Video from the Expo

[AndyThomas]

Has everyone seen this? https://youtu.be/E9NhTT14Xis

[Crash]

Hi Andy,
Great video - you did a great job finding that!

@1:36 - Get those Japanese tourists out the way!

[Serenity]

Wow, what a fantastic exhibition, many lovely pieces there!

I still think the Pluto astro fighter is one of the coolest ships in the whole show.

[Crash]

The Pluto fighter is a real interesting design.
It has an odd, flying saucer vibe and a conventional aircraft vibe all together in one design, and yet, it looks nice.

The expo makes me think how much stuff was made for the show but was discarded afterwards.
There were 4 types of EDF fighters and patrol ships, and then you're still missing all the incidental Alliance hardware such as Captain Carter's astrofighter, various missiles, launchers, turrets and installations.
That's before you get to all the landing dioramas at Moonbase, Pluto and all the exotic planets that they visited.

[Serenity]

I always quite liked that there were different versions of astro fighters. There even seemed to be variants of the same design.

The "Pluto" design:



But then you also had:



No idea what that is on top, but it's not on the frame of the other design.

Then you had the "Ocean Patrol" design:



And the Mars variant which is slightly different:



The Moonbase diorama is one of my favourite things from the whole show - I would love to get a high-rez version of this shot:

[Crash]

I did try using tineye and google image search to see if I could find a bigger one.

The 720p upscale of the show that Gary Cass shared with me is very sharp on a big screen.
I wonder if the best way is to get a screengrab from the French DVD version of the show, (which has the best visual quality) and seeing if an AI upscale engine can make a decent job of that single frame.

[Serenity]

I did try using tineye and google image search to see if I could find a bigger one.

The 720p upscale of the show that Gary Cass shared with me is very sharp on a big screen.
I wonder if the best way is to get a screengrab from the French DVD version of the show, (which has the best visual quality) and seeing if an AI upscale engine can make a decent job of that single frame.

I tried to grab the image from the 720p image as well and it turned out....ugly lol. Lots of pixelation in the dark space, of which there's a lot.

I took the best image I could and ran it through Topaz Photo AI but more often than not I ended up sacrificing elsewhere to compensate for and eliminate any pixelation. Most of the time it ended up looking like a computer game! Will continue to tinker around but doubt we'll be able to do too much. That whole Mikami Moonbase matte painting is gorgeous though, I'd settle for a nice print of that. Since they refound it they should definitely cash in on some merch.....

[Crash]

Well, this is the thing. I think they had some big prints of that at the Expo, as well as the original.
The Earth HQ and many others are brilliant as well but the moonbase one is especially magical.

Photoshop now has a kind of pseudo-AI enlargement option for resizing an image overall, called 'preserve details enlargement 2.0' that's worked well for me in the past.
The bay of piracy is always a welcoming place for that sort of thing.

[Serenity]

Well, this is the thing. I think they had some big prints of that at the Expo, as well as the original.
The Earth HQ and many others are brilliant as well but the moonbase one is especially magical.

Photoshop now has a kind of pseudo-AI enlargement option for resizing an image overall, called 'preserve details enlargement 2.0' that's worked well for me in the past.
The bay of piracy is always a welcoming place for that sort of thing.

Haven't used Photoshop for a while, I'll have to take a look. I've tended to stick with Topaz recently. I used the Video Enhancer last year to up-rez a load of Laserdiscs to 1080p. The results were quite pleasing. Not true 1080p obviously but far better than a standard 425i Laserdisc image. Off the back of that I've been playing around with the Photo AI. Less successful, but interesting. I did use it on a screen grab of the EDF matte painting. No obvious pixelation issues but it just looked incredibly processed. I'm not au fait with all of the features with that software yet though so I'm sure I didn't produce an optimal image!

I did use the Video Enhancer to push the 720p version of the first episode up to 1080p. Mixed results. Some shots look quite nice. Others, again, look very processed.








I'd take it over the Discotek episodes though!

Finally got around to checking out the SD on BD release yesterday. I've had it since release but never got around to it. Suddenly twigged that it includes the Japanese episodes, hence Episode 18, which I'd never seen before. I know it's only like 7 minutes of new footage, but still, new footage is new footage. Checked it out, think it was the right decision not to port it to Star Fleet, no need for ANOTHER flashback show, but it was interesting enough, especially the Makara/Orion scenes. Thought the PQ on the Discotek release was pretty poor. Sub-optimal transfers used, and 49 episodes + extras on a single disc is not a good combination. Glad I have it for the subtitled Japanese episodes, but beyond that I'll stick to other sources.

[Crash]

That's interesting info about the software available for use on this.
When you have imperfections in the individual frames, it matters a lot less when 24 go by every second.

Discotek had some interesting ideas with their blu-ray release, but putting on the whole series in Japanese, with subtitles, including the preview show, was a very nice move.

I have the X Bomber laserdiscs waiting for a player to run them.
Do you have a capture card attached to a PC to import the laserdisc footage?
That sounds like a very interesting job.