Synopsis:

The STAR TREK PILOTS project is a 3-DVD collection of the first episodes of THE NEXT GENERATION, DEEP SPACE NINE and VOYAGER – all in trimmed WIDESCREEN versions. This one is for fans, who always wanted to watch these shows without the worst annoyances on the big modern screens.

Intentions:

Once again I struggled with the overall bad video quality of the original DVD. I reframed every scene to make it fit to the widescreen format. When it came to the editing there was not too much I wanted to remove from this episode as it is all introducing the characters or plot essential, without ever being great. The beginning and the basic idea for the Caretaker are nice (except for the annoying Tom Paris, who is made way too important), but when it then comes to the farmhouse world, the Kazon on the planet, who are an advanced species but cannot produce water, the strange underground society of the Ocampa and the always annoying Neelix, things get seriously worse. It took me a long while to motivate myself, because I do not like the episode much and reframing a 90 minutes movie again was also not as much fun as it was with the first one. The decision to remove several scenes with the super-sized Kazon spaceship was the most important one to add a tiny bit of star Trek reality to the episode. Like both predecessors this is not at all Star Trek movie quality. It is a labour of love for fans of the show, who will probably never see it in widescreen nor in HD quality.

Change List:

This is a widescreen version of CARETAKER, the pilot double episode of Star Trek – VOYAGER. The most striking annoyances have been removed for a better overall pilot episode. Voyager started interesting with the space travel, but the first enemy they faced (the Kazon) already revealed a lot of weaknesses. So many episodes were flawed, embarrassing or just bad. But some are among the best that Star Trek TV shows have ever been. The most important edit for the pilot episode was to make the super-giant Kazon ship less of a menace, because Voyager has a much higher advanced technology and it feels just wrong if these space savages come up with an indestructible spaceship. I reframed EVERY scene of the movie to make it fit to the widescreen format. Only very few times the center could be used. Some parts had to be zoomed and additionally cut to not chop off heads. Cuts and Additions: - shortened Janeway/Paris prison encounter - shortened first farm scene (to get rid of ad break) - shortened battle between Kazon and Voyager, because it makes them too much appear as if they are a match for them.

Additional Notes:

This release is not (and maybe cannot be) perfect. Here are the known issues: To turn 1.33:1 to 1.78:1 meant to sacrifice more than 20% of the visible image from top and bottom. This results in: big faces, some blurry images, some artifacts, some noise. Because of the overall rather bad image quality of the DVD source there is also in some scenes: blurriness, a bit of stuttering, quite some visible noise pixelation. The original comes with a lot of video imperfections and I was not able to correct them all by upscaling the video and using the best possible tools.– removed Beverley and Wesley with Will on Farpoint Station – removed Wesley on the holodeck – removed Will and Deanna meeting – removed Wesley and Beverley inspecting the bridge – removed Jean Luc and Beverley talking about Wesley

Other Sources:

Special Thanks: