The new bluray version of the Theatrical release looks amazing. I think I might have a go at upscaling and stitching in the key missing scenes from the SLV.
i would love to see it
I hit a snag in that my laptop is not currently recognising my bluray player so I can’t make a start.
Here are the current rough versions. I would like another crack at some of the head transfers, and sound levels for the imported dialogue need equalising.
It looks (and sounds) promising. I’m always open to new cuts of TMP, because i love this movie so much.
Grateful thanks for this and i’m looking forward to your progress.
Thank you. It sort of spiralled out of control during lockdown. Originally I was just planning on doing a DE / SLV hybrid but I wanted to give Grace Lee Whitney a cameo in the second half of the movie because I think it was a shame to bring her back and use her so little. My plan to give her a simple close up during the cloud scene didn’t really work because every inch of the bridge is covered during the scene and I couldn’t do a long shot establishing her entering the bridge.
So I decided to extend the scene in Kirk’s quarters and have Rand pop in while Kirk and McCoy watch Decker and Ilia. I had no clue what I was doing. I went through the TOS scripts for dialogue that could be useful and found lines from Balance of Terror, Miri, Spock’s Brain, and Is There Truth in No Beauty to add some dialogue. I then manually pasted the lip sync and neck movement for Rand in Gimp using layers and then ran it through Deepfake. It’s not very smooth but I am still astonished it even looks passable considering that I was totally winging it.
Then I came across a line from World Enough and Time which slotted perfectly into the scene where McCoy beams in so I used Wav2lip and Deepfake to add a line for Rand there too.
Then I went full crazy and started to wonder if I could stitch back in the rough Memory Wall footage. I had to manually paste the original space suit over the close ups of Kirk from the DE (apart from the rear shot) and I found that the soundtrack from the cloud fitted really well, running almost perfectly to time with the second half of the scene in Ilia’s quarters. But the scene was long and boring with no dialogue and with all the shots of Spock on his own in a different space suit, I wondered if I could make use of a different character in his original spacesuit. Since engineering suits are red and I had already trained Deepfake for Rand, I decided to experiment using Character Creator to apply a layer of Deepfake to a CGI avatar of her which I could paste inside Spock’s helmet. I used IMDB to look for some of Grace’s earlier appearances for dialogue that might make some kind of sense and I used a Vocoder to try and train (badly) dialogue from the original script for the scene.
I’d still like to try and improve it some more, especially the scene where Spock is tumbling through V’Ger and maybe try to get Rand’s close up to look smoother using After Effects.