remastered in hd or digitally remastered?

i've read that with some blu ray titles, the films are not actually in high definition and have only been upconverted to 1080p or something like that. Movies like Predator for instance. Also i've heard several people complain about the new star trek blu ray box that wrath of kahn is the only movie that is truly in high definition and the rest were just upconverted.
I was wondering if someone could explain if there is a difference between digitally remastering and remastering in hd, or if there really is no difference at all.

First, let's take the "Star Trek" issue. An uninformed poster on Amazon.com started a rumor that five of the BD movies were simply upconverted standard-definition transfers and only "Khan" was in actual high-def. Nonsense. "Khan" was the only movie in the set that Paramount restored frame by frame. That means they went back to the original print and fixed and cleaned and color corrected each frame. With the other five movies, the studio took the original prints, converted them to the digital domain (probably at 4K), and remastered them in 1080p for reproduction on Blu-ray.

To "restore" a film is just that: to go back and fix the ravages of time on a film, cleaning it and correcting it to look as much as possible as it originally looked when new (or, in some few cases, changing it to reflect the director's or cinematographer's latest ideas on what it should look like).

To "remaster" a film is to go back to the original print and transfer it to digital, usually at 4K or so these days, and if it's an older film, often cleaning it as best they can without doing a complete restoration. The studio will then usually save the film for archival purposes at the higher resolution and downconvert it to 1080p for Blu-ray.

Incidentally, studios generally use 4K or 5K digital intermediates today for editing new movies before theatrical release. That is, if a studio shoots a movie on conventional film stock, they then transfer it to digital at 4K or 5K for editing (the intermediate phase) and then when the editing is completed, they transfer it back to film stock and send out to theaters for exhibition (or, if the theater is equipped for digital playback, they send the movie out in digital form on hard discs).

John

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[Post edited by John J. Puccio on May 31, 2009 - CDT 8:04 PM]

Thank you so much! I really wanted to pick up that Star Trek set and had reservations due to said rumor.

Again thank you for the very informative reply!