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

No see are done from an inter positive however films do wear out requiring new prints struck (and back when movies played for a long, long time) requiring using the interpositive which, eventually, wears out as well requiring a new interpositive from the negative.

 

I haven’t had any hands on in 30 years so @Vidiot would be the best source for all this stuff.

 

Thank you. I will stick to mixing / mastering audio. Although we have done some 5.1 mixes for television. If the footsteps are way too loud I apologise. Sometimes I get too heavy handed and mix effects heavy.

 

Film as always been a mystery to me. Thanks.

 

The run times listed for movies seems to just match the actual movie and does not count the trailers. So regardless of which version is being shown, I expect there will be some short behind the scenes featurette or interview that will air before or after.

 

No idea yet but a site like TrekCore or TrekMovie may have more information on that when it gets closer to the date.

 

By the way I’m positive not negative about things.

 

Prints are generally struck from an IN (interneg), which is a copy from a fine-grain positive (an IP in the case of color), which in turn is made from the OCN (original camera negative). You can strike a print from the original negative, but it's usually frowned upon, because if anything gets screwed up... you've harmed the original source material. But there were many, many films going back to the 1940s, 1950s, 1960s, and beyond that were struck from the OCN, and this did damage the negative in some cases. Even Star Wars was badly scratched four at least four rolls of the negative, which requires extensive, costly, time-consuming fixes in order to digitally remove or obscure the scratches.

A normal 2000' print (roughly 21 minutes) takes about 2 minutes to run on an optical printer, then maybe 30-40 minutes through the developer, then wound on a reel and checked. Multiply that times however long the movie runs. You can run multiple prints at one time; I know the old Technicolor plant in North Hollywood (on the Universal lot) could do 2000 prints of one film in less than a week, but they went 24/7 and had 350 people working there. Digital is much simpler and easier in terms of making release copies... and despite what some purists (like Quentin Tarantino) believe, I think in general a digitally-restored copy of a film actually looks a lot better than a print. There are always exceptions.

He means the Kodak T-grain emulsions that started with Vision negative in 1992. The grain got much smaller and "sharper," so we wound up with sharper images, better blacks, and less grain, and they also improved the color couplers. It was fantastic... and film continued to get better throughout the 1990s.

That is not true... and I'm writing this from the original 1915 Technicolor building on Romaine Street in Hollywood. [The ghost of Natalie Kalmus roams the halls.] Technicolor films weren't too grainy because they lit the living **** out of them, so they always had lots and lots of exposure. Do that, and grain basically goes away. Underexpose it, and it's grain-city.

I am literally the guy who makes those changes. I try very hard to always remember a) it's not my film, b) stay true to the cinematographer's original photography, and c) use common sense. There are many judgement calls involved, like preparing fine food in a restaurant or any other craft that borders on an art form. The physician's mantra of "first, do no harm" often applies, particularly in the business of restoring old classic films.

As to 16mm: bear in mind that labs routinely just "puked out" 16mm TV prints that bore no resemblance to how the film was supposed to look in theaters. Frequently, the "B-team" color-timed the 16mm prints, so god knows what you'd get. Many studios outsourced their 16mm prints to cheaper labs just to save money. I have seen original 35mm and 16mm prints projected side-by-side, and you'd be shocked by how different they were. Don't forget that the 16 reductions were often 2 or 3 generations down, so that alone really screwed up the image just due to the chemistry.

The point is: we make judgement calls, and -- just as our host might pull an original-issue LP when he prepares a master tape for reissue on CD -- we use a previous video release as reference just in the hope we're not straying too far from what came before. Sometimes, I'll grab a reference from the 1990s and say, "oh my god... this is so hideous, I'm not even gonna watch it," and I chuck it in the garbage and just time it from sheer gut reaction and instinct. Other times, the old version looks fantastic, and I match it within 10% or so. So in mastering, there's a case of trying very hard to have good taste and not veer off the road.

I have had cases where the original director or DP came in and wanted to make drastic changes, simply because they saw things differently today than they did 20, 30, or 40 years ago. Speaking of Robert Wise (Star Trek TMP director), he had us make Sound of Music very cold and blue in the late 1990s, because he insisted that's what he intended back in 1965. But the Fox Home Video audience was irate about it and complained quite a bit that "we had gotten it all wrong," despite it being absolutely 100% supervised and approved by the director. After Mr. Wise passed away, they quietly went back and remastered the film and made it bright, warm, and colorful, which is I think the way people remember the film. Which version is right? You tell me.

 

Didn't NBC run The Sound Of Music every year on TV for decades? I seem to recall it there often. I always thought - since they were owned by a huge electronics company - NBC had by far the best picture quality of the three major networks, with the best color and the sharpest, cleanest, most natural picture. So I'd imagine it's their color timing - which was slightly cool but very natural, with proper but not extreme contrast like CBS and ABC always seemed to offer - that most audiences recall and would want to see replicated now.

 

This is going to sound stupid but why not put both versions of "The Sound Of Music" out?..The version everyone knows and loves and then the other heretic version? Question. If he wanted it "blue" looking in 1965 then why didn't the movie look "blue" back then? Did a memo come down from head office saying, NO OVERTLY BLUE MOVIES?
I am so confused? MGM maintains they are trying to put out movies exactly the way the director intended. Although that can get baffling at times. For example as you know, "The Robe" (1953) was shot in 2.55:1 and also in the Academy ratio standard of 1.375:1. So we have two versions of that film. But they won't release both on Blu-Ray. No one had every done wide screen before so he was rightfully nervous.

When I said 800 lines of resolution I was referring only to 35mm prints we use to see in the movies. Not a print struck from a negative.
My cousin works in a professional film transfer facility. He has people coming in with old 8mm, 16mm and 35mm prints of movies and even television shows. Most of his companie's clients are studios or TV networks but 15% of the business is from the average Joe. A lot of people purchased 8 mm sound and silent cameras in the 50s, 60s, and 70s. And a lot of people still have the 8mm negatives. A guy a year ago came in very excited with a 16mm print of Star Wars from 1979. The client thought he would get a high definition transfer out of it. My cousin later said," You would be off with the 440 line Laser Disk....Better picture and sound..."
Another guy a while back brought in a 1981 16mm print of "Brave New World." This was shot on film. Only available on DVD / VHS / BETA. I never knew this 181 minute Television mini series was ever available on film. It was briefly. My cousin has the DVD at home and the film to video transfer they did was far superior. Not exactly high-Definition but damn good.

Mmmm....Like fool I just assumed that a 16mm copy was good. Or as good as they could make it. I remember seeing a 16 mm print of the "Dark Crystal" back in 1984 at Catholic school. It looked good to me. But then all we had was crappy 250 line resolution analog television. Even my Father's 8 mm silent colour films looked way better than TV or VHS.

I remember back in the late 70's my Father brought home this film catalog where you could rent and purchase movies and television shows on 8 mm, 16mm and 35mm film. I remember the 16mm copy of Star Wars was $100 and the 35mm print was $250. I know 70mm 6 track prints were expensive. Assuming someone had a 70mm projector with the 6 track optical head reader and the sound system to play it back on how much did a 70mm print cost? Could a consumer even order one?

Kids today don't realize that before Dolby Digital 5.1 came along in 1993 then only way to see a movie with a 6 channel soundtrack was on 70 mm. For Sci-Fi I always paid double the price to hear those glorious 6 channel analog optical soundtracks. I think those mixes were better done than the toned down 5.1 mixes of today. I understand the compressed Dolby Digital was placed in between the film holes. That could never work with analog, but with digital it could. Now every 35mm print could have a discrete full range 6 channel soundtrack plus still keep the stereo (Dolby Surround Encoded) optical track. Pure genius! But a Dolby Digital 5.1 is not the same as 70mm, 6 channel optical soundtrack. How did you feel back in the early 90's when you heard that now every 35mm print could have a 6 channel soundtrack?

So all the 16mm prints for sale for movies and television shows were bad? Funny how the first two seasons of Buffy The Vampire Slayer were all filmed on 16mm. I gather those prints were struck from the negative. They were scanned into a computer and then edited from there. That's how they did it for Star Trek TNG. They used 35mm. When they did the HD version of Star Trek: The Next Generation they had to go back to the all the original 35mm elements. Thousands of different scenes and takes. Figure out which take of what scene was used and scan that in at 2k. It must have been some headache.

It was from a MGM DVD "Gone With The Wind" that I watched this video called Restoring A Legend. And at one point one of the restoration guys at MGM says, "... Technicolor is grain hiding process...." The restoration of these Technicolor movies was something else. And they have this new software called Edge Detection that allows them to realign the three colours better than ever before. I didn't realize that Technicolor films weren't actually filmed in colour. Or rather three stripes of black and white ran in perfect sync through the camera record ing the level of the three primary colours. And through a die transfer process turn this into a colour image. Excuse me if I don't get things quite right.

 

Makes sense. The SD 250 lines of resolution that we were stuck with until 15 years ago were so bad that I never noticed. Maybe you had a nice big attenna on your roof. All we had was Rogers Cable.I didn't get to here stereo television until 1989.

 

Because the director would bite your F'in' head off if you were to suggest it. And the studio would say, "naaaa, we're not gonna pay for that."

The director has been dead for 30 years, so they don't know what the director wanted.

We were told at Cinesite by all four of our color scientists that it was 2000 lines -- optimally. If you add together bad cinema lenses, marginal pin-registration in the projector, and ****ty prints, god knows what it could be. But under optimum conditions, it's about right. Again, just to pull Rank, I just hit 40 years as a colorist this week and this is my experience. I can refer you to books and references that confirm my opinion.

Tell him that Disney will sue him out of existence if he touches it. The 2K version we did at ILM in 2004 is plenty sharp, and they went through 3 weeks of several different sharpening passes at Lowry Digital. It's fine. There will undoubtedly be better versions in the future.

I would argue that Dolby Digital is actually better: despite the 384mbps compression, mag stripe is notoriously unreliable and wears out very quickly. And alignment is critical and tough to do in the real world.

No, it was all scanned on a Rank-Cintel Flying Spot Scanner, I believe over at Editel/Hollywood. Only the first season was shot on Super 16mm; the seasons from 1998 on were shot in 3-perf 35mm, which is a great format for a lot of reasons.

You can believe me or believe them -- your choice. (And the Warner MPI guys who restored Gone with the Wind did a wonderful job.) I've actually aligned 1940s YCM negatives myself -- I was part of the team that worked on The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, which was a very tough restoration process at Lowry -- and I think it came out very well. That came from several different groups of color separations, and the alignment and neg clean-up alone I think took almost 4 months. Definitely a labor of love: it's not a very famous film, but it was one of the very first color British films, so it had historical importance.

Technicolor was three strips of B&W nitrate negative, the red and the blue on top of each other, then the green going through a filter:



The Green color record essentially has most of the "sharpness" of the image; the Red wound up being the softest image because of the bipacked film, but that was judged a good compromise because it camouflaged skin problems. One secret of Technicolor was that there was actually a 4th monochrome color record used for the B&W soundtrack (with a mild image from the green channel), but they also used a mild outline to "solidify" the RGB image and give it a bit of a black outline to hide any misregistration. Very tricky process. I have every book ever published on Technicolor, and none of them have all the secrets. (Dr. Kalmus' unfinished autobiography, Mr. Technicolor, might be the most entertaining.)

None of it hides grain, so the person narrating the documentary is imprecise at best. Grain and exposure are closely tied together; number of generations also affects it greatly. In all of these restorations, mild NR is part of the process, but the key is not to go crazy and use it to death. You can say that Technicolor saturation was quite vivid and very stable over time because of the organic dyes, and that's a very valid observation.

 

Congratulations! Without wanting to derail this thread, I simply wish to thank you for your contributions not only to your industry, but to this very place. You have helped many people here understand how important and challenging the whole process is.

 

Still alive! I reminisced with some of my colleagues this afternoon and we're all amazed we've survived and are actually still working.

 

Or maybe I won't be seeing the 40th anniversary theatrical presentation. Have been trying to the last two days to buy a ticket, and either there is a technical glitch, or all 8 showings are completely sold out. It won't let me add a ticket to my cart for any of them.

 

I'm assuming if TMP becomes a Fathom Event or something similar, it'll be the theatrical cut.

 

No, Fox furnished NBC with videotapes of their films all the way from the mid-1980s to the mid-2000s. And after that, it was all digital files. The networks began dismantling their in-house film transfer departments right around that same time. Fox almost always did their own mastering, with Fox Worldwide manager Rick Montez supervising for several decades until his retirement around 2000. [Note that CBS alone still has a film mastering department at TV City, but it kind of operates outside the network as part of CBS Digital.]

There were cases sometimes where the network would call up one of the studios and say, "hey, we're going to make a special event of this movie of yours," and the studio would say, "hmmmm, maybe this is time for a new master for home video as well," so they'd quickly put together a better version than the one done 5-10-15 years earlier. I definitely was a part of a few of those: "quick, get this thing done in the next two weeks, because it's gonna air on the network!"

 

The fact you're quoting Huey Lewis tells me you need a break!

 

The power of love is a curious thing...

 

Make-a one man weep... and another man sing!

 

Yeah @Vidiot, it might just save your life...

 

I've become quite a fan of LD over the years but one must understand its shortcomings and the limitations of the format. The big draw for me quickly became the untouched PCM audio tracks which for most films are the best sounding release they've ever gotten and this even goes for some ac3 titles because despite the puny bitrate (which is equivalent to Dolby Digital theatrically) they lack the nearfield remixing of later releases.

Unfortunately I've never gotten to see a print of TMP which sadly by now would likely be faded. However I must stress that I'm talking about the widescreen reissue LD and not the original pan n scan discs which usually suffer from laser rot. The special longer version p/s disc does look pretty good for the limitations of it being an earlier pan n scan analog sound only disc, but the widescreen reissue is not just a better disc-it's one of the best LDs I've seen or heard. I wouldn't be surprised if they pulled a higher gen element for it because they likely did for the audio as was common for digital sound on LD.
I was simply trying to say that I extremely enjoyed the presentation of the widescreen Laserdisc and found it to look and feel pretty accurate to what I expect a print to be like if I ever got to see one. And yes, 420i can look great when paired with an excellent player and display.
But audio wise I make no bones about it: the widescreen LD 2.0 matrixed audio is phenomenal and destroys 7.1 remix track on the Blu-ray.

As for Trek 1-6 I think after the widescreen LDs they did early DVD ports of those same masters and then reworked those for the 2 disc SE DVD sets. All of those are fine but then came the Blu-rays with their heavy usage of DNR, 7.1 remixes and weird color shifts on some. I really can't stand the way any look or sound. Only Khan has gotten a new 4K master which fixes a lot of the issues with the previous BD.


I will agree with Vidiot above in saying that digital sound for 35mm is what killed off 70mm. I still miss old school sound in theaters as despite out technical breakthroughs no theater even runs sound like they used to when DD and DTS were battling it out.

 

Took all of today off to recover and am catching up with my Netflix backlog and a few new Blu-rays. Back to work tomorrow, and a possible beach day on Friday.

 

Fathom events just announced 40th anniversary screenings in September so if any time would be the time to roll out a new 4k version this would be it.

 

'The Motion Picture' Returns to the Big Screen | Star Trek

Info just released this week. Also the documentary short is not new, but a 10 minute feature that can be found on the theatrical cut Blu-ray.