Star Trek: The Original Motion Picture Collection comparison *PIX* + reviews - Page 38

Got up to V, and I just have to say that some of the opinions in this thread on DNR are flat out crazy.

Is it applied too much? Yes. Are they unwatchable, a tragedy, and worse then the last thing we got? No.

Sometimes I do have to wonder if people here enjoy the movies themselves, rather then the technical details, sparing over encodings and the perceived value of what they remember in a theater 20 years ago.

Looking at the trailers on the BDs, you can easily see the problem Paramount was faced with. The grain in III, IV, & V was very, very thick, and would have generated complaints from everyone minus us here at AVS. Even with the DNR, some scenes are awash with grain. They did go a little too far for my tastes, but it's not as distracting as the screen caps here would have you believe (worst case scenarios). TMP did up the contrast a tad, but again, visually, I think it looked the best of the bunch as the cinematography was much better then what was done in II.

Either way I'm pretty happy with my $50 purchase from DD, and if they do clean them up and re-release newly master theatrical/directors cuts, I'll be fine knowing these will go easily at $25 on ebay once that is announced.

You do realize that some beat up, kicked around, poorly stored and maintained trailers are just about the last comparison source you'd want to use against an unmanipulated master film print, right? I agree with you that the TREK BDs are much better in terms of playback quality than many here will confess (really, it's the shimmering on fine lines in STAR TREK VI that drives me far more nuts than the admittedly overdone DNR), but your comparison is ill thought.

I do, and I wasn't commenting on the very dirty, scratched, dust moled prints; but rather on whats some seriously heavy grain that you don't see on the trailers for I, II, or VI.

And like I said, I see the issue with too much DNR, but it's obvious they had thier work cut out for them, and why it was even thought of in the first place. Overall I'm happy with the job done, even if there's room for improvement if they get around to the directors cuts.

That's probably because VI was sourced from an old 1080i master.

Doug

I just don't believe that. Plus, all a studio needs to do is throw up a message saying it was the "intended look" (didn't they do this with Battlestar Galactica?). I think the studios are guessing what people will complain about. As far as DVD is concerned, I will bet you there are still more people out there that would complain about letterboxing over grain. Luckily, that hasn't stopped studios from releasing movies in a widescreen format.

One day they will use the lack of post processing techniques as part of a marketing campaign to re-sell these things, once they finally catch on. It will be like organic food. "Now - no preservatives! 100% natural!"

The studios introduced a concept called Film Grain technology a while ago, which essentially removed grain prior to encoding and then re-inserted it back during playback. However, as I understand it, the concept was never implemented despite GPUs having reference to FGT in their drivers (which means the concept must have been well advanced before being dropped).

Maybe it would have been better if FGT had been implemented, but with players giving the consumer the option of whether to add it back in or not. It could have had the potential of satisfying both camps, although I'm unsure whether it was intended to preserve the original grain or add a noise equivalent. Perhaps the grain and high frequency detail was capable of being stored and utilised in a similar fashion to DTS extentions. But now we will probably never know what FGT was capable of.

It was part of the AVC specs for HD DVD. As far as I know, it isnt included in BD specs, and was never used for any HD DVD.

But you can degrain and regrain movies in the encoding stage.

Ignoring the lunacy of taking the grain out and adding it back in... the other part you describe can already be done today. Most TVs and players already have the option to turn on noise reduction and smear up a picture as much as people want. They can even crank up the sharpness to add their own edge enhancement. Which means there's no reason to not put out the unmolested material instead of all these digitally altered encodes.

FGT was a bad idea from the get go. From what I remember reading it was adding fake grain after it was filtered out.

Ironically, my display's DNR feature does a better job at preserving detail than whatever the crap the studios are doing to their releases (I don't use the DNR feature). And it's just a Samsung LCD, nothing fancy.

There are other drawbacks to that technology. It may preserve detail better, but it also creates ghosting.

The other method of noise reduction is median filtering. It lose detail, but effects only one frame at the time.

The CBS/Paramount project was funded by Toshiba for the HD-DVD sets (that were cancelled after releasing the 1st season). Maybe if that relationship hadn't ended a similar effort would have gone into the films.

I don't follow. CBS and Paramount are separate divisions, and CBS did just fine on seasons 2 and 3 without Toshiba.

I'm assuming more than the 1st season of work was done, or the same house continued the work, just not released on disc until later due to the format issue.

Regardless of who did the funding, all the CGI work on the TOS remasters was done in-house by CBS Digital. It's generally accepted that they got better at it as they went along and the episodes done later in the project have CG effects that typically look superior to earlier ones. I think the delay in getting the sets out on BluRay had more to do with Paramount first deciding to support HD-DVD exclusively and then having to back off and gradually ramp up BluRay support when HD-DVD went belly up.

Also, echoing TyrantII's comments, I finally broke down and bought the TOS motion picture collection on BluRay and based on the movies I've seen so far (TMP, TWOK, TSFS and TUS), naysayers be damned, I thought it was an overall nice presentation. If you plop in the disc to actually watch the movies and follow the story, you can pretty quickly tune out most of the issues with DNR and contrast and so on. Definitely not reference quality, but given the low budgets most of these movies were given I thought the overall presentation was pleasing enough. Now just release the Director's Editions of ST:TMP and STII:TWOK and I'll be all set with the TOS cast.

Toshiba only subsidized the HD DVD disc authoring and encoding. The restoration project itself was funded by CBS.

I picked up the trilogy set, but not the 1-6 set. The lack of director's cuts for The Motion Picture, and the SE's containing extra scenes for Wrath of Khan and Undiscovered Country was a huge factor.

http://www.play.com/DVD/Blu-ray/4-/1...e/Product.html


Dare I get my hopes up ???

No, it's just a separate release from the boxset.

I'm inclined to think its just the theatrical cut as well, but the review on the page does say "This director's cut features enhanced visual effects and a new sound mix, supervised by legendary director Robert Wise.". Don't know if they're misinformed or if they know something we don't.

It's copied from the DVD blurb.

The separate releases are already out in the UK this is a NEW release

If it's a new release, how come Play doesn't have a listing for the old one? Even if it were deleted, it would still be in their inventory. Amazon and HMV also have no listing for another edition of TMP, just the one coming out on the 22nd.

Then maybe I am wrong, the Remastered title is odd tho

Play.com lists the running time of the film as 2hrs, 12min. The Director's Cut is five minutes longer.

Perhaps Paramount ran this through another round of DNR

Dude, please. Don't even joke about that.

So I watched Star Trek VI last night. The Blu-ray. But after 30 minutes I turned it off and started again, this time with the Special Edition DVD.

I'm not one to be overly concerned with DNR (it does bother me but usually not in the extreme)... but Undiscovered Country is an absolute joke.

I was so utterly distracted by the pasty faces and what looked like excessive cartoon-like black highlights on faces and objects that I just couldn't stand to keep watching. The funny thing is in the moments of the Praxis shockwave CGI in the beginning of the film, you can see heavy grain reappearing where clearly the algorithm couldn't distinguish the grain from the rest of the image. The rest, however, is flat out the worst imagery I've ever seen.

So on watching the Special Edition DVD, what did I see? A pleasant, warm image with film grain abundant. It isn't an amazing transfer (which is why Paramount undoubtedly decided to just apply DNR and be done with it for Blu-ray) but it is far superior to the Blu-ray. Even with DVD's inferior MPEG-2 compression and lower bitrate, the film just looks sharper and that much more detailed than the Blu-ray. It shouldn't, but it really, really does.

I seriously hope Paramount one day sees the light and springs for proper 4k scans of all the movies. But I think I'm clinging to a fantasy here.

.... and yet MGM did exactly that for the Bond films.

With the release of the next Star Trek film still more than a year away, I sure hope Paramount takes this time to make fresh scans like you said.

No, if I'm not mistaken only the Connery ones received 4K scans. The rest were 2K.