"The unused shot" meaning the terminal exterior we've been talking about. Keep up. One other thing that occurs to me. I know the party line is that they flopped the shot of the bridge to confuse the landscape, but I think it's more likely that the real reason was a practical one: you can get a camera up on the hill to the west of the Marin side of the bridge, but not to the east. Since they wanted to show the city occupying basically Russian Hill, the angle from which they could shoot the plate wouldn't work, hence the flop.
Sorry about the confusion. I had been under the impression that this was another unused shot from the original TMP. I guess that's what I'm getting for having not paid enough attention to the DE. Bob
You know, with some added grain and a few tweaks, that shot really doesn't look that bad at all. http://www.badatom.com/trek/VG11_Print_tweaked.jpg Still keeping my fingers crossed for an eventual HD Director's Edition...
I'm sure a properly updated DE would fix that problem. Of course, then we'd have a fourth version of TMP on our hands: Theatrical Cut, ABC-TV Version, Director's Edition, and Slightly Upgraded CG HD Director's Edition.
Right. As I said, they would re-texture those figures to look more realistic. Proper skin and facial bitmaps I think would pretty much fix it. You have to understand how much has changed since the DE was done. For 480p you could do a lot more cheats in detail/resolution/complexity. It was all about rendering speed to make a deadline (though that part is always true), but think about the computing power available circa 2001 compared to 2013. For example, dual-core Intel CPUs didn't exist until 2005. So to get more than one core required two physical CPUs in separate sockets, etc. etc. Quite a few more tradeoffs had to be made then would be have to be made now. And of course 1080p is far less forgiving than 480p in the first place.
Quite right . Fixed. That's what I get for having a sentence that uses "then" next to one that uses "than".
The director's cut is certainly the superior edit of the film, but again, unless they redo it in 2k or 4k it won't be "future proofed". I think Paramount already went to bat for this, releaing the DE in the first place, same with STNG and Enterprise, so it'll eventually get around to this too. Too the poster who says paramount doesn't care about it's bluray releases, what utter nonesense. ST still makes money in all it's incarnations, new releases of the old movies on bluray continue to appear on shelves in stores. A remaster of STII and STII is on bluray. It poured money into the STNG blurays to re-edit them fromscratch. Star Trek 09 went back onto the top 20 blurays sales chart after STID was released in the theaters, then on video. I also saw STNG on the top 15 sales chart chart several times. There's a DE for STII on bluray. If there is a market like this, then they have reason to work on them.
I don't htink there is. If the TMP DE and/or TWOK DE made it to Blu-Ray it would likely be promoted and widely known.
Yeah, I was pretty sure because it's something I watch out for. Whenever I've seen mention of the DE's it's only in reference to them being on DVD.
TNG Blu-Rays are being handled by CBS and CBS Digital, and not Paramount. Paramount has no steak in the TV side of Star Trek. The Blu-Ray releases were only ever done for the theatrical releases of the movies, and only TWOK really got a full restoration. Extra features were added, and the features from the DVDs were ported as we all know, but that's really about it. Paramount's interest in Star Trek financially is probably more geared towards the JJ Abrams movies with Bad Robot, possibly more than the first 10 features. It is not the big moneymaker for Paramount it was when they had the TV shows, even though the movies are available for a descent price in stores and sell relatively well.