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

i regret throwing out my vhs music tapes when dvds came along, vhs audio was really great in a lot of ways

 

At the risk of being banned off this site....

But sometimes the director doesn't want you to see anything. By brightening the scene a little bit aren't you going agaisnt the film/TV creators intentions? I commend you, don't get wrong. Yes, the Game of Thrones thing was a scandal. But then most of the people were watching it on little I phones and laptops and bright coffee shops.

 

The soundtrack off the VHS release of Rush, "Show Of Hands" sounded so lifelike. It kicks butt over the new PCM stereo mix from the DVD. Not saying the PCM stereo off the DVD is bad. It's very good but not as good as the AFM one.

 

i noticed it with my dream theatre andslayer vhs when i brought the dvds home...it was kind of weird when dvd had been hyped so much

 

DS9 and Voyager have never been remastered in HD, so while "Crave" might be broadcasting in HD, those shows aren't HD.

I'd be happy if Paramount did a new standard definition master of DS9. The DVDs and what I've seen over the air the past 20 years are dark and noisy. I'm sure they could be greatly improved upon.

 

same for babylon 5, i think its the issues of the sfx that stop them making a 4k update- whuich i think they can squeeze out of the reels

 

So your saying they are upconverted the SD tapes to 1080p before transmission ? I thought CRTC rules forbid that
They look much better but I got suspicious when they didn't look anywhere near as good as my DVDs upconverted.

Have you seen Deep Space 9 on Crave?

 

So so so underrated! I think the horrible 2 hour premier and the bizarre half of the first season threw people off. for example the 3 rd season of Buffy is a million times better than season 1.

People who hated Deep Space Nine either didn't watch the whole show to the end or watched maybe a season. And if you hated the show then why would you watch 7 seasons? And you can't judge a show if you have only seen two seasons.
Kind of off thread here.

 

40 years of experience tells me I'm doing something right. At some point, you have to trust my instincts that I'm not going to screw it up. We agonize over this crap. If the director's in the room, naturally, I'll yield to what he or she wants. The only actual disagreement George Lucas and I had over Star Wars in 2004 was the infamous trash compactor scene, and he insisted it be about 25% darker than I did. I did my best to argue, but ultimately I said, "OK, it's your movie, let's move on," and darkened it to his sensibilities. And that was it -- maybe 10 tense minutes out of about 1000 hours' worth of sessions. Months later, when the Blu-ray came out, quite a few reviews said, "hey, it looks great... but that trash compactor scene is much too dark!"

Or they're library effects that the mixing facility (or the FX supervisor) has specfically chosen. Typically, the director and sound supervisor will sit down and go through every scene and every shot and choose the appropriate effect for that moment. Doors are tough: loud or soft? Large or small? Business or home? Wooden or metallic? Crisp or dull? New or old? Creaky or brand new? I think out of the 10TB of library FX on my drive, probably 5000 of them are door slams or door openings. Gunshots are even tougher. Cars, tougher still. We have software tools that allow instantly complaining dozens of FX, one right after another, so the director can say, "nope, nope, nope, not bad, awful, pass, nope, PERFECT! Use that last one!"

We also create a special mix called a "Foreign M&E" where we'll grab all the live-on-set production sound effects (PFX), try to extract them from the dialogue, and create a new mix that is identical to the movie except for the lack of dialogue. I've done that a couple of times and it's tough, tough work. In some cases, we have to substitute a new effect for the live sound because the dialogue is too overwhelming, but we'll get it as close as humanly possible. In some cases, we'll record it again -- foley footfalls and face slaps are good examples -- and get it in reasonably-close acoustics with the same kind of materials (wood floor, concrete floor, carpet floor, grass, dirt, whatever).

But yes, I'm aware of sound mixing practices just on the occasions when I have to put on my post supervisor hat. And sometimes, SFX do go to the center channel, when appropriate. Even in TV, even in low-budget films. It's not just dialogue, but it's mostly dialogue.

 

No argument there. very good points. But I have had mixes sent back because EX were in the dialouge channel or "nothing in the LEF Channel" from mastering. Anyway for foreign language versions it is better (as I have been told) to keep the center channel only for dialouge. I find it makes the mixes cleaner. But that is just my opinion. Still if you have panned dialouge then that's different. But otherwise I leave the center channel for speech. So if the movie house does want to turn up the dialogue then only the dialouge gets turned up and not effects. If you have an effect you want to go in the front center then why not just pan it in the center? Why muster up the center channel?


Excuse me. My Uncle Jack who I work for says for me to tell you that, "John is being really an*al retentive with the dialogue only being in the dialouge channel. And that I will learn when I am older...."


Yes, sometimes you have to put other stuff in the center channel. And with older films that have different mix formats sometimes you have to alter things. I just like to keep my center channel for speech. Maybe I should alter this approach?

No, I just mix. I get foley, dialogue and music tracks all sent to me. (Most of the time!) Someone else usually does the FX. If I had to spend 30 minutes looking through a massive sound FX library for a just the right jet engine sound I wouldn't get much mixing done. I once got a movie where all the dialogue was recorded using clip-on radio mikes. (remixing some movie show from 10 years ago). So the dialogue was scattered over 12 tracks. What was a mess! I don't know what the problem was weather there wasn't enough gain on the microphones or interference or whatever but the amount of compression and editing I had to do just to create a passable dialouge track was insane. And they wanted stereo dialouge. I did give them a "people will hear" mono dialouge track. I was told they had miked it with a boom mike as well. I soloed every track of the 48 tracks of that Sony 3348HR 1/2 inch DASH tape. What boom mike track? 12 dialogue tracks made from radio mikes but no boom mike track.

 

Perhaps things are different in Hollywoo than in Toronto.

That's why there's software like Soundminer.

It's terrific, Steve Pecile and his people are fantastic (tell him hello from me), and hey... it's made in Toronto! I know some very, very serious sound editors and mixers in LA, and the job is almost impossible without it.

Sony DASH is not a thing anymore -- as I see it, the business has switched almost entirely over to mixing-in-the-box in Pro Tools. I concede the need to transfer DASH tapes to digital files, but those tapes are getting very, very hard to play nowadays.

 

B5 is complicated. The current DVD and streaming video masters date from analog masters made in the '90s and I believe digitized around 2000 and are atrocious. For starters, they're sourced from PAL analog widescreen masters made for I think Portugal, which requested the show in widescreen as opposed to 4:3, which is how most of the world saw it. While the live action was shot widescreen but framed so that it looked good 4:3, the effects were all rendered 4:3. So for any shots incorporating effects they decided to zoom in on the 4:3 image and crop. That makes the effects look even worse than they should for their vintage - dark, pixelated and noisy.

Even the live action shots don't look great, due to the conversion from PAL back to NTSC but also because whoever digitized the things 20 years ago did a ****ty job. The image is dark, the contrast too high, it's noisy and it's heavily compressed.

Feh.

The original NTSC 4:3 masters still exist, and supposedly the whole series exists on film, although again the effects are 4:3. It would be nice if somebody would just do a straight remaster of the NTSC 4:3 original analog video - it would look an order of magnitude better than what we have now, even if it isn't widescreen.

Making the program truly widescreen would cost millions. You'd have to rescan the film negatives and re-render any scene with effects. The old CGI doesn't really hold up and wasn't done widescreen, so it would all need to be redone. Not just the space battles, either - tons of live action shots incorporate CGI.

Warners will never spend that kind of money.

There are no HD masters of Voyager or DS9. If someone is broadcasting either in HD, it's upconverted. Or, they aren't broadcasting in HD, which seems more likely.

 

wait if there are no hd masters of voyager or ds9, what on earth were they filmed on originally? did they tap out at 576?

 

Filmed in 35mm, but effects are in SD, so the master is SD. Theoretically you can rescan the negatives and redo the effects in HD and then redo the output in HD (that's what they did for TNG for the Blu-rays), but doubtful CBS will pay for it for the other two shows.

 

so it's scifi but they didnt future proof? thats nuts- they should have known that the mixture of models and cgi was vulnerable, you could already see where computers were going at that point

 

There was very little CGI on DS9 - mostly morphing effects like Odo. Voyager started out as practical effects as well - they didn't go to CGI until I think toward the end of the 1st season.

However, the composites were all done on video, since that was much cheaper than doing it on film. And they chose to use standard definition video as opposed to (Japanese analog) MUSE high definition video, which I've always thought was dumb but presumably there were technical and/or cost reasons. Still, people were using analog HD for similar effects as early as 1986.
The video for Cameo's "Candy" for example was done in HD and still looks pretty seamless - pity there's no high-res version available online (I wonder if the dpshts at Universal lost it in their fire):



Paramount were always cheap SOB's, though.

 

i read they shipped episodes to different networks around the world on vhs?

 

you could probably get fans to homebrew updated sfx for free, and then paramount could remaster it all, but at a pretty low cost

 

This is not something that can be homebrewed. You'd need to start with the original 35mm prints and work your way up from there. It's an expensive operation that requires a team of professionals.

Paramount spent millions remastering TNG for Blu-ray and the sales were disappointing. Although I think they'll eventually make the money back via streaming, where TNG remains popular.

 

Getting back to ST:TMP which is getting a theatrical release in September... What exactly is going to be shown? Will it be the same digital transfer that's currently on Blu-ray, or is Paramount going to circulate an all-new restoration from original film elements?
(If this was stated in someone's previous post, my apologies for missing it.)

 

I don't think that's been mentioned anywhere. All that's been said is the theatrical cut, but I would assume that since the accompanying bonus feature is also from the Blu-ray, that the main feature will be too.

 

Someone might be telling you that, but it's not HD. It can't be, those two have never been remastered in HD. Best it could be is up-converted SD.

 

Those Playstation (One) like FX would look dreadful on HD and even worse in 4K. I remember FX in Babylon 5 having plenty of jaggies and aliasing, this would be enhanced by upscaling it to HD or 4K unless those FX are re-rendered again at higher resolution and I don't think this will happen.

 

They look awful on DVD and the worst part is that, in encoding it, I swear that Sisko’s lips “skipped” (as in his lips didn’t say visually what he was verbally). It always looked weird to me.

 

Yes and you can tell occasionally as there are definite conversion artifacts.