I guarantee you, you'd have a group of fans with the know how to do it. And they would do it for free.
The problem is they'd devolve into various camps bickering about the "right" way to do it, creating their own mini standards bodies, and forming a massive internal bureaucracy of tribalism.
It seems the more passionate a group of people is about something, the more convinced they are that they know the right way to do things.
~Just run the colorquads through the main optical processor, then reverse the polarity, compress the lightstream in the warp field, and blit the output texels through the main deflector dish. That creates a virtual lightfield holo-display, using the starfield as the light source, with practically infinite resolution. Then all you need to do is point an image recorder at it, and downsample back to 1080p at 60Hz.~
Ya, I can't think of any show with such a long lasting, rabid fan base. Just look at that recent "fan film" that CBS tried to sue over. Production quality was off the charts for a fan film.
It’s pretty crazy. If the franchise were somehow freed from copyright control I have no doubt that several near-studio-quality fan productions would pop up in no time at all. People love their Trek.
Axanar was pretty impressive, but I love what the Star Trek continues crew did. The love and respect they showed to the original material was very impressive.
The fans will come, but there are limits to how far even they will go to create a product that will be owned and sold by someone else. Having toiled to edit together the HD version, id be screaming mad to see it sold for 100+ per season. If it was made by fans it should be sold at cost.
> FWIW, they failed to recoup their investment in TNG's remaster, selling at 100+ per season. By definition, that arguably means it was sold below cost.
It means they charged at a level where sales volume times net (after variable costs) price per unit was insufficient to cover fixed costs.
But whether that's because they charged too much (variable costs for the disc sets were a small fraction of the price; it's quite possible they would make more profit with higher volume and lower price), too little (maybe the people willing to pay as much as was charged would have paid even more), or either would have worked and they priced in an unprofitable valley, or neither would have worked is speculation.
It makes sense to price high to get maximum returns from the users who must have it now, and then catch everyone else later with lower priced offerings.
That's a rather naive view apparently based on a consumer-level underestimation of the complexities of asset management and funding on a big movie/show.
I'd guess from a studio's POV the trade-off is between spending money updating an ancient show in the hope of making a little cash now and a little more from residuals, and making new shows which are more or less guaranteed to bring a profit.
But that aside, I'm not sure there's any way to make something like Star Trek public domain. Never mind the studio - the actors, writers, and producers will still be relying on residuals for continuing income.
And even if that weren't true - what exactly do you make public domain? You can't just hand out the original unedited film stock to anyone who asks for it. How about the scores for the music? Or the audio mix files? Or the EDL? Or the various revisions of the scripts? Props? Set carpentry - if there's any left? Wiring?
Reality: very few elements are digital files that can be copied/shared, even if you wanted to allow the public to copy/share them.
You make it all public domain. It's been over 20 years, well past the founding father's original intent for copyright. The perpetual copyright garbage that exists today is culturally toxic and isn't seen in any other field of work. Should builders get paid on buildings that keep standing? Highway workers on roads that they make? No? Then why the hell should creatives get special treatment? Look at the house of mouse and the crap they've pulled. The fact that you can't take something you've loved for over 20 years and make derivations on it is theft from the public in my eyes. People being born today most likely won't be alive by the time it goes into the public domain. Think about that.
>That's a rather naive view apparently based on a consumer-level underestimation of the complexities of asset management and funding on a big movie/show. //
The situation is that the studio could do work on the footage to make it releasable, then sell the processed footage for profit.
The argument is that the processing of the footage makes it too expensive to do this, the studio might make a loss.
So, all the IPR, releases and such need to be in order for it to be possible to release the processed footage.
It's possible there is contractual obligation preventing release of rushes and other unfinalised footage, but it seems highly unlikely. I'd imagine the studio have rights to publish anything, thus enabling "making of" and "blooper reel" type videos.
So, if it's possible to arrange the IPR for the processed footage, then it's close to certainty that there's no IPR limitation on releasing the unprocessed footage.
Meaning finances are the only remaining issue.
Sure, the studio may not want to spend the money up front to arrange release of the footage; but that is likely to be primarily to avoid fan works based on the footage from competing with their own outputs.
>You can't just hand out the original unedited film stock to anyone who asks for it. //
You could hand it to an archive for digitisation and give them rights to sell it at cost. Or, burn it. Or leave it in a canister to degrade until it's unusable.
>How about the scores for the music? Or the audio mix files? Or the EDL? Or the various revisions of the scripts? Props? Set carpentry - if there's any left? Wiring? //
Well, IPR aside, why not. If you're paying to keep the set in storage, why not give it away and save your storage costs and get on with making new sets that are going to be used?
Primarily however, we the demos should be taking the question of what to do with unneeded IPR away from the studios. Make copyright terms shorter to match patent terms.
The Blu-Ray sales can’t be the real story. Surely they expected the long term value to come from the significantly added appeal of HD content for streaming services.
IAE, I can understand the reasons something upscaled is all we’re ever likely to see of DS9 or Voyager. Primarily that as soon as CGI became the dominant effects technology, the frequency of use went way up, and all those scenes would require non-trivial reconstruction.
I am sure the TNG remaster will eventually be worthwhile to CBS, due to streaming, re-releases, etc. It's an asset they will monetize for decades to come. But studios do not think long-term like that, and are unlikely to attempt it again if they don't think they'll make their money back for twenty years.
As I noted in another comment, many of the effects artists from DS9 and Voyager have their original meshes and scene files, and some have posted insanely high resolution files on their blogs. It would be a frustrating effort to gather all of this, but arguably, CBS already owns the works in question, so compensation for retrieving these would be minimal probably, and the quality of the work done for the series was more than adequate if re-rendered in HD.
Similar situation with Babylon 5. There some defenders using the original stuff but in HD quality. Even using the original textures keeps looking impressive. Sadly, Warner not have idea of the golden goose that they have.
IIRC the phrase they used was "failed to meet expectations", which is very different from 'failed to recoup their investment'. The idea that you can sell a remaster for 100 a season aside the second one is a factual statement. The first one is arbitrary. Maybe they expected 100 million profit and only made 90.
