Is the OT over going to be remastered?
 

I was watching my copy of the season 2 DVD and thought about how they crammed all of those episodes onto one disc. Even though a series set has been released (twice), Lions' Gate is still printing the same discs.

Do you guys think those DVDs are the best the series will ever look on home media?

No, I don't think it will ever be re-mastered. No way, man.

Yeah that'd be way too much work for a show that old, with that much degradation of the master copies and all that. Far easier to just write it off as, "It's old, please lower your standards", since most people truly don't care about the picture quality and just want the episodes. They're not going to spend a fortune going all "Lucas Special Editions" on it just to appease a few HD snobs.

Even if Lionsgate sells the rights to Nick I don't think they would ever bother remastering it either.

I personally would love to see a complete remastered set with chronological ordering in place. Having episodes the missing 'time machine' & 'turtleoids' episodes shoved on the season 10 disc makes my OCD act up, lol.

HAH! Fat chance, it would be a waste of money. Even if they scale up the definition, sound quality and correct the animation errors it's not going worth the effort seeing how it will always have the same choppy frame rate and general "cheapness" to it's production.

At this point, I kinda wonder if the "masters" in the Fred Wolf vault are actually just VHS tapes.

Probably. With a show with over 150 episodes, I'd imagine some will get lost.

It would be a magnetic tape yes, you can see artefacts on some episodes that would confirm than. Probably not VHS though.

I guess those tapes, if they exist, would be terribly degraded by this point...unless some unknown person got a hold of them. That would be an interesting story, wouldn't it?

http://33.media.tumblr.com/46fdab4bf...36uxo3_500.gif

The OP asks two different questions, the first one is "Will the current DVDs be the best quality we'll ever get?" And I definitely think that is incorrect, even the German DVDs had better quality because Lionsgate crammed too many episodes into the DVDs in the US. Even without remastering Lionsgate can release better quality versions just by not compressing them.

Second question depends what he meant be remastering, everyone here thinks HD, that will never happen for the same reasons other shows like Transformers or He-Man can't be done, the film is lost. Now you can still fix the transfer up and clean them a little bit. Is it likely? Who knows, it could, just how many releases has Transformers gotten and they've cleaned it up and TMNT was a much bigger franchise.


Will it happen anytime soon? It doesn't seem like anyone cares about bringing this TMNT products even though it is currently successful with kids and adults are craving nostalgic merchandise. We still have the same crappy DVDs and BR transfers. The death of physical media is probably to blame though as Transformers got all those sets when DVD was hot.

^
I would like to see what the non-compressed versions look like.

The more content packed into a disc, the more compressed the files have to be to fit. Even the German DVD's have slight compression artifacts. The German 5 disc season 1 set is better than the 3 disc set. Link: http://forums.thetechnodrome.com/sho...902#post979902

Nope, we already have a superior version with the German DVD release. I haven't compared the Laserdisc versions to the DVD's though. Still need to find a good player.

I know this is an impossible long shot, but theoretically fans could scan the original animation cells and try to re-animate them with digital software. That would be the highest resolution you'd ever get.

Here's one of the clean up effort I just made (switch to full screen and choose the 1080p setting):

Woah, that's a impressing quality, evan2000!

And about seeing the OT episodes getting a remastered release: Unlikely, it would take a lot of work to remaster 198 episodes, and it may not be much profitable.

194, but yeah, it would probably be more than it's worth.

If they used a simple cleanup technique similar to how FUNimation remastered Dragon Ball Z, then Lionsgate could afford to remaster the series and sell it at a decent price, too.

What was the "simple cleanup technique" DBZ used?

I know the KSM Ninja Turtles boxsets get praise because they look good but I heard people complain about their Blu-ray releases. Not exactly sure but I think it was complaints about compression.

Seeing as HD is here to stay, it would be a good investment to make HD transfer of the film prints.

Choppy frame rate was a rarity in TMNT. Cheapness? Ever seen episodes like "Turtles on trial"?

HD transfer would bring significant improvement in picture quality. That's a fact. That is, if the film prints have been preserved. Audio too (if audio masters have been also preserved, they could even create a stereo mix).

Look, when you have no clue what you're talking about - it's best to keep your mouth shut. :)

All depends on where they were stored. Though for HD release - film prints are needed.

For He-Man it's a rumor that film prints have been destroyed. In fact, the current copyright holder doesn't even know what kind of material it owns and it has a warehouse FULL of the stuff. It's always been easy for DVD companies to say it's been lost to put an end to fans asking for a remaster.

For Transformers, film prints have been preserved! Rhino used film prints (albeit test ones by mistake) to make their DVD masters which are still being used. Unfortunately they did that in early 2000's, before future of HD was certain so it's in SD. HOWEVER, at least there's an HD transfer of the movie: http://www.avsforum.com/forum/150-bl...rison-pix.html

It's just progressive scan with ultra-high bitrate (meaning there's no pixelization).

It must be kept in mind that this wouldn't be just for a single release, but for ALL future releases and even TV airings. HD transfer would become default master with old ones becoming obsolete.

Haha, I remember how they promoted it as being some kind of frame-by-frame restoration project.

When the first DVD box sets came out, most purists were infuriated they altered the aspect ratio as well.