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moviefreakedmind said:
Also don't forget, the theatrical versions of the 6 Star Trek films were released on blu ray (some of them had never been released except for their director's cut). These movies did not come with the director's cuts, just the original films
Yup. It was the theatrical cut of TMP's first home video release since the vhs/beta/ld days and the first time the theatrical cut of Undiscovered Country (one of my very earliest trips to the movies!) was released on home video at all. That's why I was so supremely dissapointed by how shitty the quality of the transfers were. Glass half-full I guess, since it's still the theatrical cuts in hd, but it was almost like the blu-ray equivalent of the 2006 unaltered Star Wars dvd.
Wrath of Khan looks great, though. It's the only one that got a restoration from the original film elements.
Also, the director's edition of TMP was only rendered at 480p. I was shocked to discover that they'd cheaped out on the cgi, thinking only of a dvd release. Those vfx shots would need to be redone in at least 1080p for a blu-ray release. Even then, they really seemed to have dropped the ball on the blu-ray they did put out. I've seen screenshot comparisons (with footage from various bts making-ofs) showing that they had decent-looking hd transfers of TMP, Search for Spock and Voyage Home before they decided to ruin them with dnr and contrast-boosting. Final Frontier looks similarly botched. With Undiscovered Country they probably only had an old 1080i transfer of the theatrical lying around (there's stair-stepping on the blu-ray transfer), so they probably figured "better safe than sorry" and used that instead of de-specializing the more recently transferred director's cut.
The big difference (aside from everything I just outlined) between this and a hypothetical OOT-only blu-ray is that three out of those six Trek films only ever had one version. In two of the remaining three films, the differences are mainly editorial and don't really affect the footage from the theatrical cuts.
ETA: Yoda-sama beat me to it.