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Star Trek: The Next Generation - Shades of Gray

asterixsmeagol

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I just started working on an edit of The Trouble with Tribbles, but in order to get more familiar with the Vegas software, I decided to jump over to another project I've been thinking of for a long time that I thought would be simpler.

I've always hated the second season finale of Star Trek: The Next Generation, "Shades of Grey". They ran out of budget at the end of the season and decided to film a clip show to complete their required 22nd episode. My goal here was to reduce the hour-long clip show into a half-hour "bottle episode" instead, as an alternative approach they could have taken to produce the episode on the cheap.

The cut list is very simple, I just removed all of the scenes lifted from previous episodes, trimmed down a few "dead air" segments that were clearly just padding the run time, removed a couple of commercial breaks, and inserted one new commercial break to split the episode into three segments, roughly 5 minutes, 12 minutes, and 7 minutes long to better match a normal half hour commercial break timing.

This turned out to be even easier than I had initially expected, and I was able to crank this out in an afternoon. The TNG Blu-ray set, since it is all remastered from the original film, does not have the weird variable frame rates that I had to deal with importing DS9 footage into the TOS framework in my other edit. I was also already familiar with all of the ripping/demuxing/remuxing software which made getting started this time around much smoother.

One thing I still don't really know how to do is export from Vegas in a good format. In order to get HD video and 5.1 audio the only thing I could figure out was to render a 1440x1080 AVC video and then separately render an AC3 audio track and then re-mux them in MKVToolNix. Even then, for some reason my 1440x1080 video was stretched to 16:9. In any case, since this is my first attempt at anything I ran it through Handbrake to make a small 4:3 720p workprint if anybody would like to PM me to preview it. And if anybody has suggestions on how to export a 4:3 1080p video with surround sound directly from Vegas that would be very helpful too!
 
The Warlord was kind enough to preview my rough draft and pointed out a couple of ill-placed commercial breaks I had left in. Draft 2 is now complete.

Thinking on the title, I have two ideas. One is to use the stupid title "Riker's Brain" (a play on the TOS episode "Spock's Brain) that was apparently used as a joke working title during scripting. The other is to lean into Star Trek's love of pretention Shakespeare titles and call it "You Yourself Shall Keep the Key", taken from Ophelia's line at the end of Hamlet Act I, Scene 4, "'Tis in my memory locked, and you yourself shall keep the key of it."
 
Choose the latter and at least you get to say "His brain is gone" :giggle:
 
I've just given this another watch and I'm happy with it. I just need to figure out how to do a text overlay in Vegas to replace the title and then re-render the episode so I can submit it. If anybody wants to preview it (or if any approved editors want to watch it as the actual submission after the title swap), let me know.
 
I figured out the titles, rendered the video, and then realized I had added them to an old version of the project file. I'll have to do it again tonight.
 
Project is rendered and ready for review!

I exported it as a 1920x1080 AVCHD video stream and 5.1 AC3 audio stream, then muxed them into a .mkv container. I could also run this through Handbrake to crop it down to 1440x1080 and keep the AC3 audio, or re-encode it to AAC. What do people normally do?

I also just noticed that Vegas can export a Blu-ray image (.iso) directly, is that something people do very often?
 
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