Star Trek on Laserdisc
*Available in TOS, TAS, TNG, DS9, VOY, and theatrical release flavors.
It’s guaranteed very few Star Trek fans have ever seen these, they are as hard to find as it gets. What we have here is Star Trek on a fully analog video format that isn’t plagued by digital artifacts found on streaming platforms and early DVD releases (such as the DS9/VOY releases), nor does it have any of the quality issues found with VHS tape.
The elephant in the room here is cost, so don’t go searching Ebay/ZenMarket just yet. As with most analog hifi things, you have to spend a lot to get high quality results. Laserdisc is no exception, and it’s even worse because of the rarity of the discs and the equipment all having antique status.
That being said, in my quest to transport myself back to the 1990’s, I have amassed enough equipment and specialty gear to capture Laserdiscs in stupidly high quality, and have uploaded the results for normal people to see. Now the preferred way to watch these is in their native resolution with a high end LD player hooked directly to a retro Trinitron CRT or Plasma TV, but these direct disc captures will be the best possible viewing method on modern display devices.
Voyager LD Sample YT – VOY LD Sample Direct Download
DS9 LD Sample YT – DS9 LD Sample Direct Download
Hardware used for capture:
- Pioneer CLD-D704
- Domesday Duplicator
- Windows PC (i9-10900k/RTX-3080/32GB RAM)
Software used for processing:
- ld-decode
- Hybrid + Vapoursynth
- Premiere Pro
- Audition
- Topaz
IIRC, VOY and DS9 were stored for long term on videotape, with the original footage deleted from the disks, while TOS and TNG were still (kept on) reels. Remastering film is a lot easier than upscaling low quality videotape, especially since that is also vulnerable to EM and much more to heat than modern film. I think the Laserdiscs were created from the original footage, so you have some proper gold here. You might be able to create even better upscaling with this than CaptRobau: https://captrobau.blogspot.com/2019/04/how-did-i-upscale-star-trek-ds9-footage.html
I think they were all on reels. The DS9 doc a couple of years back (after than blog post) had 4k hdr widescreen rescans of select scenes for the campaign bonus on kickstarter. Truly amazing. They also had the CGI files to rerender some scenes like Sacrifice of Angels battles.
Dear God, if these exist, there’s no excuse for the sound quality Paramount+ pushes out. 😢
Fans need these, if you ever do this project, thank you!
I might do one full episode as a test, I have another big project I need to finish first before I start another long term project.
Good news is, sound quality on LD is excellent, 2ch 16 bit 44100hz PCM with Dolby Surround.
Laserdisk is analog?
Yes sir, instead of pits and lands being 1’s and 0’s on the disc, they are variable length and distance apart which allows for an analog RF signal to be stored on the disc.
I was so mesmerized by the Voyager intro I got sucked back into the warm nostalgia of my childhood. My eyes instinctively looked to the corner of the screen to read the episode title. And end of video. 😢
If you can get those on the internet you will be preserving access for the vast majority who would otherwise be stuck with the crappy streaming versions.
