ElectricTriangle

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.

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.

Whoo! Glad to see this back. That sample looks great!

Wow! Very cool.

For those that don’t have usenet, I’ve uploaded a copy of this, and anyone can PM me for a link.

Update: A link is still available as of 2025

I think the bulk of it was a link from this site:
(these sites also have examples):
https://www.themarysue.com/remastered-buffy-is-a-butt/
https://gizmodo.com/oh-dear-buffys-hd-makeover-is-a-total-mess-1671812347

As far as I can tell, Joss Whedon is very opposed to it being released in this state, and these been no traction in the last few years for this coming to home media (all the streaming sites still use the original SD masters too). I’m not even sure if it still airs on HDTV like this anymore, or if it got recalled.

If you really wanted to, you could track down the HDTV airings, and then recreate the original framing of the show by cropping and re color-timing the open matte shots and discarding the cropped shots for SD footage (which are probably numerous, eps. the SFX shots). Probably not worth the effort.

Yeah, all the footage shot in 1971 is pretty severely cropped, which is unfortunate, because otherwise it’s a really nice transfer. (It is actuate to the European theatrical presentation, but that still means the majority of the film is framed wrong). And in my fan edit, all of the footage I use would be framed wrong.

The 4:3 HDTV is lacking in detail, but I was able to color grade it to look somewhat more like the bluray master.

This is now available on the 'spleen.

This is now available on the 'spleen.

That makes sense.

DuracellEnergizer said:
Going the “human aliens” route probably didn’t help.

I’m not even talking about costuming, (although some of that is weird), but like:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AdNbVxMNFvk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vm8sOhr-0lA
Ignoring the ship effects, these are both scenes of people bouncing around in ships. First Contact’s is shot, lit, and blocked much more dynamically. Insurrection has some nice stuff in it, but on the whole it has a much more conservative production design.
Even this scene, from the climax, lacks the gravitas of the First Contact stuff.
I don’t know anything about Hollywood budgets, did the ensemble cast’s salaries just eat into the budget more? (I assume they increase per film).

Mike O said:
I’ve always kind of wondered what the rationale of hiring him was, especially given that Frakes was chosen instead of some bigger-name directors, apparently on the last two.

I think he was brought in because Berman wanted to “liven things up” with an action director, and Baird was who he came up with.
I imagine this was probably in response to Insurrection, which feels cheaper and more like TV than the the first two films.
Does anyone know why that is? I know they didn’t go with ILM, so that’s why the effects work isn’t great, but Insurrection has the same director, cinematographer and a larger budget than First Contact but looks worse.

chyron8472 said:
Because they are not fans of Trek. They do not understand why people would like DS9 because they never watched it.

The season’s arc was written by Bryan Fuller, who wrote for DS9 and VOY. (Fuller left production, but he’s still credited for the story on the first 3 episodes.) And there’s still plenty of fans working on Discovery. Kirsten Beyer wrote Voyager books before writing for it; Jonathan Frakes will supposedly direct an episode. And I’m sure most of the writers have seen lots of Trek.

Also, the idea that good Trek can only be made by fans of the old shows is silly. Bragga and Berman were not big fans of TOS and TNG is good. And Roberto Orci is a huge fan of TOS and I don’t think Into Darkness is very good or understands TOS very well. There is also plenty of room for a Star Trek show to be different from the hundreds of hours of existing Star Trek.

I liked the 3rd episode alright and I’m interested to see where it goes. The tone of it doesn’t really match with just 10 years before TOS, but this is more in the “responding to the present” mode of Star Trek, rather than then “socialist utopia” mode that TNG often did.

Most of the bluray set is correct, but some episodes have 5.1 folddowns to mono by mistake. Someone would have to compile a list of which ones those were (you can easily tell from the recording of the opening theme.) Then they would have to dig out the single episode DVDs or the laserdiscs.

The idea that anyone could enjoy a Seth McFarland show is beyond me.

They had a budget and time to do some accent couching for Discovery so the enunciation of Klingon you hear is actually much closer to how Marc Okrand designed it. The previous series would usually just write some Klingon words (without any real grammar), and have the actors do their best with what was on the page. The movies were better in this regard. The reason it sounds different than before is because Klingon is designed to use lots of sounds not found in English enunciation. (It has a weird consonant aragment which is dissimilar to most human languages).

No. Because they removed it from the DVD, so I would have to have used VHS footage.

Okay, I’ll send you the links.

I think pittrek might be doing that eventully. I sent him the HD theatrical cut that I used as the source for this edit.

Duel was originally released on TV with a 70-minute runtime. For its European theatrical premiere, Spielberg added more footage to get it to a required 90 minute runtime. Some of this is new car scenes and some of it is more obvious padding (the opening credits and the conversation with Mann’s wife.) In addition to the new footage, additional directorial changes were made, including a new, dynamic mono sound mix and the removal of much of David Mann’s redundant inner monologue to great effect.
This fan edit mostly follows the original, tighter TV edit of the film, while also using the theatrical sound mix and removing the inner monologues. It also includes the further edits made to the film for the DVD and Bluray release (which removes more inner thoughts). I also created some new opening and closing title cards to match the TV edit.
I used a 4:3 HDTV copy as the base because the Blu ray is unfortunately only available in cropped 1.85:1. Special thanks to DrDre’s ColorMatch tool which was incredibly useful to help match the different sources and make the older scan look a little nicer.

Sources used:
Duel 4:3 HDTV (primary video)
Duel Blu ray (primary mono audio and color reference)
Duel NSTC DVD (used to patch out logos in the HDTV)
Duel 16:9 Cropped French Digital SD TV airing (two brief shots)
Duel TV VHS Recording (some audio)
Duel SD extras documentary (partial opening shot which was blended with the French Digital source and the Bluray)
Columbo Blu ray (pilot episodes) (opening and closing Universal logo)

Sample Images: https://imgur.com/a/lwopT

Video: 7.05 GB 1080p HD MKV
Audio: 2.0 Mono FLAC
01:13:08

Version 2 changes:

• No more VHS footage (Footage from the TV cut is now sourced from a cropped French digital airing, with a custom matte to “uncrop” the opening shot.)
• A different, more balanced color grade.
• patched out the HDNet logos with DVD footage.
• English Subtitles

Now available. PM me (click my user name and then select “start a private topic”). New members may express their interest thread if they can’t yet send PMs. Also on myspleen and blutopia.

I released my HD edit of the Director’s Edition: http://originaltrilogy.com/topic/Star-Trek-The-Motion-Picture-Directors-Edition-HD-Recreation/id/56390

It’s nice to have the best cut of the film in HD.

This is an HD recreation of the director’s cut of Star Trek: The Motion Picture, which was completed at SD resolution and only released on DVD. It’s primarily sourced from the HDTV, which uses the same transfer as the director’s cut DVD. The HDTV is low detail and has lots of compression, but it has more grain and much better contrast than the Blu-ray. The unique footage from the director’s cut DVD is upscaled. Color-corrected Blu-ray footage is used for some shots with alien subtitles. I have also recreated some of the director’s cut changes in HD by combining SD and HD footage.

This edit is available in two versions:
The main version uses the new DVD effects when appropriate, but also uses the original theatrical unaltered effects to preserve HD quality (for this reason I’m calling it a fan edit; I mostly prefer the original effects when they were fully realized).
This image gallery shows which unique DC effects were included as well as a general overview of the picture quality: https://imgur.com/a/K0EhF
README: https://pastebin.com/rRKujtPa

The purist edition includes most all of the shots altered for the director’s cut DVD. For many of these changes I’ve combined HD and SD footage while others were simply upscaled from the DVD. The purist edition currently also has four foreign dubs (Italian, French, Russian and German) and a host of subtitles from two different European dvd releases. (The main project will be updated with these at a later date).
Sample frames: https://imgur.com/a/ALontqP
README: https://pastebin.com/JXcJRYts

Now available on myspleen or pm me (click my user name and then select “start a private topic”) for a link.

Video: 1080p MKV - 12 GB
Both the video and audio are BD-compliant if you want to remux this for a Blu-ray.
Audio:
Track 1: AC3 Dolby Digital - This is the same 5.1 as the DVD, but I replaced the end credits music that was looped for the director’s cut and replaced it with the original cue from the remastered CD. The file is not re-encoded, and cuts to the different end credits at the end seamlessly.
Track 2: AC3 2.0 Dolby Surround from the DVD.
Track 3: AC3 The commentary from the DVD.
Track 4: AC3 This is a commentary originally released as a podcast for startrek.com with visual effects supervisor Daren R. Dochterman, restoration supervisor Michael Matessino, and producer David C. Fein.
(For included subtitles read the read me file)

I listened to the startrek.com podcast. It’s fairly interesting and I was very impressed that they tracked down the original production team and consulted with them on the edit. They even talked with Jerry Goldsmith about how they were cutting the music.

I’m currently working on an HD cut of the Director’s cut with the HDTV as a base (although while I include the new SFX shots, I mostly don’t include the altered shots to keep them in HD). The HDTV does have noticeable compression and it’s not very high detail, but it does have more grain and a much better contrast than the BD. One thing that’s interesting is that in the director’s cut they removed a lot of frames that had splice lines, but not consistently, so it’s a pain match that in the edit.

I have it and can send it via PM. It will take awhile to upload, as I’m not on great internet right now. You can throw it on Myspleen if you want, too. All the Star Trek HDTV caps are only on Usenet and they are ancient posts at this point.