Star Trek: The Motion Picture - Director's Edition HD Recreation (Version 3 out now)

[dvdmike]

Hunt is a clueless sycophant, he missed all the sloppy work I take it?

[iguanaclerk]

I skimmed though this offhand in anticipation of actually watching it sometime later.

Live action mostly seems as detailed as the UHD (well less, because the bitrate is so low on streaming, but it doesn't look like it's screwed with). This is going to hopefully look very nice when it hits disc. There's unfortunately plenty of DNR applied to the effects and optical shots still, although it looks like it was done differently than on the theatrical master.

The shot of the orbital complex that they re-composited looks decent. The CGI ranges from a respectable update of 2001-era CGI (I know they don't really have the resources for more) to really sloppy. The rotowork on the new windows in the officer's lounge is just inexcusable (although I suppose it matches the existing poor bluescreen matting from 1979, lol). The mattes of SF look worse than they ever have, lol; very ugly CGI/photoshop work that cuts in quite poorly. Should have commissioned a painting. The new titles are extremely overdone (they added this whole glinting animation and still kept the, like, 2001 stock after effects wipes between them).

I haven't seen some of the new "new" changes reported, but what I did see flipping though that was substantively different from the 2001 master is stuff that the producers had talked about doing in 2001 but couldn't for whatever reason. (i.e. the new officer lounge, and a shot of the Enterprise turning to match Kirk's order at the end of the trip into V'ger (this also does not look great and there is no reason for it when the original effect is fine).

Overall a mixed bag, but pretty much in line with what I was expecting. Still just a dream to have a widely available 4K version of the director's edition, it's a beautiful film and this edit is much more polished and complete than the theatrical. And they are including more deleted stuff as extra with the disc release!

[iguanaclerk]

Looking back at this, I'm wondering if the sloppy rotowork in the new officer's lounge (otherwise a nice idea and certainly better than what they had for the 2001 DE) is some sort of export error. It starts out with extremely harsh, bloby mattlines that aren't feathered at all and then the last shot has Kirk looking decent-ish (with a feathered edge), while McCoy's nose and front of his face is cut off, like the boundary is misaligned (McCoy is standing in front of the window that exists in the '79 version and still has a nose there, so this bit at least definitely feels like an error to me). Hopefully this can be fixed, or at least finessed a bit for the disc.

Edit: I finished watching this. I think all of my reservations are basically what I detailed in the last post (although, watching in bit-rate starved 1080p on Paramount+, it's just about impossible to get a sense of the general video QC). On the whole, a nice edition of the film. The ADR recordings they rediscovered for what previously was muddy, on-set audio are so goood. Something I thought we'd never see in the quality it deserved; so glad they wore down Paramount into green-lighting this thing, lol.

[Bigrob]

Considering they had a deadline to get it done for streaming on April 5th, I wonder if the physical disc version will have anymore tweaks and fixes

[iguanaclerk]

I'm gonna hope. While nothing's going to change Dochterman's suborn conviction since 2001 that this Photoshop mess is preferable to what is a perfectly nice matte painting by Matthew Yuricich, they could at least align the bottom-right corner of it with the live action plate, lol.



(for anyone worried based of this shot, this is easily one of the worst things they did in the DE, both in 2001 and now, I would not consider it really representative of the larger project, which I do like)

[HippieDalek]

Since this isn't out yet in the UK I've not seen the new restoration myself but some of the screenshots coming out are pretty concerning. I just saw this over on the blu ray com forums: 

   

Yikes! 

I'm rarely a fan of CGI additions to films from the pre-CGI era as they usually stick out like a sore thumb and take me right out of the film. Because of this I rarely watch the Director's Edition of TMP despite it's many other improvements. Hearing the hype from Hunt and others I was actually starting to get excited for this, but less so now. 

Hopefully they get the chance to fix or revert this particular problem before it comes to physical later in the year. 

I hope some day the TV Cut gets a 4K restoration so we can enjoy the extended scenes with the original effects...but I'm not holding my breath.

[PDB]

Yikes both of those examples are pretty rough

[iguanaclerk]

The first has always looked horrible. They had some crazy notion that it's overcoming the limitation of the set (with its wall to the right), but it makes little sense and destroys both the details of the painting and the visual weight of the frame. The 2nd is something they've always talked about doing (to extend out the original officer's lounge set to resemble the Probert concept), but 20 years on, they still clearly don't have the chops to make the rotoscoping look nice. Both of these were signed off on by Wise, who let the producers freely tweak VFX (while being particular about the cutting). Most of the CGI additions to the film are actually necessary completions of effects that were just left unfinished in the theatrical cut, and while they do look like obvious CGI in an otherwise '70s film, they are much more vital and cut in much better than those examples. I really do still recommend this version strongly as the "finished" version of the film, despite these flaws: the cutting and sound design in this one is incredibly more polished then what they had to send out in '79. That said, if they don't tweak these any more for the disc, I may make a fanedit similar to this version that just reverts those couple shots back to the theatrical cut, lol

[dvdmike]

Considering they had a deadline to get it done for streaming on April 5th, I wonder if the physical disc version will have anymore tweaks and fixes

It was their own deadline tho
Not a fan of any of it, the original director's edition was neat in the dvd days, but this feels cynical

It's all very rough, it feels like a fan edit.
But with less time and budget.

[iguanaclerk]

Yeah, I think their budget for this was tiny, tiny. The producers basically have been begging Paramount to greenlight since like 2007, and the streaming division finally did it to have more things on the the slate for their invented "first contact day," (I also don't think the deadline really stymied them, but it is paramount's). I never expected the effects to be much more than what we got (though frankly a lot of the shots of the enterprise look great, considering it's basically a straight update of lighting setups from 2001), but the fact that we have Wise's finished edit with a proper master is a miracle.