I'm assuming if we hear anything about the 4K Director's Edition it'll be tomorrow to mark 40 years since the original release? Being an impatient soul I just wanted to know if there had been any more news on this since the "it might be happening" news in June/July?
Any news on the TMP Director's Edition 4K?
- Thread starter Kelvin2019
- Start date
No, it’s just a case of early discussions being announced in public, creating a kind of release fan-myth that comes up again and again. Best to forget about it until something real is announced out of the blue, rather than keep the word going indefinitely (2034: “Fifteen years ago, there was talk of a 4K disc release…”)
The talks continue. I assume Viacom reuniting Paramount and CBS is a bonus for getting things done.
TWOK-DE has been released in 4K, but only on iTunes and not on a physical disc. I can't find any info on how sales have been. It would be cool if they did the TMP-DE in 4K, but it might also end up stuck on iTunes.
For physical media, 4K UHD content is still a niche of a niche. While HD content is basically standard for streaming services and digital purchases, when people buy physical media, DVD somehow remains more popular than blu-ray, even with declining DVD sales in recent years. And 4K discs have an even smaller footprint in the home video market, with sales figures going down already.
Kor
I’m just pointing out that the newer Star Wars and Marvel films are being finished in 4K as opposed to 2K, released for streaming in UHD with disc releases in UHD done or in store for all of them. That’s the standard, so finishing a feature film in HD for video would be substandard in 2019/20, especially since Blade Runner: The Final Cut was given a 4K DI for its 2007 release already (no UHD back then, of course).
It’s important not to settle for the bare minimum here because it’s not like the changes make a huge difference to TMP: we can easily wait until everything becomes even cheaper and watch the theatrical cut until then (which can also be prepared for a UHD release). It should be clear to Paramount that Star Trek fans are not happy with the current aging HD masters and (somewhat) special treatment given only to TWOK. One must keep asking for competitive releases, that’s all.
It’s important not to settle for the bare minimum here because it’s not like the changes make a huge difference to TMP: we can easily wait until everything becomes even cheaper and watch the theatrical cut until then (which can also be prepared for a UHD release). It should be clear to Paramount that Star Trek fans are not happy with the current aging HD masters and (somewhat) special treatment given only to TWOK. One must keep asking for competitive releases, that’s all.
Last edited:
If TMP is going to get a remaster at some point, then 4K would make sense at this stage. However, rendering the CGI DE effects at 4K would be quite time-consuming. I'm not really up on all the technical details involved in all this.
Blu-ray is still a pretty good standard for home viewing. Even the vaunted Criterion Collection, the standard-bearer for overpriced cinephile home video releases, has refrained from jumping on the 4K bandwagon, even for titles in their catalog that have gotten a 4K remaster. And some other recent blockbuster 4K releases have just been upscales of 2K sources.
Kor
Last edited:
The independent HD Blu-ray releases are more about the cost and tech involved in creating a UHD disc release as opposed to hitting a 4K button on the CGI and rebuilding assets according to an exact template if necessary. The underlying question here is whether Star Trek movies are supposed to be a flagship product approaching the M:I franchise… or something that’s really so obscure it hardly deserves the Blade Runner treatment. I’d rather imagine them as the former, and if that’s not how Paramount sees it, then it’s better to wait than ask for less, especially since the DE is more like a missing final draft than any kind of massive improvement.
That depends on how precisely they decide to do it. The software used for the 3D in the DE has evolved considerably since 2001, to the point where just loading the files up would make them look terrible without a considerable amount of reengineering, and with modern rendering techniques, there might be a notable difference in render times at the different resolutions.
On the other hand, with computer power being what it is, if they loaded the files in the version of the program they were made for on a modern CG workstation (never mind a modern render farm), re-rendering the scenes in 4k would probably not take too much longer than rendering them in 2k. It'd require more memory and storage to work with, of course, but that's a drawback of 4k in general. I'm traveling for the holidays, or else I'd be tempted to run some of my oldest scenes from the turn of the century to get an idea of how much faster things could go and how different 480, 1080, and 4k render times would be on them.
Ideally, they probably would retool the CG a bit to take advantage of advances in the state of the art, but if (and I emphasize "if") all of the working files are still available from the 3D and compositing, since all the fine-tuning had already been done to get it to look like vintage 1979 work, I'd probably just go with digging out the old software and putting out all the old effects as-is rather than, essentially, redoing all the additional effects of the DE from scratch (even though there are aspects that would benefit; the step-printed animation that isn't actually period-accurate, some low-resolution areas and notable inaccuracies in the Enterprise model, that extremely slight off-axis camera angle in the wormhole sequence, and some of the matte lines and bleed-through in the drydock sequence would be easy to touch-up).
On the contrary. The DE team is supposedly still in consultation. We have been asked to be patient. Nothing would be announced until contracts were signed.
Where has there been any mention that the de team was still in consultation? I have scoured the internet for any mention since last July by anybody involved about ongoing talks or discussions and found nothing. And neither has there been any official statement that the talks have broken off because why would there be.
Has anybody involved even mentioned one word of it since last July?
I would be thrilled to be patient if anybody from any quarter said "be patient".
The mere fact that everybody involved said one of Paramount's considerations was the amount of social media Buzz could have an effect on whether the project went forward is discouraging. The peak social media Buzz would have been within a few days of the convention panel.
Hope I'm just being a pessimistic fool and this thing is announced sometime soon
Has anybody involved even mentioned one word of it since last July?
I would be thrilled to be patient if anybody from any quarter said "be patient".
The mere fact that everybody involved said one of Paramount's considerations was the amount of social media Buzz could have an effect on whether the project went forward is discouraging. The peak social media Buzz would have been within a few days of the convention panel.
Hope I'm just being a pessimistic fool and this thing is announced sometime soon
There is a TMP group on Facebook. They have communicated there that they are still in negotiations.
As mentioned before, the team chat to us often at the Facebook page, "Star Trek: The Motion Picture Appreciation Society":
https://www.facebook.com/groups/StarTrekTMPappreciationsociety/
Apparently one of the things that Paramount is looking at is online interest.
Get on twitter and voice your support to @paramountmovies, @paramountUK, and @tmpblu with the hashtag "#sttmp40"
I know it's a pain in the ass, but this is supposedly something they are measuring to gauge interest. Get out there and flood the interwebs, people!
Get on twitter and voice your support to @paramountmovies, @paramountUK, and @tmpblu with the hashtag "#sttmp40"
I know it's a pain in the ass, but this is supposedly something they are measuring to gauge interest. Get out there and flood the interwebs, people!
