Screen Capture Quality

For obvious reasons, we at HeroComm are always keen on finding the biggest, bestest screen cap images to base our research on, and sure enough Paramount keeps us on our toes with their continued new releases. Most recently has been their remastered Seasons Two and Three on standard DVD. A few years ago it was the remastered Season One (>>) in a dual HD-DVD/standard format. Prior to that was the four-episode-per-disc repackaged DVDs, and further back still was a two-episode-per-disc collection that our screen cap library was taken off of. The re-mastered DVDs available now boast, besides a nice CG Enterprise, filmed images that have been taken directly off of the original negatives, so at a minimum truer color and frame size is promised.

We've also seen the "maximum" that can be obtained - with the first season in high definition HD-DVD. Simply put, when it comes to resolution, or the amount of raw data contained, there is no comparison... high def blows away standard. By how much? For every one pixel on Standard, HD delivers 4.5. That is nearly half a magnitude improvement! When astronomers get that kind of step up from a new telescope, they discover galaxies.

Let's talk basics. Standard DVDs save their data as 720 pixels wide by 480 high per frame (below left). That's all you get; 345,600 "native" pixels. This format is called 480p; 480 for the height and the "p" for Progressive scan, simply meaning each line is refreshed after the last one (the other kind is "i" for Interlaced, where every other line is refreshed like in older TVs). However, since that native image has an aspect ratio (width / height) of 3:2 and a TV set has an aspect ratio of 4:3, a Standard DVD image has to be stretched vertically to be reconstituted into its proper shape, which is 720 wide by 560 high. Your DVD player will automatically do this, but no extra data is created (below right):

Note: above pictures from a Standard DVD are shown at half scale to fit on this page side-by-side

To contrast, HD frames (stored in 1080p format) are 1960 pixels wide x 1080 high. That makes for a whopping 2,116,800 pixels. But that is for wide-screen movies. Again because TV is at a 4:3 ratio, an HD-DVD cannot make use of the full width, so it only gives you 1440 pixels (1080 divided by 3 times 4). The unused portions end up as black bands to the left and right. That makes each frame of a classic Star Trek episode displayed at a still-impressive 1,555,200 pixels. As said before, that is exactly four and a half times more than Standard. Below are portions of the same frames from Miri illustrating just how much additional detail is now available to us. Note at a minimum here how nearly every antenna hole in the HD version can be made out separately:

Enlarging a portion of each reveals the true detail we want... plus the undesirable artifacts from the digital compression used to reduce the file size on the disc. Though these squaring-off distortions in the HD images might occasionally interfere with our analysis of tiny details, it is easily imagined that many discoveries will still be forthcoming once all three seasons have been released in HD and fully examined:

Unfortunately for us hobbyists, the entertainment industry recently had another format war reminiscent of VHS vs. Beta. Two high definition video disc formats, HD-DVD and BlueRay, went toe-to-toe. BlueRay won. Toshiba was involved in developing HD-DVD technology, and as a way prior of bolstering their position in the marketplace, they agreed to shoulder the expense of bringing classic Star Trek to high def. Paramount of course agreed, but since Toshiba is no longer making HD-DVD and thus no longer has any reason to do the transference, Paramount - and we - are out of luck. Only Season 1 got done, and that is now on a format that no computer or home entertainment system made today can read.

For the few HD screen grabs we have on this site, we relied upon the TrekCore library and personnel. Unless you have an recently-outdated Toshiba computer and some special software to play and capture HD-DVD at full native 1960x1080, this is all we're going to get in that size until Paramount does everything in BlueRay, hopefully later in 2009.

However, the remastered Seasons 2 & 3, still only in Standard DVD, have their own surprising merit. Their images, while not having any more pixels than before, are a little richer and truer in color, plus cleaner (less compression distortion) However, in exchange for the cleanli-ness is sometimes a slight loss of crispness and even minute detail. Note below how the cap on the right, from the remastered, has a nicer overall look and shows off the antenna holes a bit better, but the wide base rim on the control knobs (Aurora slot car hubs) that is clearly seen on the left gets fuzzed out. It can be somewhat hit-and-miss depending on the episode and scene, but overall there is an improvement:

... And in this field, sometimes that's all you need. No doubt this story will continue. See you again then.