the Season 1 episodes because those LQ and MQ sharpening functions are based on extrapolating detail from grain. Season 1 lacks sufficient grain to extrapolate.

I think the problem with Season 1 on both DVD and blu-ray: they are blurrier than later episodes because they were edited on analog videotape; the on a 340 lines of resolution format; the subsequent episodes on a 250 lines format. Season 2 - 5 episodes are sharper because they were edited on digital videotape with 540 lines of resolution.

It also looks like the PAL masters were created by taking the NTSC versions and stretching them from 640x480 (NTSC) to 720x576 (PAL) for all five seasons of SLIDERS. The digital videotape format of Seasons 2 - 5 came out of this looking great in PAL and blu-ray; the digital format proved resilient enough to survive a 20 per cent stretch. I've compared "As Time Goes By" on Universal DVD and Turbine blu-ray and the Universal DVD version looks well-defined if compressed while the Turbine version has a good amount of filmic detail beyond DVD quality (and diminished by videotape but still present).

However, the analog videotape format of Season 1 has suffered severely. The Pilot was already not as sharp as Season 2 - 5 episodes in NTSC; the stretch to PAL blurred it. And the next eight episodes of SLIDERS: the PAL masters were blurred by being stored on analog videotape.

I don't believe this is Turbine's doing; the problems is in the PAL master tapes.

Season 1 on the blu-ray might appear better at first because it isn't covered in compression artifacts and blockiness like the DVDs. But the blu-ray image's lack of compression still presents an image that is blurrier than the Universal DVD. If you can look under the compression issues of the Universal DVD (or deblock it), Season 1 has a more defined image, it's just badly obscured by compression noise and blockiness and poor interlacing.

The Season 1 episodes, whether Universal or Turbine, are in lousy condition and can't be upscaled as well as Seasons 2 - 5 and certainly not in the same way as Seasons 2 - 5. The Artemis LQ preset on the S2 - S5 DVDs created a lovely 720p image via compression removal and grain-to-pixel conversion. The detail was well-rendered (if hidden by compression) on the S2 - S3 DVDs; the detail-forming grain was available on the S4 - S5 DVDs.

But Season 1 episodes on DVD, despite being less blurry than on blu-ray, are still severely denoised. The video files lack the grain needed for AI upscaling to re-render the files to a better level of picture quality. The best that can be done is to use the HQ preset to remove the compression artifacts and do a lossless scale to 1080p, offering few improvements but creating no new flaws.

It won't look as good as the Season 2 - 5 upscales or PAL masters, but it will certainly look better. I don't know how much better (yet). I'm also not sure if it both can be done effectively in a single pass or if two passes are needed, but I'll start with a single pass for the DVD version of "Summer of Love."

I'm not sure what you mean. Noise layers are pretty common in video editing software. The problem is that unless the noise is image-forming, it's useless for AI upscaling. Topaz can tell the difference between grain that forms the image and grain that's just a layer on top of the image.

The 1080p Artemis HQ version of "Summer of Love" is an incremental improvement on the LQ upscale -- but the preset keeps inflating some of the compression artifacts that it doesn't fully remove. I'm going to try the two-pass approach: running the HQ preset without making the video any larger and simply removing the artifacts, then running the HQ preset again to raise the resolution losslessly.

Oh, sorry. I guess I didn't understand that from the video.

Sadly, the two-pass approach to upscaling isn't working with Topaz; it just creates a peculiar watercolour effect across the image. It looks like upscaling the NTSC versions in HQ losslessly/gainlessly is the way forward. I've put the rest of Season 1 in the queue.

I've never seen that episode look that good...

Out of curiousity, does the LQ setting work best for non-pilot S1 episodes on close-up shots, and the problems it introduces only come when the camera is more zoomed out and there's less fidelity in the image to work with?  You may have already addressed that here, but I dont recall.

Ok. I ask because it would seem like if one were to make the perfect restoration (absent of anything but dvds), that, theoretically (i only mean theoretically), would S1 (not pilot) be best on LQ for close shots, maybe MQ for medium shots and HQ for wide shots (and maybe medium)?

I would probably just stick to the HQ preset for all of Season 1 off the Universal DVD. The close shots are sharpened on HQ but without any of the waxy, airbrushed qualities I've seen in the LQ setting.

Probably the most reasonable-to-watch image on a hdtv we have seen. And better than is out there commerically.

The source is so compromised that it would be hard to imagine being able to make the image crisper.

If I was putting this out on peacock I might tinker with the the coloring a bit. I might also try to see if adding any additional sharpness would be tolerated but I suspect not.

Aside from the pilot episode, out of curiosity, what percentage of shots in s1 would you say have special effects in them?  I have a guess in my head but don't want to influence your answer.

Interesting. . I was thinking it was a couple minutes of content per 43m episode.  We get our vortex shots but most of it is practical. As you said, s3 is where they ramp up that stuff.

12 percent would be about 4 to 5 minutes per episode.  You know the material better than I.

There's propertiery technology that is out there for scanning film negative and automatically re editing the content to match a reference source (an existing edited version).  It makes the process more manageable.   https://www.illuminatehollywood.com/services/iconform/

Special effects shots would basically have to be upconverted. 

I think the pilot and s2-5 can clearly be made into a damn good picture through topaz.  Non pilot s1 you've made look better than we've seen before with that tech but the source is still stubborn in pushing it further.

Theoretically with about 50 or maybe 100k I think ep 2 through 9 coukd be scanned, reedited snd have special effects shots inserted (upconverted from original source).

Would Turbine Media Group ever be willing to do a worldwide blu ray release for s1?   Would Universal keep the license to $100k to $200k or less?  With the idea that a partner who pays for that true HD content enable universal to then provide peacock and other partners HD for s1?

Turbine or let's say Shout Factory may say they need some exclusive window for the Hd content.  So what can they do in sales?

I am guessing globally we are talking 4 to 10k units a s1 blu ray moves.  At 15 dollars or off per unit that is $60k to  $150k in revenue.

It's tough.  Not a lot of wiggle room. 

If I were ever rich I would throw money at it myself...  spend the 100k to try to get it done.  If only we had some ability to raise a crazy amount if money like those Mystery Science Theater fans do.

I'd be willing to log the special effects shot for the stakeholders just as a proof that the series, while sci-fi, is not special effects dominant, and may not be an inhibitor.  I'd be willing to do whatever labor to cut down on there's.  I bet you would too.

I'm really interested like you where the up-res tech goes.  Has it platuted?  Or can it keep going further?  And is there any incentive for them to work on training models for visuals as fuzzy as the source content (s1) we are talking about? Or is it too niche for them to even try to address that use case?

I think trying to smartly add texture/grain back into the image, and then building off that gain might be a solution, but you also really have to figure out how to sharpen images/boundries without pixelating/jagging content.  You have to figure out how to condense blurred boundries and not sharpen areas that don't need the work.

I think it will be awful hard for anything to intelligently build/reconstruct the s1 objects/forms as they should be.  They may make some gains in wider shots, not bluring on people in the distance etc.

I've certainly dreamed of deep fake technology being able to make old characters have "new" content again... maybe in 25 years we'll be able to work with realistic character models of the sliders group and put them against backgrounds, and pull from an audio library of their words to insert sound.  

Here's the thing about Season 1:

Peacock would probably see a 2x lift in viewing numbers if they had S1 in HD.  Now how much add dollars does that translate for them?  I suspect it's not all that much.  I don't recall how many commercial minutes peacock inserts but they make about 10 dollars for every 30 second ad per 1000 views.  Let's say they get 25k streams of an episode at this point.  If they have 6 minutes of commercials, that's 12 ads, which is 12 cents per stream in revenue.  So that's $3k in revenue for that episode with 25k views.

If you double that stream total, it's another $3k in revenue.  Across 8-9 episodes, you are basically talking about a total additional $24-27k in revenue as an estimate for HD content, assuming S1 is HD.  It would have a halo effect on the other seasons viewing, so you can bump that to $35k.

I'm making assumptions of course, but it gives a general picture.

Now, $35k in increased revenue, may be $100k over a ten year span (sliders on peacock has only been on two years).

Then when you add you add $60-150k off a blu-ray profit, and increased sales on VOD, it sort of all adds up to some small justification for HDing a S1.  But barely, and not very clearly, and also, companies want to go after big opportunities, not small ones like this.  An upres is ballpark $~100k cost.

And it's tough because Universal's licensing group acts like its own company from peacock, and a peacock is seperate from a third-party blu-ray company.   So the benefit to take on the entire HD cost may not be clear for one individual party, but adds up for everyone collectively.

I was poking around and I noticed Stargate did a blu-ray release, and actually just up-resed some of the older content without re-scanning.  Some of the issues with the waxy look and lack of grain were there, but it's clearly better than the dvd.

I also noticed that company I linked to with iConform technology (to scan the negative and then automatically edit it together from a reference source) used the tech on a recent Baywatch Season 1 release.  They've also done jobs on the star trek and x-files blu-ray releases.

If Sliders really isn't that special effects heavy, at least for s1 non pilot, you almost wonder if it wouldn't be that much more work than what they did on Baywatch.  Grab some time codes for the vortex or the killer bees and insert upconversions on the special effects shots.  X-Files actually did this in some of their stuff.

They could do that... and I wish they would.  The issue becomes if they feel comfortable labeling a blu-ray as a blu-ray if it's all upscaled content.  How much precedence is there for that?  How do they handle.

I would love for Turbine or someone else to release an upscale. Or universal to do it.  That said, 65 hrs of upscaling is still somewhat expensive I think.  I mean off 88 episodes. 

So you got consumers who mostly don't want to pay north of 40 bucks for something.  Not many are willing to spend 150 bucks plus.  And yet the expense of upscaling everything... because machine time.

I don't really know how much it would cost, or if consumers would accept it as a blu-ray, or if they'd complain and you get bad reviews.  I would very much like to see a GOOD upscale job.  I think your samples for s2-5 people would consider mostly viable as 1080, especially because it is just so much better than anything we've had before, and s1 is still better as well, and the pilot is gorgeous.  But if someone does a shitty job, because they are lazy (that will be most production houses/distributors) than it's harder to market as a blu-ray.  I guarantee you would have done a better job on Stargate or some true fan of the content, because of LOVE.

I honestly never would trust universal with an AI upscale job or anyone else that we couldn't have direct contact with.  They would choose one standard setting, and push start. And that's it. Someone like Turbine would probably listen and be less lazy about it.

I don't have knowledge on that as well, but I assume they are mapping/scanning some celebs face, and then map the models face as well, and super impose.  I think there are cell phone apps that do this as well.  I will see what I can find, if there's any programs built for it.

I guess the Clinton's face bothers you but I kinda like it knowing it's another real human being in the same room rather than taking the same actor and splitting the image.  Although they did a great job in the pilot and world killer with Jerry on that.

I always thought Fever and Last Days were among the most crappy looking episodes in all the mediums (streaming, dvd, vod, etc).

When you look at those screenshots, do you think the HQ setting is definitively the best for Fever?  LQ hits waxyness too greatly, I assume?

I will actually run "Fever" through the MQ preset and share some screencaps. But until then, here's "Last Days" looking okay. This is the image once the compression artifacts are removed. Aside from that, it's just the DVD image with all its other qualities preserved at 1080p.

*sigh* If SLIDERS had just been delayed by one year, Season 1 would be on digital videotape.

I've been watching some 2002 - 2008 episodes of THE DEAD ZONE on DVD. It's a DVD image and it's 3 - 4 episodes per disc, so the video quality is only adequate and a touch fuzzy, very much the average DVD. However, it was clearly shot on film (aside from digital cameras for some special effects sequences). And it looks like it was edited on high definition digital videotape, so that high definition video detail is still there, just muted by the reduction from high definition HDV to standard definition broadcast and DVD.

As a result, Topaz has absolutely no trouble restoring the high definition video quality of these episodes because it's mostly there on DVD, diminished but not destroyed.

It took two-weeks to do that Pilot scene shot so I suspect they had Clinton play Remmy2 for speed/production cost purposes...

Really about Greatfellas?  Because I always felt I could tell the difference between the two actors...

In the pilot, even with the body double, there are scenes where both jerrys are in the same shot, and i think in the pilot commentary they explained how they did that.  Didn't they just superimpose the film negative over each other in that one?

You know, RussianCabbie, I think you're right that the Artemis medium quality preset might be better suited to the Season 1 episodes. Here's "Fever" via Artemis MQ preset. 

I have to say, this is looking better than the HQ result. The wide and medium shots had serious aliasing issues in the original video files. The HQ preset didn't make that worse, left it alone but inflated the issue of edges of people and objects having phantom outlines around them. The MQ preset smooths that out, adding a touch of blur to those outlines, blending these flaws out of the image. There's a bit of blurriness, but it's for a wide shot.

I guess I'm upscaling the other seven post-Pilot episodes of SLIDERS again, this time on the MQ preset. What is this, the seventh time? The eighth? I've had to position some ice packs below the laptop stand for extra cooling.

**

I don't hear anything in the commentary about the technical means for filming the Pilot scene with Quinn and Smarter Quinn aside from remarks that they found a body double who looked just like Jerry O'Connell once they put a wig on him. Torme says that Jerry had an uncannily close body double in the recent livestream, too.

I'm guessing that this person is James Bamford, a Vancouver stuntman who's career began in 1994 with VIPER (shot in Calgary) and MANTIS (in Vancouver). Bamford performed as Jerry's body double in "The Unstuck Man," and I'm assuming that he was Jerry's double between the Pilot and Season 5 too before going back to Vancouver to serve as stunt coordinator on numerous shows and then moving into superhero TV directing in 2016.

They did merge alternate sides of the film negative over each other. But it's customary to have a body double play the other side of the scene so that the actor has a scene partner for timing. Jerry would have performed in the shot as Quinn alongside a body double playing Quinn-2. Then Jerry would have performed the same shot as Quinn-2 with a body double for Quinn. These shots would then be composited on top of each other; the sides of the shots with Jerry's Quinn would be kept and the sides with the body double would be covered.

**

I would argue that in "Greatfellas," Cleavant plays Rembrandt and Rembrandt-2 and Clinton is used as a body double. Cleavant plays Rembrandt-2.

Yes, in shots where both Rembrandts are in the same frame, Clinton's face is certainly visible and can be distinguished from Cleavant, but Clinton is always slightly angled or moving (but not obscured). Also, the double shots have Cleavant and Clinton switch roles to try to average out the differences.

At the end, Clinton (playing Rembrandt) and Cleavant (playing Rembrandt-2) are standing together.

Then Clinton/Rembrandt runs out of frame, leaving Cleavant/Rembrandt-2 alone.

We go to a shot of Rembrandt, now played by Cleavant and not Clinton, saluting Rembrandt-2.

Then we cut to Rembrandt-2 and Rembrandt-2 is also played by Cleavant.

Clinton is removed once there's only one Rembrandt in the frame.

This technique was also used in the DEAD ZONE episode "Looking Glass" which featured identical twins played by two identical twins. The plot requires that they be indistinguishable. However, there are small but noticeable differences between the two men. To smooth this over, "Looking Glass" would have the twins switch roles throughout the same scene in almost every other shot; this would average out any differences between the two.

Sorry I keep going back to THE DEAD ZONE, I'm afraid this is going to be happening for awhile. THE DEAD ZONE THE DEAD ZONE THE DEAD ZONE. It's an interesting failure.

**

Regarding the STARGATE SG-1 blu-rays: I have only seen two episodes of the show (the first two, and on the blu-ray). But even from those, it's clear that distributor, Visual Entertainment Inc., didn't do a very good job.

I don't know the show well, but fan reviews remarked that on the box art, the Stargate is incorrectly drawn and that the cast photo uses a character lineup that was only in place for one season out of the 10, indicating that the distributor had clearly never watched the show -- which reflects their upscaling process.

VEI not only failed to improve effectively on SD video, they actively damaged HD video. Seasons 1 - 7 were edited on digital videotape. VEI upscaled them to 1080p, but their process was the equivalent of Topaz LQ, creating a clean image, but one that was also a bit blurrier than it needed to be. It would have looked like the 720p upscales of Seasons 4 - 5 where there was a bit of natural film grain on an HD-acceptable image. But then VEI ran the files through another round of image smoothing. Likely, they did this to avoid all the jagged edges that often show up in upscaled video files, but rather than do it selectively, they did it to every episode, adding another layer of blurriness.

It was probably unfeasible to watch seven seasons of TV to find the specific scenes that didn't upscale well, but then it would have been best left it alone and let some shots be flawed rather than adding further blurriness to all shots.

With Seasons 8 - 10, VEI ran their image smoothing process again -- which was nonsensical. Seasons 8 - 10 were shot on digital cameras; they were already in 1080p. VEI took sharp HD video and made it blurrier. The only reason I can see for this: one of their marketing elements is to declare that their blu-ray products offer a "Super Clean" picture, even if the image does not need to be super cleaned.

VEI also reportedly messed up the surround sound. Sometimes, enabling it on the disc turns it off while disabling it turns it back on, and it's completely random across each episode.

**

Back to SLIDERS: in terms of upscaling, Seasons 2 - 5 would look good if upscaled, but there will always be a certain haziness to medium and wide shots that separates true high definition from HD approximations.

There is one more thing I haven't tried with Season 1 yet. There was a fan upscaler who shared his process awhile ago. (He then went dark and destroyed all his social media posts.) His process: he didn't just use Topaz video upscaling. For numerous shows including XENA and LOIS AND CLARK (but not SLIDERS), he used Topaz Video to extract an upscaled version of each frame of the video masters (which he somehow acquired) and saved each frame as a PNG file.

Then he ran an upscaling process on each PNG file, apparently sharpening them up, refining all the details, and bringing the resolution to as high as 15,000 pixels tall. Then he scaled the PNG files back down to 4K or 1080. Then he reintegrated the PNGs into a video sequence via Premiere Pro and added back the sound.

I have Topaz Gigapixel for upscaling still images. But I'm not sure I would get the same results for SLIDERS as this fan upscaler had actual video masters whereas I have DVDs. In addition, I don't even know if these frames we're seeing can be upscaled because, as he explained his (destroyed) notes, the upscalers use grain and these Season 1 files are very short on grain. I'm also not sure if my external 1TB spinning hard drive and external 120 GB SSD are enough for even one episode of this increasingly over-the-top endeavour.

Anyway. Let's do MQ and see how it goes.