slaynmage

Hey folks. Sorry I was gone so long. I’ve been sidetracked tinkering with an old 1992 compaq computer. All of the bonuses on my mega account have expired so I’m going to have to find a new place to upload to share with you guys. The film also can be found on 'spleen and thestarwarstrilogy forums in the meantime. I’m sorry I was gone so long and I will find a way to share with those who have sent me messages. Thanks for the comments and support guys. I’ll get this back up soon.

I’m not sure what’s going on with the audio on your end. Plays without any issues on my end and I haven’t heard anyone else mention audio problems yet. Maybe try re-downloading it? The audio is from the laserdisc and no splices have been made apart from the correction of a musical glitch that made it into the LD release. (the details are available in the first post of this thread). My vhs did have the overture (an early 90’s copy, part of the set with the enterprise picture puzzle on the side).

I’m glad you enjoyed it. I hope you’ll try a re-download and hopefully the audio issues resolve for you. Another person had problems with some video glitches that were resolved by him re-downloading it.

The file doesn’t have chapter markers. I’m not sure why it glitched for you. Maybe try again like Video Collector suggested?

Oh cool just noticed the update. I’m glad it’s working now.

I appreciate the feedback guys. Makes the whole project well worth it. Thanks!

Ok the film has been shot out of a cannon and has made it’s way up into the “clouds.”

Thanks for the support guys. I’ll message you other folks back soon and get it to ya.

Edit: Removed the cranky bit I wrote when I was drinking last night.

Edit:
Well I got a reason. Messaged them on the forums and I’m banned because I got the account second hand. Guitarclef. Just keep seeding if you can so other people can have a chance to get it. I want people to see it. Thanks guys.

MKV sounds good to me. Padded would mean the 2.40:1 movie letterboxed into a 1280x720 video file. Cropped would be a 1280x534 video with nothing above or below. I’m interested in folks opinions on the release. I know I can’t please everyone but I am curious. Of course since you guys (you, Jonno, and ElectricTriangle) were so kind to me, your opinions will carry more weight in my decision. Just telling it like it is. I appreciate y’all.

Should I release an MKV or MP4 file?.. also…padded or cropped?

This is the version of Star Trek The Motion Picture I grew up with on vhs. Until the Bluray came out in the 2000’s this is the only version of the film I knew about. I never saw the theatrical version of the film until just a few years back when I bought the bluray disc. I like the theatrical version just fine but once you’ve seen a film over and over again a certain way it becomes ingrained into your memory and you expect certain sounds and scenes to come in a certain order (I got this same feeling the first time I saw the TWOK director’s cut and was never happy about it until I got the set with the theatrical version included).

A few months back I found out about Fanfiltration’s restoration. It’s quite wonderful and a great acomplishment but the jagged moire effects in the encode made it hard for me to watch. I started out with the intent of taking Fanfiltration’s restoration and cleaning it up and splicing in Vernon Wilmer’s completed matte airlock scene (from youtube) for a complete widescreen SLV experience. Well that didn’t work out. No matter what I tried I could not remove the moire and stair-stepping from his restoration. So I decided to start over and try to cobble together my own fanres.

After a bit of reading I got online and bought a new, sealed copy of the Director’s Edition DVD on ebay. I was originally going to just do another SD version with clean video using fanfiltration’s edit as a guide and soundtrack source but after doing a bit of research on upscaling software I was eventually convinced to go ahead and give a 720p version a try and thankfully… after much trial and error it has turned out better than I could have imagined. I’m absolutely tickled with the end result.

This reconstruction is mostly made up of footage from the HDTV broadcast (thanks to DekRollins for suggesting this since the D.E. and HDTV are taken from the same print). The SLV scenes were sourced from the Director’s Edition DVD and it’s special features disc. The completed matte scene was sourced from Vernon Wilmer’s youtube video. Two short scenes in the HDTV broadcast had the deflector dish recolored from blue to orange (thanks to electrictriangle for the tip) for continuity and I sourced those scene’s that needed to be blue from the rip of my bluray. The scenes with the original optical subtitles were shared with me from a kind user here in this community. The audio is from fanfiltration’s edit which he sourced from the laserdisc (I’ve got the laserdisc but I don’t have a good capture setup). The SLV scenes and the frame’s from Vernon’s completed matte scene were upscaled with the trial version of Gigapixel A.I.

Upscaling the SLV scenes was a trial and error adventure. I started out using Video2x but ran into problems later with scenes that had Kirk and McCoy. Video2x is not able to preserve detail in older persons with wrinkles. I finally ended up downloading the Gigapixel A.I. 30 day trial version which worked out really well. The upscale method that finally worked for me was to first rip the clips from the D.E. DVD’s with Makemkv, detelecine them into progressive video at RF 0 with Handbrake, degrain and remove dirt & scratches in Film9 exporting to logarith, Export each cleaned/degrained clip as a .tiff image sequence into a folder with Virtualdub, then copy the image sequence folders over to my mac and upscale each with GP A.I., copy the folders with the upscaled image sequences back over to my windows box and reassemble those with Virtualdub exporting to logarith, resize and correct the aspect with another run through Handbrake at RF 0, add in artificial grain in Film9 exporting to logarith, soften the artificial grain with another run through handbrake with nlmeans set to ultralight output at RF 0. All of this is done at 24fps because Film9 will not export to 23.976. In the end I need 23.976 video like I started with. You CANNOT trust Handbrake to take 24fps sequences and slow them down to 23.976 without it randomly throwing away frames so I took my finished video sequences and slowed them down to 24000/1001p with Mkvtoolnix and repackaged them with MKVtoMP4.

All of my final pile of media was H.264 to save space. Prores would have been the best to work with but I simply did not have the space to do everything with prores. FCPX mostly plays well with H264 other than the occasional burp here and there I only had two short scenes in the final edit where FCP did not want to play well with h264 so I converted those two small scenes to prores and everything else turned out ok.

I used ffmpeg on my linux box to fix the color display issue with the HDTV version (many thanks to Electrictriangle and Jonno for the colorfix tips), used Handbrake to convert from 25i to 25p, used Mkvtoolnix demux the audio and retime the video to 24p, used Audacity to retime the audio, and finally Mkvtoolnix to remux the retimed video & audio back together.

I also ran the entire HDTV film through Film9 knowing that the dirt filter would not play well with every scene. No degrain or DNR was run on the HDTV footage.

There were three scenes with scratches that Film9 was unable to clean. The big tan scratch in the shuttlepod scene lasted about 97 frames so I dumped that segment into a folder and used GIMP’s heal tool to paint out the scratch in all of those frames one at a time. There’s also a very thin, very fine scratch throughout most of the scene with Spock in sickbay. I just decided to leave this in because the scene is VERY LONG and the scratch goes right though people’s faces and I just couldn’t imagine trying to clean this scratch out of a bazillion frames by hand. Painting that wiggly tan scratch out of the shuttle pod scene was grueling and took forever. There was also a very light translucent scratch in one of the upscaled SLV scenes (the one with McCoy grilling Kirk) and I just left that in too because it goes over his face.

When I got everything cleaned and converted I ended up with a big pile of media that included the upscaled SLV scenes, the downsized to 720p dirty HDTV broadcast, the downsized and cleaned copy of the HDTV broadcast, the downsized blue dish clips from the bluray, the downsized and regraded clips with the original subs, and the audio from fanfiltrations edit.

While editing the movie together on my mac I brought up both the videos of fanfiltration’s edit and the rip of laserdisc version of slv on my windows box to the right of me and used them as references.

So the final edit of this film is pretty dang clean. The slv clips and most of the whole movie are clean and free of dirt and scratches with the exception of some special effects sequences and a few of the scenes in engineering. Film9’s dirt cleaner doesn’t play well with fast moving stars, strobe lights on models (the shuttlepod and the enterprise’s engine nacelles), or fast flashes of light (scenes in engineering, the sonic shower, and some of the final V’ger sequence at the end) so I used footage from the “dirty” version in places where I needed them… aside from that I’d say about 90% of the film is clean and tidy while also leaving the original color and grain intact.

When I was editing the film down I found a couple of weird issues and fixed them. The scene included on the D.E. Special features disc where Doctor Chapel comes in to take care of Chekov is a few frames different than what’s actually in the 4:3 SLV. In Fanfiltration’s edit there’s a lipsync issue in this scene. I did a little retiming and now her lips sync up with the soundtrack when she say’s “medic”. There’s also a weird glitch in the music soundtrack just before the scene where Uhura and McCoy speculate the potential crew size of the alien vessel. This issue wasn’t an editing or encoding error because the same glitch is actually on the laserdisc. I do not remember this musical glitch on my VHS tape so I fixed it. I took a little slice of the theatrical soundtrack and carefully sync’ed and edited it in. I played it over and over with headphones and adjusted the cut and volume envelope until it sounded natural.

Anyway I just got done with this the night before last, watched it last night and found and fixed a few errors, watched it again this afternoon and found one more glitch which I’ll fix tonight when I get home from work. After that I’m going to say that this Version 1.0 is pretty much done.

This is a great community and you folks have been wonderful help.

Thanks to DekRollins, Jonno, & ElectricTriangle. Your suggestions, technical tips, sharing, and helping me find stuff made this edit (my very first fanres) possible. Thanks to Fanfiltration for making the original widescreen version.

I’m calling this version a “fanedit” because of the A.I. upscale and the addition of the Vernon Wilmer’s matte painting. Eventually I’ll get to work on an SD version of this which I’ll leave the original unfinished scene in there like it is (I’ll work on this after I take some time to clean up the LD rip) Next year maybe I want to start cleaning up and restoring all of the original Flash Gordon serials from 1936-40. I’ve got to take a break for a while though. My brain is fried from working on this nonstop for the last 3 months. After I take a break for a while I’ll slowly start tinkering a much cleaner Version 2.0. I’m going to rotoscope/mask some of the elements in scenes where the cleaner software misbehaved (like around models in some of the effects shots and whatnot)

Here are a few frames from title 19 that was giving me so much trouble when I tried to use video2x. Gigapixel AI worked out pretty well for me.

Here’s a dirty frame of the original size.

Here’s that one again after the degrain, cleaning, & upscale. This is before the artificial grain was added.

Here’s the frame with that translucent scratch.

Here’s that frame again after degraining, cleaning, and upscaling. Film9’s dirt and scratch cleaner wasn’t able to remove the scratch from this one. I remembered wrong about it going through his face. It doesn’t. I may try to paint this scratch out by hand for Version 2.0. This is before adding artificial grain.

These image uploads look like crap. The actual film looks a hell of a lot better I promise.

SOFTWARE USED
MakeMKV
Handbrake
Mkvtoolnix
Audacity
VirtualDub
Film9
GIMP
MkvToMp4
Gigapixel A.I
Final Cut Pro X

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.

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.

I wonder if sardonyx ever started on his ABC-TV project. I’m currently working on tinkering together a 720p Widescreen TMP SLV as well as cleaning up a slightly noisy 4:3 LD rip of SLV. I would love to find the TWOK ABC-TV cut to deinterlace and run some cleaning filters on after I kludge my way through the two SLVs. It can’t be found online in the normal places though. I’ve got a vhs copy of theatrical TWOK back home and I bet that between the two, a cleaned up, detelecined 4:3 ABC cut could be stitched together. I was planning to start working on 36-40 Flash Gordon after SLV but I’ve already got those sources lying around and and I’ve got Star Trek on the brain atm. I’ve been told it can be found on ms but I don’t have access to that place. Anybody 'round here know where one could hunt for that?

Ok I’ve gotten ahold of all the TWOK ABC cut materials I can find and I have been spending some time learning and practicing with avisynth. I’m going to be cleaning, deinterlacing, and running IVTC on the Theatrical 4:3 TWOK laserdisc capture and two separate captures of the actual TWOK ABC TV broadcasts. I’m going to get these materials as clean as I can possibly can and then use the best elements of each to stitch together a restored 4:3 ABC-TV version of TWOK.

None of these materials have the original commercials nor do I have knowledge of where and when the breaks were supposed to happen. I had an idea of something I’d like to do but I would need some help from folks who know better than I do about the commercials. I’ve read that The ABC TWOK broadcast took up a 3 hour time segment so that’s a start. If I could find out which points in the film the commercial breaks were supposed to happen I could spend some time researching and hunting down 1985 commercials (non-regional nation-wide commercials) that were broadcast on ABC and edit them into the film for a simulated non-regional ABC broadcast of the film.

Ideally I’d end up with a release that includes two edits of this restoration in one folder. One as just restoration of the ABC version of the film without commercials and a separate one with the commercials edited in to simulate a broadcast on ABC.

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.

I can’t thank you folks enough for the help and the tips. I’m going to try to slow down and rethink this since I have a little more time (thanks to this virus mess) to work on it and better materials to work with. I’m going to try to take my time and do a good job on this…though I’m going to try not to take too much time. I’m excited about this project and I’m learning a lot. I’m thinking I may be able to come along half way and do this in 720p. I tried the Dandere2x scaler which pretended to work without errors but could only generate files that were no more than 17mb or about 72 frames. I resized a couple shots in Film9 that look ok but I’m not quite happy with it yet. My machine doesn’t have a powerful enough video card to run the gigapixel trial so I’m just going to have to keep messing around with free stuff. I’ll give Video2x a try next and if that doesn’t work I’ll just try to see how rough it is to bust open these clips and save the individual frames into a folder and resize them with Waifu2x one at a time and then reassemble them. This is turning out to a pretty fun project and this place has turned out to be a wonderful community. I’m going to try to do a good job on this so I can give something back. I gotta get this thing done so I can work on cleaning the 36-40 Flash Gordon serials next!

Dang, that HDTV version seems to be impossible to find. Some folks have mentioned a certain place where it can be found but I don’t have access to that. I wish I did. If anybody out there knows how or where that can be found I’d really really appreciate any tips. Shoot me a pm if you know or can help.

Otherwise I reckon I’m going to continue with trying to degrain and color match the slv clips with the theatrical BD footage.

tb813 said:

slaynmage said:

So far I have ripped the BR of the theatrical version and downsized it to the same dimensions as the DC DVD release.

Why?? I would much rather have an HD movie where some scenes have a drop in quality, than have the whole movie be a piddling 360p. Wasn’t the whole point of Fanfiltration’s second version to do it in HD?

I’m sorry that you feel that way and I do appreciate your suggestion, but after having seen the “TMP Director’s Edition HD reconstruction” that’s floating around the internet I found the effect of going from HD footage to scaled SD footage very jarring and have decided against it. I’m just going to keep this a high bit-rate standard definition project for the time being. High bit-rate SD widescreen movies look fine on a 1080p display. It probably won’t look good for those of you who have 4k displays so I don’t know what to tell you. This will simply be a project to replace all of the moire affected video in Mr. FanFiltration’s release with clean video. I am also doing dirt and scratch removal with the slv scenes.

If I have success and it looks good to me when I get done, I may give a 720p version a try eventually. I have been researching some of the AI up-scaling software out there and the best one is pretty expensive but it does have a 30 day trial version that has no restrictions. So if I get done with my SD version and it looks good to me I’ll just dump all of the SD clips sourced from the Director’s Edition into a folder and give them a run through that upscaler software and see how they look. I’ll try 1080p first and see how it does with that but I’m not going to get my hopes up. If it can manage to crank out a decent looking 720p upscale I’d be happy with that but I’m not going to get ahead of myself. We’ll just see what happens.

Dek Rollins said:

You should use the HDTV broadcast of the theatrical version rather than the Blu-ray. The one from the same master as the Director’s Edition DVD.

Hey that’s not a bad idea. I’ll have to see if I can hunt that down. I’m still in the cleaning and encoding phase so it wouldn’t hurt for me to find a release with a similar look. Thanks for the tip man!

Ok so I have gotten a little carried away and am really getting crazy into this silly little project. I never was able to clean up the video on this release so I decided to start over. I bought a new unsealed TMP Director’s Cut DVD on ebay and have ripped it, the extra scenes for SLV on disc 2, and have also ripped the bluray of the theatrical version as well.

So far I have ripped the BR of the theatrical version and downsized it to the same dimensions as the DC DVD release. The theatrical release looks amazing even after having downsized it from 1080p down to 720x360(848x360 display).

I also noticed that both the footage in the DC release and the extra footage on the special features disc has not been digitally cleaned in any way. Sure, the footage was taken from prints that were in excellent condition but there are still plenty of dirt spots and the occasional very light scratch(the scene where Sulu stares at Ilia and stumbles all over himself was the dirtiest of the lot).

So I have taken the clips from the DC that I’m going to end up needing and have run all of them through Film9 (a gui frontend for avisynth that pipelines through virtualdub2) to clean the dirt and scratches. I must say, having never used Film9 before I am VERY impressed with it. It took a little practice to learn how to use it correctly but after some experimentation I have manage to remove 99% of all the dirt and scratches from the scenes I need without having introduced any weird artifacts (you really have to be careful where you use the ‘remove scratches’ filter because it will try to erase seams on walls and doors). I am tickled to death with the end results!

I have also taken that completed “missing matte” scene from V.W.V.'s youtube video and with some initial difficulty managed to convert it back to 23.976fps progressive to match all of the other footage. It was embedded in a 30p stream and it took converting it up to 60p in handbrake and finally from 60p back down to 23.976 to preserve the motion without introducing additional judder (trying to go straight from 30p to 23.976 was a disaster and destroyed the motion with horrible judder). After that I resized it to match the DC dimensions as well. I’m going to end up trying to sharpen it a little bit (it’s a touch soft in comparison to all of the other clips) but I think it’ll turn out ok since it’s only a little over 10 seconds that I need from it.

Anyway…so far I have just about finished all the ripping, transcoding, and cleaning that needs to be done, so I’ll have everything I need to get started. I do have one more thing to do and that’s to make sure I make a small adjustment to the contrast and color balance so these clips from the DC match the downsized footage from theatrical BR release. They aren’t far off but it does look like the BR release of the theatrical version has a slightly higher contrast and the colors are a little bit “cooler”.

It’ll end up being a lot easier for me than I’m sure it was for Mr. Fanfiltration since I have his release to use as a guide. The soundtrack is right there and all I’ll have to do is just carefully drop the clean footage right on top, scene by scene and then render it when it’s done. Wish me luck folks!

After searching all around the darkest regions of the interwebz, I finally found this preservation. The edit is perfect. It matches right up with the original video releases a lot of us grew up with. It isn’t without problems though. The video encoding has some moire issues. The jagged edged interlacing artifacts cannot be removed. I’ve tried reverse telecine, deinterlacing, comb filters and every single combination of those to try to clean this up with no success.

A youtuber V.W.V. took the airlock scene with the missing matte painting, created his own matte (very well done I must say) and created a completed version of the scene.

My intention was to take this preservation and splice in the restored airlock scene to create a 100% complete widescreen version of SLV. I still intend to do so, but it’s going to end up looking really silly with that one single scene being the only clean shot in the entire film. Wish me luck folks.

I’m sure Mr. FanFiltration and other folks get tired of hearing this, but does this Widescreen ST TMP SLV preservation still exist? To say that my interest is piqued would be an understatement. SLV was the first version of TMP I ever saw. I still have the worn out vhs tape from my childhood but I don’t even have a working player at the moment. I’ve looked around here and there online for this one with no luck. Does this widescreen preservation still exist and how would one go about finding it? I’m still kinda new here.

The puggo grand transfer was absolutely wonderful. I wish I knew how to see this one too. You’re very good at what you do. Thank you!