Star Trek: Next Gen shot on film?

[WickyWoo]

TNG was shot on 16mm for the first 2 seasons, and then 35

Except for the ILM generic ship shots, all episode-specific VFX were shot and composited on analog video. Doing HD versions would require pulling out every piece of film, re-scanning, re-editing, and redoing all non-ILM FX shots. It is not impossible, just extremely expensive. From what I hear they have a budget of about $250,000 an episode for TOS's restoration. Doing TNG would probably be a million apiece (and sadly they'll never spend that on DS9)

They have apparently done some tests.

TOS was easy because all episodes have a master 35mm print that they used for broadcast and it's a simple matter to just do a new print from the negative and scan it, plus the aforementioned lack of needing original SFX elements. The HD DVD version is the remastered. Apparently a future Blu version will/would have included seamless branching.