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Star Trek: TMP Edit Not Dead yet! (a work in progress) — Page 2

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I just wanted to pop in and say STMP is one of my favorite films, and I really appreciate the work you're doing on it!

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Here is the K'tinga reveal. The Blu-Ray had crushed blacks, a few clipped highlights, and the grading was such that the V'ger cloud was rendered very dark and grainy. I've taken information from the HDTV broadcast to supplement the Blu-Ray, resulting in this composite: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCn2RZkfeNc

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The detail. The colors. I love it.

There is a band at the top that's off. Is that unaligned stuff? Extra information from one version?

Star Wars Revisited Wordpress

Star Wars Visual Comparisons WordPress

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If you want to see the detail, here is a link to a 220MB MOV that showcases the restoration work. I've recolortimed the shot to remove the elevated black level (artifact of optical compositing) while still keeping most of the detail (something the blu-ray's colorist didn't seem to care about), and adding a bit of green to the cruisers as they seem to be green in most other shots save for this one.

Here is the link! The levels in this video are PC and not video, btw.

https://app.box.com/s/sgmebk8xrrooe2vb2a6u

Yes that area at the top is extra info from the BLU-RAY; different scans were used for the BLU and the HDTV (I believe the HDTV scan was the same as the one used for the Director's Edition DVD).

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Aspect ratios is kind of one of my side projects, especially of Trek, so this difference is most intriguing.

Star Wars Revisited Wordpress

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Back from the dead with some new power-tools!

I’d like to present a frame from a restored version of the E reveal. The Blu-Ray transfer is missing the dark and highlighted areas of the image, and I was able to restore those using the HDTV transfer, along with the film grain that was removed from the Blu-Ray. Best the film has ever looked in my humble opinion!

https://image.ibb.co/co68zb/REVEAL_BLU.png
https://image.ibb.co/dZ3csw/REVEAL_HDTV.png
https://image.ibb.co/bDbVCw/REVEAL_COMP_GRAIN.png

I’m also working on dust-busting the deleted scenes and concocted a superb upscaling script so they’ll feel less out of place amongst the HD footage. If any of you want to do Director’s Cut or TV Cut restorations of the film in HD get in touch and I’ll find a way to get the material to you.

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Yeah looks good… Are those shots also re-used in wrath of khan also?

Anyway yeah what you have there is much better than TMP blu atleast.

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They reuse a bunch of the dry dock scenes in Wrath of Khan. I explored using them for my HD director’s cut recreation, but unfortunately most all of them are trimmed compared to their length in TMP.
The behind the scenes documentary on the bluray shows the transfer before the DNR and contrast boost, although it still unfortunately doesn’t include any full shots.
Comparing Synnöve’s sample to that footage shows really great results, detail-wise: https://i.imgur.com/pIA2sv2.png
This process is basically magic as far as I’m concerned.

Star Trek: The Motion Picture DE - The Anti-DNR Fanedit
Duel (1971) - The Hybrid Cut
The Phantom of the Opera - 1925 Version Reconstruction - Rare Scores Collection - Roy Budd Score

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ElectricTriangle said:

The behind the scenes documentary on the bluray shows the transfer before the DNR and contrast boost, although it still unfortunately doesn’t include any full shots.

I believe that footage came from the same scan that was used for the HDTV master; the frame geometry is different from the Blu-Ray.

Hah it will be even more magical if I can find a better way to align the transfers; right now I’m doing it manually and, while it works okay, it’s tedious and the alignment quickly changes within the sequence (notice how the right bottom corner has some ghosting due to misalignment).

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Synnöve said:

I believe that footage came from the same scan that was used for the HDTV master; the frame geometry is different from the Blu-Ray.

It is. I always forget they did a whole new scan for the bluray, as they ended up thoroughly botching it. I wonder why they bothered.

Synnöve said:

Hah it will be even more magical if I can find a better way to align the transfers; right now I’m doing it manually and, while it works okay, it’s tedious and the alignment quickly changes within the sequence (notice how the right bottom corner has some ghosting due to misalignment).

That sounds extremely tedious. There might be some way to use use Photoshop’s auto align and some scripting to deal with that. You might ask Williarob, I know he’s had to deal with aligning different sources in his projects.

Oh, and I know you probably realize, but keep in mind the HDTV is wrongly flagged at PC levels (0-255) while actually being 16-235. You need to convert the luminescence levels.

Star Trek: The Motion Picture DE - The Anti-DNR Fanedit
Duel (1971) - The Hybrid Cut
The Phantom of the Opera - 1925 Version Reconstruction - Rare Scores Collection - Roy Budd Score

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I’ve been tinkering with the idea of adding some of the details of Andrew Probert’s “cargo bay” matte painting to the version Matthew Yuricich completed for the film; no offense to the master that was Yurichich, but the rendition of the cargo-bay in the final film is very boring to look at.

https://imgur.com/a/2PrcK

Still needs to be grained and color graded. Thoughts?

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That’s a cool idea!
The left-hand doorway in the 2nd image could probably be darkened a little more to keep the frame balanced.
Also, the hallway on the lower deck could be tinted blue to match Probert’s version and the hallway of his you already added.

Also, if you make an imgur account, you can select an option to not re-compress images. Currently, those are pretty chunky jpgs.

Star Trek: The Motion Picture DE - The Anti-DNR Fanedit
Duel (1971) - The Hybrid Cut
The Phantom of the Opera - 1925 Version Reconstruction - Rare Scores Collection - Roy Budd Score

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Finished restoring the Wormhole exterior shots via combining the complimentary information in the Blu and HDTV copies. Took several hours… and I still have to dust bust the footage! Amazingly tedious. Basically have to:
-isolate the footage in Avid and export every shot (for both the HDTV and BLU transfers)
-generate a color correction LUT via the Color Matching Tool
-throw each shot in Nuke wherein I need to:
—manually align them with grid warp (the frame geometry differences between the transfers is variable)
—apply the LUT
—set the luma key so I find the right transition points between the footage
—export

Hoping that my method can be streamlined somewhat. I don’t suppose any of you know how do setup image registration software like Elastix? Or perhaps a method using Avisynth? The manual alignment of the footage is the most time consuming part and if that could be automated to some degree, that would be amazing. Also automating the color matching, like say, instruct the program to color match & generate LUTS for all PNG pairs (ex 1a.png with 1b.png, 2a.png & 2b.png, etc) in a directory would also speed things along considerably.

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I asked Williarob what he had been using for his Star Wars project:

Williarob said:

The best tool I found was Photoshop - If you save both versions as an image sequence you can record Photoshop doing it’s ‘Edit - Auto Align Layers’ thing as an action, and then run that on the whole folder as a batch, or maybe write a script to do it. It doesn’t always work, but that was the best tool I found for aligning sources.

Star Trek: The Motion Picture DE - The Anti-DNR Fanedit
Duel (1971) - The Hybrid Cut
The Phantom of the Opera - 1925 Version Reconstruction - Rare Scores Collection - Roy Budd Score

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I tried Elastix and did eventually get it up and running, but I found it to be very hard to use, extremely slow, and I wasn’t impressed with the results. So ultimately I abandoned it in favor of Photoshop’s Edit -> Auto Align Layers. Now I ended up writing a script to manage the process, but I bet if you stored two image sequences in a folder, e.g. version_a_001.tif, version_b_001.tif and you record a new action that opens both files, locks one layer, selects both layers, does an Auto align Layers, saves the result as aligned_001.tif and closes all open files [stop recording] you could then simply run that action as a batch command and it would process the whole folder.

Another thing to try is to layer the two versions of a shot in After Effects, apply your LUT to match the colors and then set the blend mode of the top layer to ‘difference’. When everything is the same color and perfectly aligned the frame will turn black. It’s hard to match the colors perfectly, even with Dre’s tool, so that’s pretty rare, but it will be still be easy to see when the frames are aligned correctly. Manually nudge the top frame up, down, left right, and transform the height, width and rotation if necessary until they line up as well as you can get them. Make a note of the transform data, or save it as an Animation Preset. If you’re lucky, the same transform can be used again on other shots, and if so you can just apply the preset on every clip to match it up. At least making it the same size and shape will be a big help - then all you have to do is nudge it left and right if only the cropping is different.

Here are a couple of videos I created which demonstrate these techniques:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CIy_donprzg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yaRZ9etYaH4

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@ElectricTriangle: I might consider doing that just to make the process easier. However, using Photoshop or Nuke’s autoalign doesn’t get me all the way there because it doesn’t correct the non linear distortion within the frame.

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@Williarob Wow thanks for the information! I’ll definitely check out the videos and try to get that batch processor running. Your suggestion concerning AfterFX is similar to what I use within Nuke; I set up the two sources, insert a grid align on the HDTV source, merge the two sources via a Plate_Align gizmo (it works a LOT better than difference mode to my eye), and tweak the grid points until it gets close enough.

Processing via photoshop would at least result in me having to manually correct my grid transform node less frequently.

Oi, all this work to fix some idiocy on the part of a colorist.

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Even though I really don’t understand any of the previous posts it makes me very happy that you’re putting so much work and skill into this project.

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Haha thanks!

If anyone has a bit perfect copy of the PCM track from the TMP LD please get in touch; I found out the copy I have (which was converted to 48Khz and synced to the Blu) has a LOT of clipping in the latter half of the film.

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https://youtu.be/u8FgrPpuuRk <- Here’s a rough edit of the pod ride/Enterprise tour (includes a new composited shot). Let me know what you think! Need 3rd party perspective on how it flows.

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Do you think it is going to be worth revamping using the upcoming bluray as a base? I tried ripping the Theatrical Cut in the recent boxed set and it is a much cleaner, brighter print. I am still intending to try and make a DE/SLV hybrid but I hit a stumbling block in that my dvd ripper gives up half way through the Theatrical Cut and saves only the German soundtrack…

At this point I will only need the extra scenes in Sickbay on top of what should be in the upcoming DE but it would be nice to have the whole thing to play with. It would be especially cool to have a clean copy of the soundtrack to play with in some edited scenes.