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Help Wanted: 'STAR TREK - TOS' deleted scenes preservation

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 (Edited)

Yesterday finally my copy of “The Roddenberry vault” has arrived and I spent the whole night watching the bonus features. I mean they’re “THAT” good for a classic Star Trek fan.

The most interesting things are the deleted scenes. There are many, and I mean MANY deleted scenes included. Unfortunately they are not restored at all. That means they have a lot of dirt, scratches, green “maps” on the right side (some chemical deterioration I guess) and similar stuff. However that all can be cleaned up quite easily with modern software, and I definitely want to try it during Christmas, but there is one huge problem - colours. Most of the footage is very badly red (or pink) faded, some of it has a yellow tint and some other bits are almost black and white. And I have no clue how to fix that.

Dr.Dre’s tool seems to be able to automatically correct faded footage, but it’s not “publicly available” 😃 So is there any good software which could be used for restoring colours? Or maybe is there anybody here who could restore the faded colours?

And another question - would this “project” be interested for more people than me? I mean I definitely plan to do the restoration for myself anyway, but I don’t know how many Trekkies are here

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pittrek said:
And another question - would this “project” be interested for more people than me? I mean I definitely plan to do the restoration for myself anyway, but I don’t know how many Trekkies are here

I’m a Trekkie (not a Trekker, a Trekkie) and proud of it! If the magicians here on this forum can get together and enhance all this footage it would put CBS to shame.

Visit my *NEW* Star Wars on Video Collection site:

http://www.swonvideo.com

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If my avatar hasn’t made it clear, I like Star Trek a bit. I’d be interested in seeing this.

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pittrek said:

Dr.Dre’s tool seems to be able to automatically correct faded footage, but it’s not “publicly available” 😃 So is there any good software which could be used for restoring colours? Or maybe is there anybody here who could restore the faded colours?

The first page of Dr.Dre’s thread mentions sending a PM if interested in his software.
If that’s still true I’d love to see the results, big Star Trek fan here!

I thought I recognized your foul stench when I entered this forum!

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A small status update - right now I am in process of identifying various deleted snippets (most of them are just part of a documentary with no further detail). I have also started to clean up one specific deleted scene (from Conscience of the King), after some work with both AviSynth and PfClean I managed to clean it quite well but I can’t get the colours to an “acceptable” stage, I tried various software including Dr.Dre’s tools and DaVinci Resolve, but I just am not satisfied, I will probably need some help with the colours. But at the same time I am also playing with the blue screen model footage 😃 So yes, my work on this is a completely disorganized mess, but I plan to show something as soon as I will have something to show 😃

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I can only assume that thhere is something more extensive and bigger coming from CBS with all those cans and that these releases are just teasers. I can only assume that eventually we will be seeing longer restored cuts and more outtakes and bllopers as they digitally scan these reels. I mean there are a LOT of reels and they have been looking at this stuff for a DECADE. Seems to me that we will eventually see Star Trek Blu Rays released with extended episodes with cleaned up and color graded cutting room floor footage etc. Thoughts, opinions? I can only imagine we will most likely get a few more Roddenberry Vault releases and then a whole new set of episodes with the “found stuff” restored and used in context of the episodes. Thoughts?

"Ollie, wontcha speak to me…?

“I have nothing to say.”

L&H

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I’m definitely a Trekkie since before there was a Star Wars, and though I haven’t picked the Roddenberry Vault set up yet, I undoubtedly will soon.

I really dislike it when deleted footage is buried in documentaries so that you can’t access it any other way. There should always be an option to watch the footage separately, as well as within the documentary. A common thing these days is to have deleted footage viewable separately, but then have additional segments that can only be seen within some documentary piece. They did this on the Star Wars BDs, and it sounds like they’ve done this on the Star Trek discs as well. This is part of why I haven’t purchased it yet.

On another related note, where the hell are the Star Trek TOS bloopers? Certainly not included with the BD release, or even with the new Roddenberry Vault release. Those reels have got to be out there somewhere; they showed for years on the convention circuit. Time for a new topic on this, I think…

–SKot

Projects:
Return Of The Ewok and Other Short Films (with OCPmovie) [COMPLETED]
Preserving the…cringe…Star Wars Holiday Special [COMPLETED]
The Star Wars TV Commercials Project [DORMANT]
Felix the Cat 1919-1930 early film shorts preservation [ONGOING]
Lights Out! (lost TV anthology shows) [ONGOING]
Iznogoud (1995 animated series) English audio preservation [ONGOING]

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GrindhouseGuru said:

I can only assume that thhere is something more extensive and bigger coming from CBS with all those cans and that these releases are just teasers. I can only assume that eventually we will be seeing longer restored cuts and more outtakes and bllopers as they digitally scan these reels. I mean there are a LOT of reels and they have been looking at this stuff for a DECADE. Seems to me that we will eventually see Star Trek Blu Rays released with extended episodes with cleaned up and color graded cutting room floor footage etc. Thoughts, opinions? I can only imagine we will most likely get a few more Roddenberry Vault releases and then a whole new set of episodes with the “found stuff” restored and used in context of the episodes. Thoughts?

If extended versions of classic STAR TREK episodes were made available,it would be an instant purchase for me.
THE RODDENBERRY VAULT appears to have some branching issues for the episodes themselves,I chose to view “ARENA” with original mono and SFX.I got the mono audio but the Gorn captain still blinks!
I was hoping to see deleted moments from “THE MAN TRAP” and “WHAT ARE LITTLE GIRLS MADE OF?” Unfortunately none appeared.
I’d welcome a second VAULT edition - if it ever happened.

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I had the opportunity to talk about this release with Roger Lay Jr., who supervised with the Okudas the Roddenberry Vault project (along with all the other recent Star Trek Blu-ray releases). He assured me that there is nothing else. They didn’t left out anything of value, all the new materials found in Roddenberry’s reels (and they’ve checked all of them) was included. And there was no sing of the bloopers reels.

Maab

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Maab said:

I had the opportunity to talk about this release with Roger Lay Jr., who supervised with the Okudas the Roddenberry Vault project (along with all the other recent Star Trek Blu-ray releases). He assured me that there is nothing else. They didn’t left out anything of value, all the new materials found in Roddenberry’s reels (and they’ve checked all of them) was included. And there was no sing of the bloopers reels.

I believe that’s true, as that’s what I’ve heard as well: their intent was to use all the footage on this release, and they apparently did use it all.

But regarding the blooper reels, did Roger Lay actually mention them specifically? Because we know they exist, and they’re out there…it’s just a question of whether anyone knows where the original reels are. And even if they don’t, I imagine they could still locate the next best copy and clean them up for inclusion as well. Not sure why they didn’t. Did they even try?

–SKot

Projects:
Return Of The Ewok and Other Short Films (with OCPmovie) [COMPLETED]
Preserving the…cringe…Star Wars Holiday Special [COMPLETED]
The Star Wars TV Commercials Project [DORMANT]
Felix the Cat 1919-1930 early film shorts preservation [ONGOING]
Lights Out! (lost TV anthology shows) [ONGOING]
Iznogoud (1995 animated series) English audio preservation [ONGOING]

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Yes, I’ve asked Roger Lay specifically about the bloopers reels. He said that they weren’t among the materials found in the Vault. This does not necessarily means that Roddenberry’s son does not have a copy of them somewhere else. Roger said that they wanted to include only new materials, things that has never been seen before. Honestly I don’t find this very convincing, my idea is that they don’t know exactly where to find them.

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 (Edited)

The vault footage is presented in a rather outdated SD transfer. None of it is in HD, even on the blu-ray. There are lots of digital artifacts. So that makes doing any color correction or restoration much more difficult because so much resolution and color information just isn’t there. I don’t know if they intentionally used substandard transfers to specifically prevent fans from restoring it into the episodes, or if they were just too cheap to make new HD transfers. I’m betting it’s the latter reason. Either way, it’s a huge shame because even faded 35mm footage would have looked much better with a modern HD transfer.

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It probably has something to do with the fact they started in 2007 and without any “proper” release plan.

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Maab said:

Yes, I’ve asked Roger Lay specifically about the bloopers reels. He said that they weren’t among the materials found in the Vault. This does not necessarily means that Roddenberry’s son does not have a copy of them somewhere else. Roger said that they wanted to include only new materials, things that has never been seen before. Honestly I don’t find this very convincing, my idea is that they don’t know exactly where to find them.

Hmm…well what about this, then:

35mm Blooper Reel

That looks like one of the original reels. Here’s the original article on StarTrek.com, written by the StarTrekHistory.com guys:

http://www.startrek.com/article/new-guest-blog-tos-artifacts-ephemera

Looks to me like they have at least one of the master blooper reels. What could their plans be for the bloopers if they didn’t use them on the Vault discs?

–SKot

Projects:
Return Of The Ewok and Other Short Films (with OCPmovie) [COMPLETED]
Preserving the…cringe…Star Wars Holiday Special [COMPLETED]
The Star Wars TV Commercials Project [DORMANT]
Felix the Cat 1919-1930 early film shorts preservation [ONGOING]
Lights Out! (lost TV anthology shows) [ONGOING]
Iznogoud (1995 animated series) English audio preservation [ONGOING]

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litemakr said:

The vault footage is presented in a rather outdated SD transfer. None of it is in HD, even on the blu-ray. There are lots of digital artifacts. So that makes doing any color correction or restoration much more difficult because so much resolution and color information just isn’t there. I don’t know if they intentionally used substandard transfers to specifically prevent fans from restoring it into the episodes, or if they were just too cheap to make new HD transfers. I’m betting it’s the latter reason. Either way, it’s a huge shame because even faded 35mm footage would have looked much better with a modern HD transfer.

Well that is very disheartening. And it makes me not want to buy the Roddenberry Vault discs now. What good is throwing something onto Blu-ray if you’re not going to bother even transferring it in HD?

At least the Star Wars Blu-ray set has the deleted scenes in stunning 1080p HD resolution, warts and all. I own it for nearly that alone.

–SKot

Projects:
Return Of The Ewok and Other Short Films (with OCPmovie) [COMPLETED]
Preserving the…cringe…Star Wars Holiday Special [COMPLETED]
The Star Wars TV Commercials Project [DORMANT]
Felix the Cat 1919-1930 early film shorts preservation [ONGOING]
Lights Out! (lost TV anthology shows) [ONGOING]
Iznogoud (1995 animated series) English audio preservation [ONGOING]

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SKot said:
Hmm…well what about this, then:

That looks like one of the original reels. Here’s the original article on StarTrek.com, written by the StarTrekHistory.com guys:

http://www.startrek.com/article/new-guest-blog-tos-artifacts-ephemera

–SKot

Well, the picture shows that David Tilotta, co-owner of startrekhistory.com, has a copy of one blooper reel, but he was not involved the the Roddenberry Vault project. Also Gerald Gurian, author of the book series “To Boldly Go - Rare Photos from the TOS Soundstage” and owner of the website startrekpropauthority.com shows a blooper reel he owns in this article:
http://www.startrekpropauthority.com/2014/01/special-report-behind-scenes-look-at.html
And there are certainly other collectors who owns them. Simply they weren’t on Roddenberry vault, and in any case they decided they were not interested in them.

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Maab said:
Well, the picture shows that David Tilotta, co-owner of startrekhistory.com, has a copy of one blooper reel, but he was not involved the the Roddenberry Vault project. Also Gerald Gurian, author of the book series “To Boldly Go - Rare Photos from the TOS Soundstage” and owner of the website startrekpropauthority.com shows a blooper reel he owns in this article:
http://www.startrekpropauthority.com/2014/01/special-report-behind-scenes-look-at.html
And there are certainly other collectors who owns them. Simply they weren’t on Roddenberry vault, and in any case they decided they were not interested in them.

The one I showed above appears to be a 35mm copy, which has got to be about the best one could hope to get their hands on. About 3 years ago, I emailed Curt from startrekhistory.com about the bloopers, and he told me that they plan to post the blooper reel - which I assume is the one in the picture above. So far that has not happened, but I really hope they do go through with it.

The blooper reel you mentioned from startrekpropauthority.com, does that look like 8mm or 16mm to you? The single-sided sprocket holes made me think 8mm, but I know that Super16 has single sprocket holes as well.

–SKot

Projects:
Return Of The Ewok and Other Short Films (with OCPmovie) [COMPLETED]
Preserving the…cringe…Star Wars Holiday Special [COMPLETED]
The Star Wars TV Commercials Project [DORMANT]
Felix the Cat 1919-1930 early film shorts preservation [ONGOING]
Lights Out! (lost TV anthology shows) [ONGOING]
Iznogoud (1995 animated series) English audio preservation [ONGOING]

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I couldn’t say if Gurian’sel is 8 or 16mm. The reel below is The Managerie two parts. The reel below should not be 35mm because one single episode would need 2 or 3 35mm reels, so the reel below should be 16mm. This would make the blooper reel above 8mm.
However it’s certainly not 35mm and, as you say, the 35mm are the best elements one could hope to get.

Maab

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 (Edited)

SKot said:

litemakr said:

The vault footage is presented in a rather outdated SD transfer. None of it is in HD, even on the blu-ray. There are lots of digital artifacts. So that makes doing any color correction or restoration much more difficult because so much resolution and color information just isn’t there. I don’t know if they intentionally used substandard transfers to specifically prevent fans from restoring it into the episodes, or if they were just too cheap to make new HD transfers. I’m betting it’s the latter reason. Either way, it’s a huge shame because even faded 35mm footage would have looked much better with a modern HD transfer.

Well that is very disheartening. And it makes me not want to buy the Roddenberry Vault discs now. What good is throwing something onto Blu-ray if you’re not going to bother even transferring it in HD?

At least the Star Wars Blu-ray set has the deleted scenes in stunning 1080p HD resolution, warts and all. I own it for nearly that alone.

–SKot

Well, I broke down and bought the Roddenberry Vault finally…and while it was nice to see the 30 minutes or so of trims, the quality is indeed greatly disappointing…worse than I expected, even. And I’m not talking about their unrestored state with scratches, burn marks, fading, etc., because that’s part of the charm of those old film segments. I’m talking about the transfers themselves. The clips that are embedded in the documentaries are the worst: not only are they in a squashed aspect ratio somehow, but the frame rate is choppy and there is a horrible combing effect going on like you would see with interlacing problems, leading to lots of stair-stepping on the edges of everything. The clips that are stand-alone are mercifully spared the combing effect, but are still plagued by the squashed aspect ratio and a bit of stair-stepping on edges as well. And of course they’re all in SD rather than HD, which was expected but still disappointing considering it’s the primary reason for purchasing this whole BD set (though I understand the included episodes may be botched as well, with parts of the audio mix missing in some cases).

Just two questions about it come to mind:

  • How did they manage to eff the transfers up so badly?
  • Who is responsible for greenlighting this obviously botched product?

Offhand, I’d like to blame CBS/Paramount even though it’s probably not their fault this time, just because they screwed so many other things up for Star Trek’s 50th last year.

In any case, a preservation of these scenes seems mandatory at this point just to fix the rotten aspect ratio. I wouldn’t mind seeing a collection of the standalone clips paired up with all the other clips extracted from the documentary, all with repaired aspect ratio and maybe some kind of fix for the combing effect.

Maybe if we’re lucky there will be a better transfer of this material down the road. One can only hope.

–SKot

Projects:
Return Of The Ewok and Other Short Films (with OCPmovie) [COMPLETED]
Preserving the…cringe…Star Wars Holiday Special [COMPLETED]
The Star Wars TV Commercials Project [DORMANT]
Felix the Cat 1919-1930 early film shorts preservation [ONGOING]
Lights Out! (lost TV anthology shows) [ONGOING]
Iznogoud (1995 animated series) English audio preservation [ONGOING]

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There’s so much more fun with the scenes…
I am now working on a scene from Conscience of the King, the dialogue with Lenore. When I’m going through it frame by frame, I see things like misaligned channels, “ghosting” which can be found only in the green channel, sometimes the movement is “weird”, for example Lenore’s hand moves, but in one frame only a part of her hand moves, and the rest of the hand moves in the next frame - almost like bad deinterlacing.
Also there are many scenes, which are “squished” for some reason, almost all of them have compression artifacts …
And I’m not going to even talk about the fact that EVERY scene is ruined by huge annoying yellow text saying very intelligent things like “Deleted scene”, “Omitted dialogue”, “alternate take”… Oh really? This is a release for people who have seen TOS a million times before, why are you degrading the quality of the video even more?

Also the transfer… I was very nervous when Denise was saying things like “we telecineed the reels” and “DVD”, but I was hoping that it was just a simple human error. Nope, it looks like they telecined the reels and encoded them to DVDs for the Okudas to catalogue properly, and instead of going back, scanning it properly on a proper 1080p scanner they aparently used the 10 years old DVDs 😦

And people don’t like when I say that CBS are a bunch of (self censorship) who don’t want to invest in Star Trek a cent more than absolutely necessary.

Still, I am happy I have it, I love deleted scenes from absolutely anything, and this release has scenes I was hoping to see when I first read about them online some 20 years ago, so…

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pittrek said:

There’s so much more fun with the scenes…
I am now working on a scene from Conscience of the King, the dialogue with Lenore. When I’m going through it frame by frame, I see things like misaligned channels, “ghosting” which can be found only in the green channel, sometimes the movement is “weird”, for example Lenore’s hand moves, but in one frame only a part of her hand moves, and the rest of the hand moves in the next frame - almost like bad deinterlacing.
Also there are many scenes, which are “squished” for some reason, almost all of them have compression artifacts …
And I’m not going to even talk about the fact that EVERY scene is ruined by huge annoying yellow text saying very intelligent things like “Deleted scene”, “Omitted dialogue”, “alternate take”… Oh really? This is a release for people who have seen TOS a million times before, why are you degrading the quality of the video even more?

Also the transfer… I was very nervous when Denise was saying things like “we telecineed the reels” and “DVD”, but I was hoping that it was just a simple human error. Nope, it looks like they telecined the reels and encoded them to DVDs for the Okudas to catalogue properly, and instead of going back, scanning it properly on a proper 1080p scanner they aparently used the 10 years old DVDs 😦

And people don’t like when I say that CBS are a bunch of (self censorship) who don’t want to invest in Star Trek a cent more than absolutely necessary.

Still, I am happy I have it, I love deleted scenes from absolutely anything, and this release has scenes I was hoping to see when I first read about them online some 20 years ago, so…

From what I’ve seen, none of those additional problems surprise me. This is probably the biggest botch job I’ve ever seen on a commercial release.

Of course, I’m happy as well to see these scenes at long last. Having lived with the regular episodes of Star Trek my entire life, it’s great to finally have a few more little windows to peer into.

But at the same time, it’s like someone gave you the best birthday cake you’ve ever had and always hoped for, but then tells you the frosting is made of poo.

–SKot

Projects:
Return Of The Ewok and Other Short Films (with OCPmovie) [COMPLETED]
Preserving the…cringe…Star Wars Holiday Special [COMPLETED]
The Star Wars TV Commercials Project [DORMANT]
Felix the Cat 1919-1930 early film shorts preservation [ONGOING]
Lights Out! (lost TV anthology shows) [ONGOING]
Iznogoud (1995 animated series) English audio preservation [ONGOING]

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Especially considering the cost. Very disappointing. Come on CBS, you can do way better for your mothership of a product. Shame.

"Ollie, wontcha speak to me…?

“I have nothing to say.”

L&H

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Just a bump to see if anyone has done any cleaning of the footage?

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Sthunderrocker said:

Just a bump to see if anyone has done any cleaning of the footage?

I went back and watched my BDs again recently, and felt the same disappointment I did when I got the discs originally. Maybe slightly lesser so, just because it was great to see the deleted footage again.

But I haven’t heard anything about any further preservation efforts, unfortunately.

–SKot

Projects:
Return Of The Ewok and Other Short Films (with OCPmovie) [COMPLETED]
Preserving the…cringe…Star Wars Holiday Special [COMPLETED]
The Star Wars TV Commercials Project [DORMANT]
Felix the Cat 1919-1930 early film shorts preservation [ONGOING]
Lights Out! (lost TV anthology shows) [ONGOING]
Iznogoud (1995 animated series) English audio preservation [ONGOING]