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

Anyone got an idea if the 4K super-HD 1-4 movies will be released for digital download? The idea of having to buy a super HD blu ray player to watch them is... Expensive!
It is, so we just purchased a PS5 disc version and I believe the 4K presentations will be available for streaming on ALL PARAMOUNT ACCESS PLUS.
 
That and I never understood the appeal of 4K. Makes me nauseous.

Isn't that the 120hz or 240hz soap? opera effect? Yeah, I'm the first to disable that... 4K just adds image resolution*, with UHD adding HDR to capture a far greater color gamut to reduce bloom or crush. Explosions in TWOK (or any of 'em) no longer look overexposed, with the additional detail looking more fleshed out and almost real.

* granted, for home theater 4K is borderline excessive when you consider every tv size/distance 4K calculator... 8K would be groovy for stadiums and such... But it's UHD/HDR that sells that latest home video iteration (think of the good old days of "VHS vs LaserDisc" where the latter had better visual content but was niche...)

The first family I knew with a widescreen, wall-size TV insisted they had to watch everything stretched wide, no matter how it had been filmed.

That's how I do it. Works great for "Freakazoid" and other cartoons... just not as swell for live action shows, unfortunately...
 
If they are adding/using alternate footage, how can this be called " a director's cut" without the Director involved in these further changes?
Even though Robert Wise has passed away, everyone who worked on the Director's Edition is involved with this 4K rendition. And believe me, even with the Director's Edition we had on DVD, there were ideas that Wise and the team wanted to do but sadly didn't have the time and resources to pull it off (i.e., The Officer's Lounge scene). In a way, this team has become the film's official caretakers who know how to treat it the way Wise would have preferred. I trust them implicitely.
 
A few questions from a Canadian Trek fan for any who knows the answer to.

Will this be available to stream somewhere in Canada during the Paramount + U.S exclusive window?

Will this be eventually released in iTunes?

I already have TMP in 4k purchased through Apple which includes a SD version of the Director's cut. If the new Director's cut will be released on iTunes, will my version of TMP director's cut automatically "upgrade" to the new 4k version?

Will there be a 1080p bluray version?
I don't have a 4k bluray and my newish TV has crappy HDR which can't be turned off.. At least with my Apple TV 4k , I can turn it off. If I do splurge on a 4K player, can anyone confirm if you can typically turn off HDR from the player's settings?
 
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^^ Speaking as a fellow Canadian fan I suspect it will be available for download eventually. I suspect you will also be able to buy a Blu Ray disc version as well eventually.

In the interim we will have to be content with drooling over reviews until we can get our hands on our own copies.

I’m particularly interested in what bits get put back into the film particularly anything we might never have seen before.
 
Will this be available to stream somewhere in Canada during the Paramount + U.S exclusive window?

Is Canada getting its own Paramount+? More and more, the rest of the world is coming on board.

Will this be eventually released in iTunes?

I already have TMP in 4k purchased through Apple which includes a SD version of the Director's cut. If the new Director's cut will be released on iTunes, will my version of TMP director's cut automatically "upgrade" to the new 4k version?

Maybe after the Paramount+ exclusive window?

Will there be a 1080p bluray version?

The DE Team anticipated it would be available in both 4K discs and Blu-Ray after the exclusive window.
 
I hope it's a really short window. It's not my impression most of the Paramount+/Kurtzman Trek audience even likes TMP. And whatever happened to that rumored theatrical release?
 
More preview pics have been added to StarTrek.com and, um, yikes. I’m really hoping that there was some kind of glitch with converting from HDR to SDR for the screencaps, or they haven’t been through final compositing or color-correction yet, because those look way too contrasty and blown out. Some of them don’t seem to have had the “film” look applied to them at all.

TrekCore posted a twitter thread comparing these previews with the 2001 versions of the shots, and the new ones don’t look better.

On the plus side, the first new photo indicates they’re recompositing some of the original effects from raw elements, which should fix a lot of those matte-line issues. And notice the Earth has been added to the shot of the Enterprise emerging from dry dock (though it looks like the mounting arm hasn’t been pained out, yet).
 
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I mean… there’s stuff I kinda want to see, but not sure all of it was filmed (memory wall) and some of these shots have had too much modern jazz added. (Lens flares! Sharp Kirk even though he’s behind a window!)
A lighter touch may have been good (somewhat like BRs Final Cut… fixing things but not changing a huge amount. Kind of. The colour timing and sound mix is harsh, and would it have killed to put things like the basic fixes into a theatrical cut release?) and even better in places.
TMP was very much an art film of its time, and as such shouldn’t be too tinkered with. Though, if we are going all in, can we recast Decker as Robert Redford or someone?
 
In the twitter thing, there is a tremendous difference in sharpness between the upscaled 2001 images on the left and the 2022 images on the right in each example, if you click the pictures to see the whole things. That alone will make the remaster way more enjoyable to watch on a modern TV than the DE DVD.

I'm not so sure about the color timing in the picture of Kirk, though. Maybe I'm just too used to the old version.
I'm also not sure if I quite like the new energy balls. They seem to have a more recent CGI aesthetic, while the older ones looked more like something from 1979. Maybe they will look better in motion.

Kor
 
You are looking at preview pics on the low-res Internet. Your lack of faith in the 4K DE Team disturbs me. They are committed to creating a great result.

The resolution is not the problem. The images are full 4k-sized screencaps (at least, TrekCore's copies are, I'm not sure how they got those off the Star Trek website, I can only download the small versions from there), in every technical way they blow the image quality of frames from the 2001 DVD out of the water. My issue is with the color and contrast. The screencaps are all way, way too bright.

Actually, experimenting with screencaps of the 2009 BR and 2001 DE, it looks suspiciously like all of those images were downconverted to SDR from HDR originals using Photoshop's "Equalize Histogram" setting (or some other equivalent), which is... not the most representative way to display them on an SDR screen.

Here's a horrifying example of what that looks like on one of my own HDR images (what I did to the older TMP screencaps was informative, but not representative, and the artifacts caused would've been distracting to my point). Left is what it's supposed to look like, right is what I think happened to these preview images.

Equalized_Histogram.jpg

I've been able to reverse that effect, more or less, in Photoshop, and gotten results that match more closely with the 2001 and theatrical versions of the film. So that's a point in favor of these screencaps being the victim of an egregious technical error, and not representative of the actual look of the film.

Still, I stand by my "yikes." If someone was remastering a classic album and released a preview that was brickwalled, I think it's only fair that that should raise concerns, even if it is possible that that was an error by whoever clipped out the preview that won't be present in the actual album. I'm sympathetic, unfinished or unrepresentatively altered versions of my work have been sent to clients when I didn't expect them to be, without context or explanation, but that doesn't make it not a problem that it happened.

Also, there are some weird super-bright lights added to the model that are definitely actually there, and not a glitch with the images. The comparison is a shot of the miniature from the theatrical edition to one of the new screencaps (after I Photoshopped it to get it closer to the brightness, color, and contrast of earlier versions of the movie). And it seems the windows on the aft-port section of the saucer edge are still too far apart on the DE model.

Extra_Lights.jpg

I'm not so sure about the color timing in the picture of Kirk, though. Maybe I'm just too used to the old version.

On Twitter, writer Antony Johnston quipped, "At last, see the movie as it was always intended: like watching on a display TV in Target."
 
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Here's a horrifying example...

You have access to the DE Team through the TMP Appreciation Society Facebook Group, of which you are a member. The team is still working on the DE. Complain directly to them now, if you require more reassurance. It will be too late when they have finished. And there won't be another 4K DE, just this one.
 
The 2022 shots are pictures of it taken off someone’s computer screen by the looks of things. It surely wont be that badly lit.

Vulcan 2001, in a moody, low key light scheme that actually looks like how a camera captures footage when pointed towards sunrise or sunset. The 4K is way too overlit and brightened up.

Kirk in 2022 remaster, someone decided to jack up the damn contrast for no good reason. It looks weird
 
Some of those shots look…disappointing. I’m pretty sure the final result won’t look like that.
 
Starting to George Lucas the film... I know it was made in 1979, and thats quite okay, I don't need crystal clear, if its a bit fuzzy, thats okay. Just clean up the shots you already have, if it needs to be redone, make it as close to 79 version as possible. I don't need to see Han shooting first..
Just finish the TV version effects that wern't finished, and leave it alone. :)
 
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