TMP-DE fully restored in 4K…it’s about time!

[Warped9]

Made a video showcasing the audio differences between the various versions.

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Nice!

Yeah, not only does the new audio mix sound better it gives the scenes more substance and depth. You can hear dialogue more clearly, more nuanced and all sorts of background detail that just seemed empty before.

The film looks a lot more detailed and colourful than before.

I can’t wait to see this in entirety myself.

 

[fireproof78]

Made a video showcasing the audio differences between the various versions.

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It's such a weird mix. Some times the sound pops really clearly from one to the other then it doesn't. It's like it was switching channels in the mix.

 

[Pauln6]

Made a video showcasing the audio differences between the various versions.

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Wow that was very interesting!

 

[Ottens]

Thanks for the video, @Jeyl! I understand now what people mean when they say the sound is more "crisp".

 

[Pauln6]

I did a quick 10 minute experiment with the DE and remastered TC and it looks as though frame blending might help improve the rotoscoping in the lounge scene. The TC has a different aspect ratio which needs a bit of work to get the frames to match but once that is done, I think layering the DE - TC - DE might work. Blend the TC over the DE using the lighten blend mode, which pulls up the figures against the darker background (but also the stars) and then block out the actors only on the top layer to get rid of any stars. There is a slight chance some stars close to the actors might bleed through but can probably mask them individually.

Anyway, it certainly looks like this will be possible with a bit of effort.

I might experiment with the SD DE and re-mastered too.

 

[PhotoBoy]

I finally got around to watching the new DE and while I enjoyed it, I still rank them SLV, theatrical and then the DE. I know the SLV is a mess, but it was the first version of the film I ever saw. I didn’t even realise it had extra scenes until the BBC aired TMP; I decided to record over my copy that had adverts with the advert-less BBC version only to notice partway through that there were scenes missing.

In terms of things I liked, some of the new V’ger effects at the end looked good and the clarity of the sound and dialogue was really incredible, there genuinely were new things to be heard in the background that I’d never noticed before. The image quality was also very nice, making it easier to appreciate all the detail they put into those sets. It looked better to me than the 4K remaster from last year. I was also glad to see when Decker and Ilia stand by the window on the rec deck that they’d fixed the purple V’ger background outside the window.

In terms of things I didn’t like, I still prefer the old red alert noise. The new one is OK, except when they sometimes mix in that off-the-shelf alarm klaxon that turns up in loads of films and is also an alarm sound on the iPhone. Likewise, I liked the old annunciator for the computer better, but I know most people aren’t fans of those things so I’m not surprised they kept the change.

Probably the one thing that I think they got wrong again was the lounge scene. They replaced the distracting wobbly nacelle outside the window from the old DE with a full background replacement. The new background looks good, but Kirk and McCoy just don’t blend naturally with it making them look like cutouts. I actually think they’d have been better off just leaving the scene as it was in the theatrical cut. Not seeing the nacelle that should be there is a lot less distracting than what they’ve been adding.

It’s still a great film and I’m glad I got to see another version of it, but I’ll probably stick with the SLV I managed to rip from VHS a few years ago.

 

[Mr. Laser Beam]

The new DE really dropped the ball on one thing:

It could have restored the full scene in Kirk's quarters, where Kirk and McCoy argue about Kirk's reaction to Decker countermanding the phaser order.

To this day I still don't understand why not even the first version of the DE restored that scene. Instead it maintained the chopped up, overdubbed version (particularly obvious when McCoy says "The point, Admiral, is that it's you who's competing") which seems to start smack dab in the middle of the argument.

Can anyone explain?

 

[Ssosmcin]

The new DE really dropped the ball on one thing:

It could have restored the full scene in Kirk's quarters, where Kirk and McCoy argue about Kirk's reaction to Decker countermanding the phaser order.

To this day I still don't understand why not even the first version of the DE restored that scene. Instead it maintained the chopped up, overdubbed version (particularly obvious when McCoy says "The point, Admiral, is that it's you who's competing") which seems to start smack dab in the middle of the argument.

Can anyone explain?

Most likely because that's the way Bob Wise wanted it.

 

[David cgc]

I prefer the SLV version, too, but I can see arguments for keeping the TE version of the scene. Since it's a pair of single-shots in the SLV, for the context to make sense, you're forced to come in to the scene early, keeping the whole preamble before "Make your point." It doesn't feel right to come in on Kirk saying that line off-screen if its the first line of the scene. So, if you want to keep the pacing tight, you're pretty much forced to use the (awkwardly blocked and less well-acted, IMO) two-shot from the theatrical cut (assuming there aren't other alternatives). Kirk's exasperation with McCoy might also be a factor, since one of the things they wanted to do was eliminate his snippiness (personally, I would've kept more snippiness from before this scene, to try to map out his arc of getting himself back into the right headspace for being a captain, ease it down to show McCoy was wearing him down with his constant needling about him focusing on staying the captain instead of focusing on captaining).

Personally, I think Kelly's slower performance is more appropriate than him rushing out his argument (though that may just be because that's what I was used to), and I would've bit the bullet and let the scene breathe a little bit in the longer form, but if I want to make decisions about what goes into the movie, that's what fan-edits are for.

 

[Pauln6]

The scenes from the SLV that made it back into the DE were remastered. It stands to reason that if they were able to remaster those, including sound, then they would have been able to remaster the others. It sounds like they did it for the scene with Ilia in engineering but need not follow that they spent time and money on the pre-existing outtakes.

I prefer the faster pacing of the DE but I miss the character moments from the SLV. I upscaled outtakes to HD. Once I have the bluray I will try to colour correct the extra scenes and try to reinsert most of the dialogue and see how the sound compares. Can always just adopt the SLV soundtrack for the whole McCoy scene although from memory I needed to add in background hum. The musical bleed from the Decker and Ilia scene was the biggest pain since it continues until after McCoy starts speaking on the DE but it might be too quiet to split.

 

[Tosk]

I'm holding out hope that the deleted scenes will be remastered on the new DE disc. Even though I know they absolutely won't be.

 

[ananta]

Random comment: I love the way the Vulcan priestess pronounces Spock’s name as SPOCHH! It sounds very Geordie (not a reference to LaForge but a regional dialect from Newcastle in England).

 

[Pauln6]

I'm holding out hope that the deleted scenes will be remastered on the new DE disc. Even though I know they absolutely won't be.

I would never expect it but I will be over the moon if they did (although even updating the soundtrack on the outtakes would impress me greatly).

From what I've seen so far this was definitely a labour of love and the definitive official version. Everything else is gravy!

 

[Tomalak]

Random comment: I love the way the Vulcan priestess pronounces Spock’s name as SPOCHH! It sounds very Geordie (not a reference to LaForge but a regional dialect from Newcastle in England).

Ha, I thought she sounded Scouse. "It stirs yer yooman blud Spochh!"

 

[Jeyl]

I made this video after I talked about the Shuttlecraft Ants in the 'Star Trek: The Motion Picture Appreciation Group'. After an hour of posting, I was banned from the group. Not trying to stir anything up. Just wanted to nitpick some details that just didn't sit right.

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[Ssosmcin]

I made this video after I talked about the Shuttlecraft Ants in the 'Star Trek: The Motion Picture Appreciation Group'. After an hour of posting, I was banned from the group. Not trying to stir anything up. Just wanted to nitpick some details that just didn't sit right.

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Facebook Group admins are notoriously sensitive.

BTW, I hated the TOS shuttle launch in the 2022. Even without squinting, it looks vastly inferior to the 2001 DE

 

[David cgc]

I made this video after I talked about the Shuttlecraft Ants in the 'Star Trek: The Motion Picture Appreciation Group'. After an hour of posting, I was banned from the group. Not trying to stir anything up. Just wanted to nitpick some details that just didn't sit right.

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I don’t think those are a “marching ants” selection around the shuttle, I can think of about three different reasons that ranges from unlikely to impossible. What it looks like to me is that the shuttle layer was rendered with an unpremultiplied background, but it was accidentally set as having a premultiplied background in the compositing program.

“Premultiplied” means that, even when the background is transparent, the rendered element’s edges are blended with a background color (usually black), whereas unpremultiplied backgrounds have the rendered object in total isolation, but it causes that sort of aliasing artifact when viewed with the wrong setting (either without the transparency layer, or with the compositing program set to expect a premultiplied layer, so it includes more of the edges around the objects than it should).

 

[Jeyl]

I don’t think those are a “marching ants” selection around the shuttle, I can think of about three different reasons that ranges from unlikely to impossible. What it looks like to me is that the shuttle layer was rendered with an unpremultiplied background, but it was accidentally set as having a premultiplied background in the compositing program.

“Premultiplied” means that, even when the background is transparent, the rendered element’s edges are blended with a background color (usually black), whereas unpremultiplied backgrounds have the rendered object in total isolation, but it causes that sort of aliasing artifact when viewed with the wrong setting (either without the transparency layer, or with the compositing program set to expect a premultiplied layer, so it includes more of the edges around the objects than it should).

It's great knowing that someone has an idea what's going on. That was the only conclusion I could come up with considering how much it looked like Marching Ants.

I do have one more technical question. What is happening to the edges of the shuttle in the second shot? What do you call it when you take an object and trim off the edges as they did? Because it seems like they tried to fix those 'marching ant' like details but overcompensated by removing a lot of other details.

 

[David cgc]

That would be constricting or choking the matte (I don’t recall if the specific setting had a specific name, or precisely which way I’ve accomplished it). I actually had to do something similar in this video, since even when the layer was set to “unpremultiplied,” for some reason too much of the edges were showing through in After Effects. You can still see a little bit of the bad edges bleeding through on the top when the ring rotates to be head-on, because if I choked in the alpha channel anymore, you’d be able to tell it was cutting away parts of the model.

If they did their compositing in After Effects, it might’ve been the same exact issue, come to think of it. I probably should’ve filed a bug report.

 

[Tosk]

I made this video after I talked about the Shuttlecraft Ants in the 'Star Trek: The Motion Picture Appreciation Group'. After an hour of posting, I was banned from the group. Not trying to stir anything up. Just wanted to nitpick some details that just didn't sit right.

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Some great observations there. I am also mildly dismayed that the section below the control module has frozen footage that no one caught or corrected.

Initially I was really hoping these goofs would be fixed before the disc release, but I'm starting to think we're stuck with them. I hope I'm wrong. If this is to be the glorious "final version!" then I'd hate for it to have new errors baked in.