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

IIRC, there was a P&S laserdisc of "TMP" that had the extended (not "Director's") cut.

I don't think there was ever a widescreen version of the Extended - possibly because it was created for TV and a full widescreen might not exist.

IIRC again, there was no widescreen "TMP" until a late 1991 LD tied to the release of "Undiscovered Country" - all 5 of the 1st movies got the widescreen treatment at that time...

 

It's kind of forgotten now, but seeing widescreen versions of films in the home on Laserdisc was really amazing circa 1991. We typically hadn't seen the films as they were originally intended since they'd been in the theaters years before.

The only downside of course is that with a 525 line television system, in widescreen you only had something like 300 scanlines devoted to the actual picture on your 525 line TV, typically a 27" or maybe 32" set. So the picture was teeny-tiny.

On the other hand, VHS had at best a luma (B&W) resolution of 333 x 480 pixels in digital terms, with a chroma (color) resolution of a pathetic 40 x 480. Laserdisc in contrast sported a luma resolution of 425 x 480. It was a composite format - chroma resolution was effectively ~160 pixels along one the orange-cyan color axis, so four times that of VHS. It was lower for the purple-green axis, just ~53 pixels. The end result of letterboxing was a small but pin-sharp picture compared to watching a full-screen VHS.

 

OAR was the main reason I got into LD circa 1991. I liked the superior quality, too, but really just felt excited about movies in their appropriate ratios.

I never quite realized how much MAR damaged some movies until I went OAR. I'd loved movies like "Jaws" and "Alien" and "Die Hard" on the big screen but thought they were meh on video - until I ditched P&S and could see them OAR!

 

The TWOK complete soundtrack release notes indicate a 91 piece orchestra (including four synthesizers) "recorded to 32-track 1" digital 3M tape, 24-track 2" analogue backup and a 3-track 1/2" 3M digital live mix." TMP had a 98 piece orchestra, per the notes from the complete soundtrack release of those recordings.

In case anyone's wondering.

 

The orchestra sounds much smaller on TWOK. I wonder if the full 91 piece orchestra didn't play the entire session. Could have also been the space it was recorded in I suppose, or how it was mic'd. But it sounds much smaller than the TMP orchestra, which is really lush by comparison.

 

In France (and possibly other countries in Europe) we had widesreen, OAR films on TV and... on VHS from the start.
Yes the resolution was pathetic on VHS, but cropped movies was a concept I discovered much later when I could import early DVDs from the US; I had to make sure these weren't the Pan & Scan versions, which seemed crazy to me! "why would they do that?!"

 

Do you know if TWOK soundtrack was always mixed from the digital multis? or did they used a mix of the sources?

 

32 tracks of digital and 24 track analog back up.
The math doesn't add up. They must have had two 24 tracks synced up together. Or did they only use 24 of the 32 digital tracks? That is interesting about the soundtrack album. I am more concerned with a 5.1 or 7.1 real remix what are they mixing from? The music was on digital. But what about the effects and dialogue. Assuming it was 1979 I assume mag reels were used.

 

Ah, the era of LaserDiscs. When I first discovered that I could see 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY in its full widescreen width on my TV(very late 80s), I jumped at the LaserDisc format. It was a little while later - 1991 - that STAR TREK was celebrating its 25th anniversary. I hadn't bought any of the films on LD because they were pan'n'scan, but then I spotted this:







All five movies up to that point in full widescreen letterboxed format. All of these were the theatrical versions, and I still have this set around here even though finding a working LaserDisc player is more problematic these days.

Inside the set, in addition to the booklet (which featured the front and back images of all of the individual widescreen LDs, which were released separately at the same time, there was a little certificate "signed" by Gene Roddenberry, and a catalog of other STAR TREK titles on LaserDisc, with a perforated post card to mail in and get a 25th anniversary pin.





Fun memories.

 

TWOK was '82, not '79. The soundtrack was recorded using the 3M Digital Mastering System. AFAIK, the digital version of the music was used both for the film and the subsequent soundtrack album. They probably didn't use all 32 tracks. In fact I'd be surprised if they used 32 tracks for a recording of a symphony.

The soundtrack for TMP in '79 was recorded to 2-track digitally & to High Com encoded analog - I'm not sure how many tracks. I think some of the analog recordings if not most were actually separate performances. The digital recording was used for the soundtrack album but I believe the analog versions ended up in the actual film, at least many of them. I have the deluxe edition of that soundtrack on CD - I find the analog recordings to be really grainy and muffled compared to the far-crisper and more lifelike digital recordings, which sound more like a live orchestra to me. The liner notes have all the details but I'm too lazy to dig them up.

 

Different composer, different (I'm assuming) orchestrator. Could account for the differences, with the synths in the TWOK orchestra taking up more of the timbres.

Goldsmith also used an organ for parts of the TMP score, as well as the RAD AS HELL blaster beam. Totally different vibe which would no doubt affect the performances.

Too lazy to walk up the stairs at the moment to go grab the booklet but my short term memory says the deluxe soundtrack was mixed from the film mixes which came from the digital tapes. I'll have to go back and review.

I highly recommend anyone that loves the music from this franchise picking up all the recent sets if you can. The TOS and TMP soundtrack sets are particularly incredible.

 

Yeah, the TMP set in particular is amazing. It's got both the analog and digital versions of everything.

 

I got that 1991 boxed set kind of on a lark. It was pricey, but I would trade my Columbia House LD Club "free" titles for store credit at Tower, so was able to get it that way.

That really was a special time to be a movie fan. Obviously DVDs, BDs and 4Ks have vastly elevated the movie-watching experience at home, but LDs were the first real sense of "videophilia" for many of us.

We got to see movies in OAR with high-quality audio!

 

A lot of older NTSC era stuff has the tendency to elevate the reds a bit. It's inherently baked into a lot of stuff which most TVs labelled warm or other names. Sony developed techniques to reduce it in their higher end CRTs and their late models eventually had a way of defeating this by turning the color axis in the menu to monitor mode for a more accurate image.

As said earlier a lot of BD was derived from preexisting HD masters. Sony in particular started making HD masters and saying so on the back of DVD cases very early in the 2000's.

In upmixing you either take the preexisting track and bring it into the new system or completely remix from scratch and decide whether to keep or replace all the effects work. I generally abhor either practice as it removes the original sonic experience and detracts from the original flavor of the project.
For TOS and TNG they did do new remixes that are brand spanking new and generally faithful though they thankfully gave us original mono for TOS and 2.0 Dolby Stereo for TNG on the Blu-ray releases. As for the films they are new mixes bumped up all the way to 7.1 on the Blu-rays but in the process of remixing it seems a lot of tomfoolery went on and they don't sound as good as the original tracks. As for those WOK isn't the strongest Dolby Stereo mix to begin with as it was a lower budgeted film but it is inherent to the source. TMP has a great mix, III and IV are good, V has a really good mix for 1989 and VI has a great mix which was the test film for Dolby 5.1 ac3 theatrically.

 

Yes the SLV was only ever released as pan n scan and I picked up the LD simply on a lark when I was getting all the rest. When you get a good copy it looks surprisingly good for what it is and the age but sadly is very prone to laser rot and does not have digital audio.

 

Yeah, that was definitely something new. We'd gone from seeing pan & scan copies of films on broadcast TV coming off crappy I assume 16mm prints run thru the local TV station's film chain to watching them at home on pan & scan VHS and now - finally - we got to see the films kinda sorta how they originally appeared in the theaters and definitely at higher resolution than we used to see them (apart from maybe the original network broadcasts years before). It was certainly a different experience.

 

It was encouraging to hear Bruce Botnick mention going back to the original TMP elements when speaking of the upcoming Atmos mix. Hopefully a great deal of care will be taken putting that together.

 

I don’t know if this was mentioned but I saw some guy involved in audio talk about surround sound coming to home video in the early days. He said the person who created the decoder discovered that the stereo track on the original laserdisc release for the Motiin Picture still had the surround encoding intact when he played it through a professional decoder. That opened the door for home surround sound.

 

Pitch Black 4K delay, Dawn of the Dead 4K now shipping to the US, “lost” silent film recovered, Rick & Morty: S4 & Star Trek: TMP 4K on hold

 

Well, crap.

 

That's just plain silly coming from Paramount. Because of the Covid-19 pandemia less new movies are released,first thetrically and later on home video. They should be restoring older titles the studios know will sell well to have something to offer/sell to people.

 

Paramount is run by imbeciles. Some things never change.

 

Well, everything may be on "hold", but at least it's still a project (at this point anyway). I'll remain optimistic. As Kiko1974 mentioned above, it would seem that working on archive releases would be a reasonable pursuit during these times.

 

It would make perfect sense since the floodgates are opening on Paramount releasing catalog titles on Blu-ray this year. At first they were MOD but now they’re being announced right and left at 9.99 list price and while not new masters are titles people have wanted for years. (Two Jakes, Katie Elder, The Phantom)

There are several titles being kicked around at studios right now and in this landscape it makes no sense to not release them.

 

I remember picking up the extended version (12 additional minutes) on VHS back in 1989. Way better than the official release. Can that version not be released in HD?