I have been doing a "refit" of this film for the past couple of years, sorry for the pun but I had to throw it in :-). I have rendered a few shots on my pc at home in my spare time, like you said before the matte work done for this film was horrific, probably due to how rushed it was and money. The scene I started off with was the Klingon opening, but it soon escalated from that to almost the entire film. The opening shot as it moves over the ship and the camera turns over the bridge was difficult I tired several takes and still did not get it bang on in time with the music. I found a model of the Klingon ships by prologic 9 to be the most accurate and did a bit of tweaking to them such as relighting them. I then moved on to redo the title sequence which i created in after effects 5 starting with a starfield from scratch and new title cards. I did not want to cut any of Jerry Goldsmiths amazing music from my titles so I did a little mixing in after effects and came up with a track I was happy with. The bit I am working on now is the San Francisco tram sequence. this time going by the book... literally. In the novel of the film, Kirk gets a tram from L A bound for San Francisco. In the DE of the film the tram goes over Golden Gate bridge. Well if he was going from LA to San Francisco he would go over the bay bridge towards the Golden Gate bridge. I am also redoing Headquarters and a new tram station all of which will be highly detailed for 1080 HD. I was contemplating doing 4k, But that is timely and the quality of the old prints barely made it past HD upscaling. I know this is a huge post but I have wanted to share this with someone for a long time. I think my fiance is about sick of hearing about it :-)
