Here's a little dream of mine: With the continuing improvement and accessibility of very high quality CGI tools to non-professionals (take a look around the Art forum on this very board for great examples), it wouldn't be impossible to rebuild the director's cut of TMP in HD (using the released Blu-ray as source for the majority of the material). Take a look at Daren Dochterman's impeccable Enterprise model for example: Any thoughts about the likelihood of talented members of the community taking a project like this on - similar to the (in)famous rebuilding of the original Star Wars trilogy by Harmy?
With the blu-ray elements it's certainly possible, though it would be a lot of work. All of the CGI would have to be totally remade from scratch, which is an awful lot of work. Harmy's job on Star Wars was more about combining multiple sources, creating masks, restoring scenes. For TMP you'd have to basically recreate the work Foundation did back in 2001. For free. So it's certainly possible but I don't think it's very likely sadly.
Foundation Imaging did the work on the DC for free? Is that possible that it was purely a labor of love and not a paid gig? I would have thought that some union would have stepped in and said "that's not possible, payment is required for services rendered". Honestly, I'm very curious. And yes, that Dochterman render above is simply gorgeous!
No, of course Foundation were paid. I hope they were anyway! I mean any fan effort would have to reproduce their (paid for) work, but at a higher standard, and obviously unpaid. It's a lot of work for someone, so it would be a labour of love. Plus they wouldn't be able to easily release it in the end, so it would find a limited audience.
Wouldn't it be copyright infringement as well? Assuming Paramount wanted to push that particular button?
The copyright issue would be the bigger concern, but might (possibly) be skirted by only releasing the pieces unique to the director's cut instead of the entire film. Individual fans have already rebuilt entire scenes in several Trek films in CGI. I'm not discounting the effort involved: I'm just saying it's doable and becomes more so every passing year.
While TMP-DE's reveal of the V'Ger vessel did reflect the original storyboard concept, I have always thought the CGI in that particular scene was rather bogus and didn't look like something from 1979. It would be great if somebody could fix that. The same with the people on the outside of the Enterprise saucer. Kor
The V'Ger reveal was brand new for the DE, as the theatrical version never had a corresponding sequence showing the whole V'Ger doohickey as originally storyboarded. Kor
The original matte paintings were terrible. Genuinely terrible. For a major motion picture, they should have done much much better. At least the DE had the right shapes.
I thought the saucer walk looked pretty decent to be honest. It's preferable to the distorted, wonky matte painting of the original. Agreed on the vger vessel though.
The part that bugged me the most was the view of the nacelles out the meeting room windows. Somehow the angle just seems off on that. I love the additions, but the CGI was just barely good enough for standard-definition DVD and wouldn't really hold up to HD, which is why I'd love to see the bits redone. And, yes, the saucer-walk matte painting was embarrassingly bad. Considering so much of the rest of the film was exceptionally high quality, they must've run into a time crunch on that one.
I remember Daren talking about that sequence and mentioned how they had originally wanted to replace that entire background. Not just what's outside the window, but the whole freaking wall. The room would have stretched out beyond what we saw into a more open space area where the windows to the lounge (just rear of the bridge) are located. It would have also shown both Nacelles and with a proper passing starfield. With today's technology, Daren said he could easily do the work since the technology they had to work with back than wasn't fast or efficient enough. Since that was said a few years ago, I can only imagine how more efficient the tools have become.
No, that part at least was legit. I've seen an early mock-up photo he'd done showing what he'd had in mind.
Enough people have sample Trek-related CGI work (including Daren) on YouTube and elsewhere going back to 10 years that it's clear it should be very doable now.
They should never have revealed it at all. V'ger in the theatrical was so big you couldn't take it all in at once, which made a more powerful impression on the imagination. That was one area where one of TMP's limitations was actually a benefit. Yeah, there's no way that looks right.
But per the dialogue in that scene, the huge cloud had dissipated, reducing V'ger to the central ship. Still huge, but small enough to sit in Earth orbit without the cloud taking up the entire solar system.