The first time the Star Trek people remastered all their videos on DVD, they simply did a straight conversion with maybe a little cleanup. However, with all this new Blu-ray stuff, they’ve remastered it AGAIN and have gone so far as to “digitize” the video, replacing the model Enterprise hanging on strings in the studio with a poorly done 3D render. Well, I was watching the ad on some of our videos and it says that you can watch the videos with that 3D render instead of the original model if you so choosed. But I think this is just a cheap way of advertising Blu-ray. In fact, I think Blu-ray is way too over-advertised anyway. How much can we remaster old videos to make them better and better?

Seriously, Blu-ray is just a way to create a 40GB DVD. And of course, if the technology is popular with a big company like Disney or Universal, well, they’ll do everything possible to get sales including remastering these old videos into high quality digital video with replacement 3D renders and adding hours of ‘extras’ which are a waste of time.

Personally, I say if you want Blu-ray to take off, stop advertising so much in the way of “hours of special bonus features!” Instead, why don’t you pack hours of actual MOVIE onto the disc. Why not put Toy Story 1 at 2 (and now 3 in June) onto one side of one disc and say, “Get all three Toy Stories on one single-layer Blu-ray disc!”

Well, really it seems as though they invested in this great technology and now they don’t exactly know what to do with it. It’s like getting a one-million dollar check in the mail and…now what?

Back to old videos though: sometimes the mistakes and cheap look that the old videos had can be appreciated MORE than a remaster of them to make them look cooler. Star Trek for example was COOL when it was cheap! Of course, it’s kind of cool now, but not as much.