Messing Around with Trek Footage

[Maurice]

Peach Wookie directed @Jeyl over here to share video of tweaks done to some TMPDE stuff...

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...so I dug up some tests I did messing with the theatrical cut from 2016, below:

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2016 Rough experiments carried out on there theatrical cut of ST—TMP.

• Titles messed with (experiment of a burn in light effect)
• Klingon tacticals changed
• Klingon signals on Epsilon Nine reviseed
• Hangar matte concept crudely added to down shot (not match moved to the frame judder)
• Energy probe given "eye" as described in script, and faster data suck from computer monitor

 

[Jeyl]

Oooo. I like that 'Incoming Bolt' detail on the tactical screen before the Klingon Commander orders 'Evasive!". Also good work on the tactical screen details putting a highlight around the bolt and the Klingon text showing underneath it.

Thank you very much for sharing this. I might have to do my own attempt at the 'incoming' bolt and the three fleeing Klingon cruisers later.

 

[David cgc]

I'll throw in my rough clean-up on the last Klingon ship being digitized. The tricky part was that, while it was pretty straightforward to expand the blue glow, it would be a lot more work to remove it. There's surely enough information to get a clean plate of the ship, but I'd have to cut out all the individual arcs and lightning bolts, or trace over them. Doing it the easy way, I can only speed up the sweep of the blue glow, which does clean up the most glaring issues, but ideally, I'd expand and retract it so the whole sweep would even. It could be the most effective thing (assuming the raw VFX passes aren't available) would be to redo the ship in CG, which would let me get the blue sweep perfectly even, though I'd still have to recreate all the animated lightning.

This was probably good enough for one isolated shot, even in a fan-edit, not every shot needs to be a pixel-perfect work of art.

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That's about as far as I've gotten on my own fan edit, aside from the entirely redundant but informative exercise of conforming the HD footage from the 2011 TE to the 2001 DE. I'm not even going to think about revisiting this until both the '22 DE has come out on disc, and I've replaced my computer's blu-ray drive with on that can rip 4k discs.

 

[Maurice]

^^^The digitation effect on the inboard side of the nacelles has always been effd up and no one ever fixes it. Note the straight edges.

I don't understand what you're trying to "fix" here...something done in the DE?

 

[CorporalCaptain]

re: "TMP Sample output" by Toxic Crayon

Wow. Those titles are outstanding. The Klingon graphics are outstanding. The plasma probe eye is outstanding.

Quite exceptional. Excellent creative effort.

In the case of the Klingon graphics, the cohesiveness of that whole segment of the film is substantially increased. There has been brought in here much needed clarity (for example, in providing a clear motivation for the "Evasive!" order), and it's far more exciting.

The plasma probe eye unites the probe with the Spock spacewalk obviously visually, but therefore also thematically. That was something pretty much missing in the film. The Ilia-probe connection was clearly established, whereas not so much in the case of the initial plasma probe.

Thank you very much for sharing!

 

[Maurice]

Hey thanks, @CorporalCaptain.

I forgot to mention I added shadow under the workbee train to better tie it into the shot and a TOS door whoosh in the turbolift.

I studied the Klingon tactical graphics frame by frame so I could match the elements accurately, right down to how the texts appeared from the center out. It's subtle, but I also rearranged a couple of shots of the Klingons so they appear to be reacting to the screens.

The script called for the probe to have an "eye" and I swiped that raw plasma ball element from one of the trailers and decided to employ it as a sort of "eye of Sauron" visual device throughout, so you'd see it flicker onto the bridge during the "Intruder Alert!" stuff before the pillar of light snapped in, and also on the Ilia probe's throat whenever V'ger snatches control back, etc. I actually did the entire probe scene but might have to reload the project and re-render it.

Most of the graphics I added flashing by on the monitor were things that were drawn before the scene was shot and could have been filmed for rear-projection use, as a lot of them are from the USS Enterprise Flight Manual drawn up by Lee Cole for the scrapped Trek II TV series.

BTW, if you want to look at anything frame by frame on YouTube, pause the video and use the comma and period keys to step one frame forward or backward, respectively.

 

[David cgc]

^^^The digitation effect on the inboard side of the nacelles has always been effd up and no one ever fixes it. Note the straight edges.

I don't understand what you're trying to "fix" here...something done in the DE?

No, that's it. The blue fill in that shot was lagging behind the digitization effect and then frequently filled in in big squared-off lumps (most obviously in the starboard inboard nacelle), so I composited in more blue fill in the places where it was missing at the beginning of the shot, and masked it coming in following the glowing scan-line moving across the model (which was fine, except there were some times in the original shot where the blue fill was added in before the scanning effect touched the edge of the model, so the only way to clean up the fill not following the contours of the model was to bring it in even faster). A before-and-after clip doesn't make it obvious if you aren't looking right at it, here's a side-by-side of the same frame, and a gif of just the nacelle where it's really bad.

 

[publiusr]

Great work all round.

I really like the detail of having graphics match the action. They should have had you as part of the 4K effort, Maurice.

 

[Maurice]

Great work all round.

I really like the detail of having graphics match the action. They should have had you as part of the 4K effort, Maurice.

I would have dug my heels in over the fannish crap they put in the film, especially their throwing out the original San Francisco design in favor of stuff that better matched later films, which went in a different direction.

I'd also have burned the Starfleet Headquarters chiron with fire.