TMP on Blu-Ray

[trevanian]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I was under the impression that only Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan was remastered.

You're right.

I think they have all been remastered, but only TWOK has been given the restoration treatment because the negatives were in such a bad shape.

I mean, they had to be remastered for the BD release ... otherwise they would have been SD upscales, right?

No, depends on what rez they were scanned at. The Bond films were mostly scanned at 4K by Lowery Digital a good ways back, so they are good to go for a ways to come. Even 2K scans of the TREK films is plenty good enough for BR, so the stated notion that only TWOK has been remastered seems totally accurate to me. I guess you could look on thedigitalbits.com or blu-ray.com or some place like that for authentication.

blu-ray.com's forum notes TWOK as having a 4K transfer.

 

[SpHeRe31459]

^^
Unless the previous DVDs were sourced from (poor) HD transfers.

I'm pretty sure the films were scanned at 1080i and then downrezzed to 480i for the DVD's. Those masters were then used for the Blu-ray's except for TWOK.

Can't remember where I read that though? So take the above with a grain of salt.

Basically correct. There is some pretty strong evidence that they just cranked out the Blu-ray editions in 2009 using the very early, for the tech, 1080p scans that were made in the early-2000s for the DE DVDs and for use on the (then) new premium HD cable/sat movie channels (HBO used to have the catalog rights to the TOS movies).

Since their target resolution was DVD (480i) and done in the early-2000s they were not very concerned with what it looked like at HD resolution. So they used all the quick and easy cheats of the era to process the image for DVD resolution. The problem is those quick and dirty image manipulation tricks look like crap when viewed in high resolution. Hence why we have all of the movies with anywhere from a bit too much to massive amounts of noise reduction applied.

 

[SpHeRe31459]

You're right.

I think they have all been remastered, but only TWOK has been given the restoration treatment because the negatives were in such a bad shape.

I mean, they had to be remastered for the BD release ... otherwise they would have been SD upscales, right?

No, depends on what rez they were scanned at. The Bond films were mostly scanned at 4K by Lowery Digital a good ways back, so they are good to go for a ways to come.

I wouldn't say "mostly". Lowery only scanned a select group, 9 of the movies, at 4k. All the Connery movies, plus a few others they deemed needing the higher resolution.
http://commanderbond.net/2878/all-20-films-to-be-remastered-for-new-dvds.html

Lowery is another company that is infamously heavy handed with DNR. And again the initial target for the project were the DVDs from the early-mid-2000s.

Even 2K scans of the TREK films is plenty good enough for BR, so the stated notion that only TWOK has been remastered seems totally accurate to me. I guess you could look on thedigitalbits.com or blu-ray.com or some place like that for authentication.

blu-ray.com's forum notes TWOK as having a 4K transfer.

I highly doubt TWOK was given a 4k transfer. The Blu-ray discs appear to have been done as cheaply as possible to coincide/cash-in-on the Abrams movie in 2009.
If they did, it's been ruined by DNR, and other processing. TWOK still looks very "cleaned up", not as bad the ones clearly reusing ancient transfers like TVH and TUC, but still not what a proper/well-done transfer of a 1982 film should look like.

 

[BillJ]

^^
Unless the previous DVDs were sourced from (poor) HD transfers.

I'm pretty sure the films were scanned at 1080i and then downrezzed to 480i for the DVD's. Those masters were then used for the Blu-ray's except for TWOK.

Can't remember where I read that though? So take the above with a grain of salt.

Basically correct. There is some pretty strong evidence that they just cranked out the Blu-ray editions in 2009 using the very early, for the tech, 1080p scans that were made in the early-2000s for the DE DVDs and for use on the (then) new premium HD cable/sat movie channels (HBO used to have the catalog rights to the TOS movies).

Since their target resolution was DVD (480i) and done in the early-2000s they were not very concerned with what it looked like at HD resolution. So they used all the quick and easy cheats of the era to process the image for DVD resolution. The problem is those quick and dirty image manipulation tricks look like crap when viewed in high resolution. Hence why we have all of the movies with anywhere from a bit too much to massive amounts of noise reduction applied.

Thanks for the correct information. I was afraid I might have been misremembering some of the details.