Suffice to say that if I had my druthers I'd like to see a general tightening shot by shot to "let the air out" and not wholesale scene trims as TOS Purist has done.
If I had the skill I think that would be my first draft to see how much time could be saved and pacing could be improved. I don't think I'd remove any character scenes involving characters other than the big 3. That is what the movie lacks.
Well, if you only tightened shot by shot, you'd still be left with the "wholesale scene trims" that I did, except you might have them still in the film. Although some of them were done due to personal preference, most of the trims were a necessity in order to make the pacing consistant.
I don't see that at all. Your edit, to my eye, and this may be purely subjective, is inconsistently paced and choppy. There's no rhythm.
As I said in another thread, I
have played with editing TMP as an exercise. The first time I did it was in the early 90s. I recently did some cuts on scenes of the film as practice. For example, the first thing I attacked was the drydock sequence, which Wise himself (in 1980) said was too long, and was something he wanted to cut by over a minute.
Below is how I approached it. I'm not saying it's the right way, or the proper way, but the way I'd approach editing the film were someone to hire me to tighten it up and yet try to maintain the character of the piece.
1. Try to figure out what I thought the scene was trying to accomplish.
Decided it was was a character's grand entrance. It was designed to tease the audience about the ship, then reveal it and show Kirk's obsession, and give the audience (through Kirk) a look at what's new.
2. Make decisions about the footage
as edited to see where it might fail to do that.
Tease: you see too much of the ship, and spend too long peeking through the drydock, so the big reveal isn't as big as it should be.
Reveal: Just fine. It's Kirk's love-eyes that tell us he's obsessed with this ship more-so than McCoy's words to that effect later. To cut it is antithetical to "show not tell".
Flyover: Too long. Unnecessary angles on drydock superstructure, lights, etc.
3. Make editorial decisions how to fix it.
a. Shorten the tease by focusing on the shots of Kirk looking through the dock, but make the images of the ship defocused reflections on the pod windshield, thus keeping the tease aspect and tying it to Kirk trying to peek into the dressing room, so to speak.
b. Leave the big reveal moment alone. It's just about perfect.
c. For the flyover, junk the shots of the dock and lights and use the reflection trick to shorten the duration of the shots of the Enterprise while still maintaining the geography of the fly-around. For instance, I took a few moments off the beginning of the shot of the spacesuited figure "falling" past the hangar, flipped it, and made it a reflection on Kirk looking that direction, which then stitches Kirk's look to that shot when I cut to it.
I'm doing this in Final Cut Pro, which lets me do stuff like make the reflections in the glass and do relatively complicated audio edits. I could post it right now, but without the audio ironed out I don't think the effect would be quite right. As I said to Middyseafort (and I'm trying to recall who first said it), sound colors picture. I'll try to find time to iron out the audio edit so I can post it as another approach on how someone might've edited TMP.