Several prominent video editors and fans in the Star Trek community set out to upscale Season 1, creating highly circulated clips and full-episode proofs-of-concept that went viral on YouTube and Reddit. How the 2020 AI Upscale Process Worked
Search for "Project Defiant DS9 Remastered" or "DS9 AI Upscale 4K 2020" on fan restoration databases or Usenet. The torrents are well-seeded by the community.
Blu-ray remasters as the reason for not pursuing a full, film-based remaster for DS9.
The 2020 fan upscale projects utilized "Generative Adversarial Networks" (GANs). Unlike standard upscaling, which just stretches the image, AI upscaling predicts what missing pixels should look like based on patterns it learned from millions of high-resolution images. star trek deep space 9 s01 ai upscale 4k 2020
: The project required high-end workstations, including an AMD Threadripper 3990X and RTX 2080 , to handle the extreme processing times—up to 15 hours per episode.
Searching for these specific 2020 project terms yields extensive side-by-side comparison videos, upscaled trailers, and iconic scene clips (such as the Battle of Wolf 359).
In early 2020, software company Topaz Labs released major updates to "Video Enhance AI" (now known as Topaz Video AI). Simultaneously, tools like ESRGAN (Enhanced Super-Resolution Generative Adversarial Networks) became more accessible to tech-savvy hobbyists. Several prominent video editors and fans in the
Around 2020, a combination of more powerful consumer GPUs and mature AI upscaling algorithms (specifically Topaz Video AI) led to a boom in fan-made restorations. The most notable of these for DS9 is often referred to as the or the D-JPEG AI Upscale .
Yet, for nearly thirty years, fans have suffered through one brutal reality:
In 2020, the "story" of upscaling Star Trek: Deep Space Nine Blu-ray remasters as the reason for not pursuing
When Paramount undertook this mammoth task for The Next Generation, the financial return did not justify the millions of dollars spent, effectively killing any hope for an official DS9 remaster. Enter the AI upscaling community.
Dax checked the logs. “The AI pulled it from a temporal probability matrix. It says that figure has a 0.003% chance of being real. But… it’s not an error. It’s a echo.”
For a fan in 2024, this is the definitive way to watch the show until Paramount performs a miracle and remasters the series properly (which seems unlikely given the cost).