RELEASED: "Star Trek: The Motion Picture (Special Longer Version)" — Page 37

Ok I think a 720p version might be a go. Video2x works without crashing in cpu mode. My windows box has a single non-hyperthreading quad so running 4 threads takes about 12 hours to upscale one minute of video. It did a much better, much sharper job than the avisynth upscale and it looks pretty good with a few caveats. It doesn’t do too well with shadow gradients which shouldn’t be a surprise since the software was primarily designed with 2d animations in mind. It also does a lot of denoising which is the default behavior and there’s no option to change it. I think I found a decent workaround though. I added artificial grain back into the images in film9 at the lowest available setting. The fake grain helps fix the shadowed areas but is a bit much even at the lowest setting because it even makes completely black areas noisy which looks unnatural. After that I ran the clip through handbrake with the nlmeans noise filter set to “ultralight” this tidied up the dark areas without removing all of the artificial grain and the whole clip looks much more natural after that. Also it doesn’t do a fantastic job with light colored eyes (they look a bit soft) but it’s not really that bad, I’m just nitpicking. The scene I upscaled was reasonably well lit so I’m going to run a dark clip through the upscaler tonight to see how that’s going to work out. If it turns out ok I’ll go ahead and commit to a 720p SLV. Wish me luck!

Edit: The dark clip didn’t turn out too bad. So I am definitely going to commit to a 720p and an SD version. I probably have a couple weeks more worth of clip cleaning and upscaling to do and then I can start stitching this thing together.

A few days ago I thought my mac’s gpu was trying to croak but I think it’s actually ok. I think a recent firmware update ruined something. I could play transport stream files in both vlc and quicktime player and then the day after I had a firmware update and later left stuff encoding all night. The next day it wouldn’t play ts video in vlc (blank green screen) and wouldn’t play audio in quicktime when both of them worked fined the day before for both a & v. I was thinking that maybe I had cooked my gpu until I remembered that firmware update. Vlc works if I disable hardware acceleration but a mystery like that drives me crazy because it worked fine the day before. All other types of media files work fine in all players and FCPX still works fine so I don’t know what happened. I’m going to continue as if nothing happened or at least until the thing either dies or it doesn’t.

Ok so this little project just keeps snowballing into more and more work as I move along and learn more. I’ve been using video2x to upscale the SLV clips and most of them look pretty good until I ran into some problems. Like I said before video2x doesn’t seem to do well with shadow gradients or persons with light colored eyes but my kludgy workaround seemed to help just fine until I got to title_19 and 20 (a couple of shots with Kirk and McCoy). Both of those shots had multipoint lighting and the focus was a bit soft. So the software is unintentionally ageist and does not preserve wrinkles well at all. They just ended up looking like plastic action figures. So I tried to upscale those two clips again, this time with NNEDI3 in avisynth and the faces looked better but the shots were too blurry overall and not very much sharper than just stretching the image without any upscaling. So I broke down and downloaded the trial versions of g.p. ai and video ai. Video ai failed to install giving me a warning that my system wasn’t fast enough but g.p. ai didn’t complain and installed just fine. The only caveat with this is that I have to use vlc to bust the clips into a png image sequence and move them over from my windows box (that I’ve been using for clip cleaning) over to my mac and load the sequence up into gp. All I can say is HOLY S–T! This software is some kind of voodoo BS. Now the two “problem clips” I was having the most difficulty with look waaaaaaay better than the other clips I was happy with. I mean I thought those other clips upscaled fine and looked pretty good. So now I’m going to start over and run all of the SLV clips through g.p. I’ve got 29 days left with the trial which should be plenty of time to get them all converted. Now the new problem I have is that I’m temped to run a clip through and upscale to 1080 and see how it looks. I’d be a fool to start EVERYTHING all over AGAIN but I may just end up trying to do a 1080 version later in the year. The video version of the software is pretty expensive but the one that just works on single images or image sequences is a hundred bucks which isn’t terrible. If my job turns back to normal and this virus madness calms down I might just buy a copy and then give a 1080 version a try. For now I’m just going to stick with the three projects I’ve got going all at once. I’m working on an SD SLV, a 720p SLV, and I’m also detelecining & cleaning up a 4:3 LD rip of SLV. Wish me luck!

Edit: Ok I’ve now learned that VLC is totally unreliable for converting video to an image sequence. Even with it set to where it’s supposed to dump all of the frames into the folder it still skips some of them and the longer the clip the more it skips. Should have been using virutaldub the whole time, works much better.

slaynmage said:
Both of those shots had multipoint lighting and the focus was a bit soft. So the software is unintentionally ageist and does not preserve wrinkles well at all.

If I remember my Star Trek trivia correctly, the people who made the movie did this on purpose (by applying Vaseline to the camera lens) because for some reason they were pretending that it was only three years after the events of the series, when in fact the production was ten years later, so they were trying to hide how old the actors were. That’s why Wrath of Khan had such a heavy theme about aging, so they could lean into how old everyone was getting instead of using camera tricks to avoid it.

Hey dudes. Where’s a good place to upload example clips and whatnot other than youtube? I don’t use any google services. I’m pretty much finished with my cleaning and upscaling and I want to start my own proper restoration thread with pictures and video examples and whatnot. I was thinking maybe vimeo but I think they might dump me if I’m uploading clips from a major motion picture. I’m just now starting on the task of editing this picture together and figured it’s a good time to start my own thread. I dunno. Just curious to what you guys think.

The only other big one I know of is Dailymotion, but I have no idea how long they’ll last on there either. People put mainstream stuff on Pornhub sometimes.

Hi all,

I am relatively new to this forum, and am very interested in accessing a high quality laserdisc rip of Star Trek: The Motion Picture - Special Longer Version. It has been very difficult to access elsewhere, even on MySpleen. If anyone has a copy of this, or knows where I might be able to find it, I would greatly appreciate a PM. Thanks!

wyattp said:
very interested in accessing a high quality laserdisc rip of Star Trek: The Motion Picture - Special Longer Version

It depends, what do you mean by high quality?

New here… So how does someone get the download? I have the Bluray and the SCE DVD. I tried to find a copy of a widescreen TV version on ebay (I don’t think one exists…8588A?) transfer it to PC and make it into 16.9 but no luck. Nice job BTW.

Greetings, may I suggest Archive.org for sharing; if you fear of any future copyright-claim upon that website, I may recommend the method of mis-titling the uploaded videos and providing farse “tags” thereof, as such has–thus far–been proving well for myself.

~Ice~

I’ve been playing with the DE, SLV, and outtakes from the DVD. This is my latest attempt at the Memory Wall scene.

https://youtu.be/-evql7WVEfo

Still lots of challenges but it has been a fun project. I couldn’t get my vocoder to train Grace Lee Whitney’s voice so atm any dialogue I wasn’t able to crib from appearances in other shows is using a pre-trained model. If anyone has a functional vocoder and would be willing to have a go, that would be awesome!

Quality may not be great though as I have only been able to scrape together about 20 minutes of dialogue.

Apparently, Paramount is releasing the Director’s Edition in 4K Ultra hi-def. Maybe that might make it more possible for a fan to revive the HD widescreen version of the SLV.

It seems that they found better sound quality for the SLV scenes included in the DE. Not only that, the scene with Scotty and Ilia in engineering has been restored and will be in the outtakes. They didn’t just join up the dialogue, they went to the trouble to add background special effects too!

If they found ADR for all the SLV scenes, we can hope that they added the improved audio to all the outtake scenes. I have no idea if that is a vain hope.

I was really hoping that they might also have found some more of the rough footage of the Memory Wall. That would be my holy grail. I guess if it not in the September release, we will never see it.

Pauln6 said:

It seems that they found better sound quality for the SLV scenes included in the DE. Not only that, the scene with Scotty and Ilia in engineering has been restored and will be in the outtakes. They didn’t just join up the dialogue, they went to the trouble to add background special effects too!

If they found ADR for all the SLV scenes, we can hope that they added the improved audio to all the outtake scenes. I have no idea if that is a vain hope.

I was really hoping that they might also have found some more of the rough footage of the Memory Wall. That would be my holy grail. I guess if it not in the September release, we will never see it.

Really hoping all the Special Longer Version scenes will be remastered on the BD with the newer 2022 4K+BD of The Director’s Edition this September. (Similar to how the deleted scenes were on the 2-Disc DVD of the 2001 release/iteration of the DE, except full quality.) That way someone could restore the SLV scenes into the remastered Theatrical Cut BD from last year. Zero DNR, of course.
Paramount Home Entertainment could have at least put the Special Longer Version via seamless branching through the menu or as an Easter Egg on the 4K+BD release last year. All official versions should have been released on the two most current formats. Special Longer Version is still relegated to VHS and Laserdisc, possibly even Betamax.

ElectricTriangle said:

Based on every indication from the producers of the DE, from like 2007 to present, the deleted scenes will almost certainly be included (including the rediscovered ADR!) and there’s a decent shot they include the full SLV as an extra.

Would be nice if it received its own 4K+BD with the TDE 4K+BD. Or at least as you mentioned as an extra, hopefully in 1080p. Really glad this time Paramount let the restoration/TDE team have full access to The Motion Picture archives for the 2022 4K TDE. Paramount didn’t when the same team released TDE in 2001 on DVD.
If the Special Longer Version scenes are fully remastered and in the best quality possible, someone should have another go at restoration if it’s not included as an extra. Zero DNR, of course. The 2001 TDE 2-Disc DVD, and 2009 BD are obsolete. The remastered Theatrical 4K+BD released in 2021 is vastly superior compared to the 2009 BD.
I’d even be more than happy if Paramount releases an Ultimate Edition for TMP on 4K+BD. Completely new encode and disc for Theatrical which would hopefully include Special Longer Version via seamless branching (disc 1 for both 4K & BD and commentary). Disc 2, for both 4K+BD with commentary, would be the 2022 TDE. Disc 3, maybe, would be BD with both legacy and new features. Would be 5 discs total. I’d certainly purchase it. Or I’d get a however many disc case for my own custom thing.
tl;dr: Really hoping Paramount Home Entertainment does a BLADE RUNNER with STAR TREK: The Motion Picture and offer all officially released versions in a nice set. (I don’t see why the 2001 DVD version of TDE would need to be included because of the low DVD resolution.)

I could have lived without the dnr pass on the opticals on the 4K theatrical, but it isn’t a deal breaker. The lack of original audio is. I wanted to finally retire me laserdisc. Disappointed that they pretty much went full Lowry, and Lucasized the directors cut. And wasted having access to the original 65mm elements. But again i can live with it as an alternate Special Edition.

Here’s an official link. Search for Special Longer Cut.
https://www.startrek.com/news/fully-restored-directors-edition-of-star-trek-the-motion-picture-arrives-on-4k-ultra-hd
This project is officially over since it’s being officially released via 4K disc on September 6th, 2022. All would be needed would be downscale to 1080p and SDR, without DNR or EE, if this isn’t also on BD.
slaynmage’s version had too much DNR already because of the shoddy bullshite upscaling.

FekLeyrTarg said:

FanFiltration said:

Synnöve said:

FanFiltration said:

I wish I could do a HD version with the corrections included.

I just don’t know anything about the newer ripping methods, video codecs, and how they work with Windows 7.  My SLV version was done on an old Windows XP computer.

FF

If you want I can provide you with the assets I’m using; I have all the non-theatrical SD footage ripped, de-interlaced, upscaled, and denoised in 422 ProRes (I still need to remove all the dirt from the footage); In addition to your analog track I’m in the process of securing a bit-perfect rip of another SLV LD that had a PCM track (it was a Japanese disc); and I have the HDTV broadcast, Blu-Ray, and both trailers (which contain some extra shots, such as the “smirk” from Chapel) in 175X DNxHD.

This should be enough to reconstruct your edit using any popular NLE software, as well as the latest Davinci Resolve which has some editing functionality.

WOW!  You know I am seriously considering doing this. It would have to be started after the New Year holiday. I would start sometime in January, and hope for it to be finished by Easter.  How does that sound?

FF

That would be cool.

Btw I’d like to offer the German VHS audio track, which I’ve offered to Synnöve, to you as well. Would you be interested?

Greetings, dear FekLeyrTarg and all others,
do You still have the german audio track of the ST TMP SLV?
Could You please upload it for me and send me a link, pleaase?
In what format do/did You have it?
Is it Lossless?

I am also interested in the Fanfiltration Version. Thank You FanFiltration. If someone could send me a PM with the link it would be highly appreciated.

This Version has some Specials that are not included in the new official 4K release.
I bought the britsh and american TMP complete adventure release and the original 4K Blu-Ray + Blu-Ray 4 Movie Collection.
The Interviews… bonus mentioned by Fanfiltration … is not on the 4K release.

The german audiotrack is missing.

I would love to be able to remux my recently bought 4K Versions with the original English LD Lossless Audio Track (Theatrical and SLV) if someone would still have them? I also have the LDs but unfortunately I don’t have an LD Player.

Sincerely, Jelges