The team from the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine documentary What We Left Behind shared a status update this afternoon which included a video update from producer Ira Steven Behr.

As we previously reported, the actual interviews, editing, sound mix, and most of the other elements have been completed. The documentary had early backer premiere events late last year, but the clips from DS9 seen at those events were a mix of newly scanned high definition and older standard definition footage.

Thanks to an outpouring of support from fans, the documentary team set about upgrading all clips from the show. In today’s video, Ira gives fans an update on the remastering progress.

Remastering episode footage

The documentary has over 20 minutes of footage from DS9 spanning all seven seasons, which involves scanning 400 reels of 35mm film. The original film reels have to be located, brought out of storage, scanned, and then color corrected and generally cleaned up of any blemishes. It’s not a trivial task. Today’s official DS9 Doc update notes:

We’re nearly through the heavy research-and-scanning stage of our remaster, and with just a few (hundred) more film rolls ahead of us, we’re hard at work replacing the 20+ minutes of new HD sequences — spanning ALL SEVEN seasons of the original run of Deep Space Nine!

What about a release date?

The team knows we’re all clamoring for a final version. But they’re not quite ready to give a date yet. Again from the update:

The restoration process alone is a HUGE undertaking — after all your support in funding this expensive endeavor, it has taken months of work from the CBS Digital team to coordinate, research, find, ship, scan and deliver the original film negatives for us, and more time from our team to clean up, color, and polish the resulting images (and even re-create a handful of effects!).

While we’re still waiting on final elements to arrive and distribution details to lock firmly into place, we don’t want to promise any deadlines we can’t meet with the film not yet entirely complete.

More coming soon

The end of their update teases something big coming later in March.

We’ve got BIG news in the works and expect you’ll be hearing much more from us later this month.

You can show your support and pre-order the final release at www.ds9documentary.com

Keep up with all the updates and news on the DS9 documentary in our What We Left Behind category here at TrekMovie.com