I watched Anti-Matter’s "Warp Edit" of ST:TMP, and enjoyed it greatly--except for the rape of my beloved Enterprise flyby in the orbital bay. I don't care that his version made MUCH more sense and moved the movie along much faster--I love’s me flyby. I was eager to see what was done to improve the terrible transporter effects, but sadly they had not been touched. As I have been making Anime Music Videos (AMVs) for a while as a hobby, I decided to look into fixing the effects myself.
I decided to work on all three scenes: Kirk’s arrival, the malfunction and McCoy’s arrival. The main tool used for this was Sony Vegas Pro 8 and its masking functions. The first and third clips presented here have both Before and After videos.
Kirk's Arrival
I was fortunate that the transporter stage is shown empty at first, this gave me the view with no blue beam. I cut out the empty transporter and placed that over the transporter sequence, then I masked out the area of the blue beam (like clipping a coupon, except that I only cut out the part I want), and placed THAT back over the now empty stage, leaving Kirk beaming in inside a properly aligned beam. There was no need to re-align them in the closeup, but I used the same technique on one of the blue glow/reflections to our right – it had a very sharp edge. I used a blurred mask to soften that edge a good deal.
In the final shot I added a few moments of the blue beam fading out, to explain Kirk’s sudden jerky movement. Rough re-entry there Captain?
Transporter Malfunction
For the malfunction sequence I added flashes to the first view of the stage, trying to match the ones we see at the control station. I used the same technique as before to repair the beams. For the closeup I had no empty platform to get footage from, so I used parts of the footage that were close to the beams to fill in when needed. Fortunately there is little to see and it is dark so there was little detail. I also used masks and a brightness/contrast filter to make the lower pads dim and brighten once again. I felt that after such an event the system might need to reset – or perhaps clean the pads off.
McCoy's Arrival
For McCoy’s arrival the same techniques were used, and an empty stage is shown at first so it was simple. I added some glow to the lower pad since it seemed to need it, to show it was doing something. For the last part of this clip I masked out McCoy himself to remove the entire blue beam, and added a later version of the effect using another program called Particle Illusion. The transporter effect is in one of its libraries. Notice that I made McCoy beam in three times before I let him fully arrive. I can be so cruel.
It's good to see these clips again. I was well aware of the alignment problem in these scenes, but I didn't have the good sense to do anything, so I give credit to Hal for sitting down one day and having a go at it for himself.I like the second clip because it shows that rotoscoping just one shot in a scene can quickly become a project in itself. What Hal has done is very good, but we need to do more. There are visible mask lines:
It happens unfortunately because we have not corrected for changes in lightness. The mask object needs to be dynamic so that its colors and luminance are changing to match the room at each frame.
Incidentally, I love the decaying glow effect at the end. I didn't noticed it the first time these appeared in the forum. Very cool, my friend!
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I was eager to see what was done to improve the terrible transporter effects, but sadly they had not been touched. As I have been making Anime Music Videos (AMVs) for a while as a hobby, I decided to look into fixing the effects myself.
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