Shitty film to digital transfers.
Voyager was filmed analog, edited digitally, and transferred to master reels for broadcast because most American TV stations were still using analog equipment in the 1990s. Then those finished reels were digitally transferred for the home DVD release and streaming services.
Remastering Voyager would not only require redoing all of the digital effects and composites, but finding the original film reels and doing a more professional job transferring them to digital.
I thought VOY and DS9 were shot on video rather than film, hence no remasters like they’ve done for NG.
it was shot on a 35mm, scanned, and all the postproduction (mixing, cutting, digital effects, sound editing…) was done digitally in ntsc resolution, because it was cheaper and faster. so doing some HD remaster would require doing ALL the postproduction again, which is why it is considered unlikely to happen.
this interview goes into great details about it if you are interested:
https://treknews.net/2017/02/02/why-ds9-voyager-not-on-blu-ray-hd/
So, why aren’t these incredible shows getting the same treatment as the others? I recently reached out to the writer, director, producer, and editor of the incredible bonus features found on The Next Generation and Enterprise Blu-ray sets, Robert Meyer Burnett, to get some answers. Burnett was so heavily involved in the previous remastering projects, he seemed like the perfect source for answers to my burning questions.
If you’ve ever wondered about Deep Space Nine and Voyager on Blu-ray, sit back and relax as Burnett provides an enormous amount of detailed information that will most likely answer all of them.
Nope. Both on 35mm. It’s just expensive and there are way more effects shots which would need to be redone for those series. The DS9 documentary What We Left Behind does have some glorious HD DS9 shots from film they scanned. I believe they even got the guy who did the color grading for the series back to work on it.
