Millennium (1996 FOX TV) HD Upscale

[TVArchive]

Hello all, I'm new to this forum (and also on originaltrilogy), had a 20+ year television production career and have owned my own boutique video production company for the past 12 years. Long story short: the pandemic nearly wiped out my entire production business, so I pivoted to restoring and, where feasible, upscaling legacy content for clients worldwide (including Universal Records). 

I use a combination of broadcast and consumer equipment/software and squeeze everything I possibly can out of each project. Having been a long-time fan of FOX TV's "Millennium", I know it will never get a proper HD release from Disney, so I decided to tackle it myself.

Seasons 1 and 2 are complete, and I'm working my way through season 3. This series was shot with a LOT of purposeful noise/grain in places, and I did no DNR to stay as faithful as possible to the original intent. It's not perfect but it's probably as close as we'll ever get to an HD release. If anyone's interested, I'll update when the project is finished. Shooting for a pre-Thanksgiving release. Here are a few screenshots. Cheers to all!

[PDB]

Very cool project. Big fan of the show.

Thanks for bringing it to this site.

[Stamper]

Welcome here. I'm guessing the same kind of upscale was used for the Wiseguy TV show on Blu-ray.

[Hitcher]

Count me in as another fan of the show. Look forward to checking it out.

[Plissken1138]

promising screens!

[TVArchive]

The series is complete! Some notes for folks:

This show was nominated for 4 ASC awards, and many of the shots in each episode were highly stylized with mixing of media (8mm/16mm/35mm film, 480i video). The large majority of each episode is nice and clean 35mm film, but there are lots of shots with varying amounts of grain. I'm not a fan of using DNR if it substantially changes the director's intention, so these episodes have been upscaled with ZERO DNR. That probably won't please everyone, as there are scenes in each episode where the grain is very high, and you can see the grain moving in those shots, but my preference is to see the show as it was presented.

These episodes of "Millennium" were upscaled from compressed files (DVD source). If you watch the original DVDs, you'll see this grain as well - on faces, backgrounds, etc. In some cases, the grain noticeably 'shimmers'. My upscaling technique uses a combination of hardware and software and blending 4 different results for final output. The end product is gritty but true to the original. Apologies to those who find those grainy shots distracting.

Last note - the file sizes are large for these episodes. Well over half the show was shot in darkness or with varying degrees of dim/gray backgrounds (Chris Carter initially pitched the show as "Se7en" in Seattle). There was significant banding of backgrounds at lower bitrates, and I didn't want to revisit this project in a couple of years, so each episode ranges from 2.6gb to 3.6gb. Season 1 is 58.7gb, Season 2 is 61.7gb and Season 3 is 74.2gb. Season 1 is 4:3 HD, seasons 2 and 3 are full HD.

If you own these episodes on DVD and would like a link to these fan upscales, please let me know. Cheers to all.

[PDB]

Congrats on finishing

[dvdmike]

Love the show and have the PAL dvd set somewhere