One possible reason Star Trek The Motion Picture Directors Cut is not on blu ray?

Discussion in 'Visual Arts' started by XIDOR, May 21, 2016.

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  1. XIDOR

    XIDOR New Member Thread Starter

    That's right, Spock does cry on the Directors Cut DVD from 2001, I totally forgot.
     
  2. XIDOR

    XIDOR New Member Thread Starter

    Clipper, I do recall reading that the rear projection for the monitors on the bridge set were making quite a racket! Another fact I forgot about.
     
  3. HGN2001

    HGN2001 Mystery picture member

  4. JoelDF

    JoelDF Senior Member

    Location:
    Prairieville, LA
    Yeah, the bridge monitors we not CRTs, but actual film projectors creating a lot of on-set noise necessitating a total looping of almost all the bridge dialog. 24 frame CRTs hadn't been made yet (or, at least not available to the production) when TMP was filmed.

    That changed by the time of The Wrath of Khan.
     
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  5. Larry Geller

    Larry Geller Surround sound lunatic

    Location:
    Bayside, NY
    I meant it's gone from the theatrical cut on blu-ray.
     
  6. XIDOR

    XIDOR New Member Thread Starter

    I started to get confused because of the improved image quality of the theatrical cut of TMP blu ray, I had not watched the Directors Cut DVD lately. Though I prefer the DC much more.
     
  7. EddieVanHalen

    EddieVanHalen Forum Resident

    I don't think the Blu ray of Star Trek TMP is specially good, it looks soft, too soft for my taste. Maybe DNR was used.
     
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  8. JoelDF

    JoelDF Senior Member

    Location:
    Prairieville, LA
    All the Blus for the Star Trek movie collection were transferred several years prior to the actual set release. At a time when heavy DNR use was the norm. Some in the set have heavier DNR use than others. I think III and IV are the worst. TMP is comparatively not that bad, but it could use a much lighter touch on the DNR knob. There is also that one short shot of the Enterprise during the space dock fly-around where the red stripes along the hull sides are green, and the rust-red space dock roof panels look blue-green. It's that one shot just as the pod turns around to back itself into the docking door.
     
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  9. BeatleJWOL

    BeatleJWOL Senior Member

  10. Plan9

    Plan9 Mastering Engineer

    Location:
    Toulouse, France
  11. progrocker71

    progrocker71 Forum Resident

    Location:
    Los Angeles
    Wise explained that the reason that scene was left out of the theatrical cut was because they lacked the exterior special effects material to include it, which he corrected in the director's cut.
     
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  12. Scooterpiety

    Scooterpiety Ars Gratia Artis

    Location:
    Oregon
  13. Rocker

    Rocker Senior Member

    Location:
    Ontario, Canada
  14. XIDOR

    XIDOR New Member Thread Starter

  15. David C. Fein

    David C. Fein New Member

    Location:
    Hollywood, CA
    Hi Guys... I just stumbled onto your thread and I appreciate the conversation, so I thought I'd offer a few thoughts.

    There is only one reason that Star Trek: The Motion Picture–The Director's Edition is not out on Blu-Ray yet. Paramount has yet to green light the project. We've had some discussions, and it'll happen, the only question is when are we going to go ahead with it.

    "One member at the Home Theater Forum claims to have checked with a Paramount person and said that the individual film elements that were used for all the effects shots are missing." - This is completely false. We have all that we need. Would I like a few more pieces... sure. But we have everything we need.

    "I mastered the "director's cut" for Paramount in 1980, and it was never commercially released. Wise cut the film down to 110 minutes, and the assistant editor on the picture told me he was livid when the studio overruled him and cut 12 minutes of the V'Ger VFX sequence back into the film. Wise was smart enough to know it dragged the film down, and he was right. But because the film had gone so grossly over budget, the studio was determined to see "all their money up on the screen," so it went out at 132 minutes." I've had many discussions with Bob about the film and the final days of Post, and I can not see how any of this statement could have happened under those extreme circumstances.

    "Most of the issues revolve around redoing the new visual effects for the director's cut--they were rendered in SD not HD and it would be fairly expensive to do from scratch. They could upscale them but they wouldn't look great at 4K much less 2K. It's certainly possible that the film elements for the DC were mislabeled." All of the shots in the film were created with HD in mind so the quality of the models and elements were much higher than the SD renderings. We have everything, and when the time is right, we'll use them. Again, there is no truth that anything is missing.

    "You are very much correct about the low lighting on the bridge set to accommodate the CRT displays used on the bridge." This is almost correct, there were projectors, projecting film onto the displays on the bridge, not CRTs. The low lighting was to accommodate the projector displays, but also to set a far more intimate mood. The color timing for the Director's Edition is exactly right, whereas the Blu-ray of the theatrical is very inaccurate.

    "As I understand it, the TMP bridge console displays at one point were animations displayed by rear projection via 16mm projectors. One article I read several years ago regarding TMP's production seemed to suggest that the ambient noise on the bridge set from the 16mm projectors was so loud as a result that recording the crew lines on the bridge set ranged from difficult to impossible." Yep, I didn't see this was stated. Good job!

    "Vidiot's thinking that Sumner Redstone is part of the issue is new to me and I had to read up on him to understand what the issue is. The Viacom CEO is trying to sell a minority stake of Paramount Studios and Sumner Redstone is blocking that. Sounds like lots of lawyers now are fighting it out with the Redstone family. This must be part of the turmoil. Though I can only guess why executives at Paramount are under pressure or getting fired. So the whole video department at Paramount is likely only concentrating on new releases and not worrying about the legacy films they have in their library. Shame given it's the 50th Anniversary of Star Trek and you'd think they'd treasure one of their golden gooses. And years earlier they were investing in the legacy films such as the Godfather and The 10 Commandments and so forth to give them proper restorations and preserving them." Immmm..... well put.

    "Karl Urban likes Star Trek The Motion Picture a lot" - I like Karl Urban as McCoy!

    Thanks, and I hope this helps and I really appreciate your support of the film and the project.

    David C. Fein
    Producer
    Star Trek: The Motion Picture – The Director's Edition
     
  16. Ophelia

    Ophelia Forum Resident

    Location:
    New York, New York
    The Motion Picture was a soft reboot, you know. That was Roddenberry's intention. He was embarrassed by good chunks of the original series (mainly the third season) and in his head, pretty much the third season was no longer canon (nor was the mid 70s animated series), so the TMP novelization (written by Roddenberry) has a foreword which is said to penned by Captain Kirk. "Kirk" says that earlier tales of his exploits were exaggerated. TMP is essentially the more cerebral vision of Star Trek that Roddenberry pitched back in 1964. The Cage, TMP, and the first season of TNG are what Roddenberry envisioned for Star Trek. He hated having to make creative compromises on TOS which he felt "dumbed down" the series, so now with much greater freedom on TMP, he was free to execute his original vision at last; thus the more subtle color palette, and more serious tone of TMP as compared to TOS.
     
  17. Thanks for the reply. I much prefer Wise's cut as it does a nice job of streamlining the journey through V'ger. The finished visuals for the sequence where they step out of the Enterprise are an improvement over the one in the theatrical version and just look plain cool. Although the editing for some sequences are quite subtle, they improve the overall pacing (and let's not forget that Robert a Wise started as an editor and that is demonstrated by the improved pacing I. The DE. I would love to see a high def version of the film. While it isn't regarded as the finest Trek film, I like it quite a bit for what it is--to create a big screen property from a small screen show is no easy task and the film does a nice job of reintroducing the characters. If Roddenberry hadn't started rewriting Livingston, it could have turned out even better. Robert Wise found himself in the middle of a battle and no one prepared him for it.
     
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  18. jtiner

    jtiner Forum Resident

    Location:
    Maine
    Thanks for sharing; it's great to hear that all of the elements needed to pull this together are available. As I said upthread, I've always felt this was the only film in the series that captured the spirit of TOS for me, and the director's cut version is definitely "the" version. I'm looking forward to an HD release!
     
  19. As well he should have been. When he was MIA as a creative person on the third season, it allowed some folks who had no business writing SF or Star Trek to run the show.

    Actually Roddenberry's "The Omega Glory" is, teaser aside, one of the worst episodes written for the show.
     
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  20. Well that was a waste of time. Oh and when it mentions that Robert Wise directed The Sound of Music and Westside Story as a means to criticize their choice, they also failed to mention thatmhemdirected two science fiction classics--The Day The Earth Stood Still and The Andromeda Strain.
     
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  21. Rocker

    Rocker Senior Member

    Location:
    Ontario, Canada
    Those videos aren't meant to be taken too seriously.... they're just for fun.
     
  22. npgchris

    npgchris Forum Resident


    Thanks so much for chiming in here, David. I know a bunch of us appreciate it!

    Wow, that is truly surprising to hear about the FX shots for the Director's Cut. I had heard that the material created for the DC was in SD, and that was the reason we weren't getting it in HD on Blu-ray. That has been stated so many times in different places that I had come to accept it as true.

    Though it's unfortunate that Paramount hasn't seen fit to release the Director's Cut to Blu-ray as of yet, it is definitely awesome to hear that it will happen at some point! Perhaps in two years for the 40th Anniversary? (Though I hope sooner!)
     
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  23. BeatleJWOL

    BeatleJWOL Senior Member

  24. sunspot42

    sunspot42 Forum Resident

    Location:
    San Francisco
    They didn't really revise many effects for the Director's Cut - they completed some live action (combined with effects) shots that were started but never got finished in time for the release of the film in '79, which meant Wise had to cut around a bunch of holes. They also added some CGI effects shots to match up with sequences that had been storyboarded but either never even started or not completed in time for the premier.

    That's in the DC, which when I saw it shocked me by being vastly superior to both the longer TV version as well as the cinematic release. The movie still has major issues, but the DC at least doesn't feel like a hopeless flop - the pacing is much, much better and the plot and character motivations actually make sense.

    They should have done what Space:1999 did, with all of their sets full of monitors - used PAL monitors and videotape (a solid 25 frames per second of video), and shot the film at 25fps.

    The DC was rendered in SD, but it sounds like David is saying they still have the actual digital models and movements that Foundation produced back in 2001, and that those could be re-rendered in HD because they're sufficiently detailed.

    Foundation (R.I.P.) did an incredible job on the DC, by the way. I thought the CGI effects matched up pretty much perfectly with the rest of the film, like they'd been there all along (which was the intent). It's unfortunate the same guys didn't do the digital effects for the HD remaster of TOS later that decade, because I thought those were absolutely horrid - half the time they looked like cutscenes from a cheap video game.

    Fans of TMP should check out the extended edition of the soundtrack from La La Land records - it's got all of the digitally-recorded tracks from '79 that appeared on the old Columbia-issued soundtrack, as well as an analog, High Com encoded version that included different takes, which is largely what was heard in the film itself. The soundtrack was always the best thing about the film anyhow, and I can't imagine a better edition of it than this three-disc set.
     
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  25. BeatleJWOL

    BeatleJWOL Senior Member

    That's what I'd always heard. Statements like "it's all in SD" were incorrect understandings of that.

    Do not wait, do not pass go, but do go get this set. It's a thing of beauty if you love the score for this movie:
    film music | movie music| film score | STAR TREK THE MOTION PICTURE - Jerry Goldsmith - Limited Edition
    STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE (3 CD) -- SCREEN ARCHIVES ENTERTAINMENT

    LLL is saying it's out of stock but ScreenArchives does not appear to say so.
     
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