Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. is going to be interesting to rip.
I've made it my goal to upload all distinct versions of each film, where reasonable (wasn't going to spend $100+ to get the "Special Longer Version" of TMP on blu-ray...). This has proved a non-problem entirely for movies 3-5, which have no "Director's Edition" of any kind.
Undiscovered Country does have a slightly different Director's Edition, but it's... weird.
There's the theatrical cut that released in theaters. Then there was the "Special Collector's Edition" DVD, which was actually the first release of that Director's Cut, but was also presented in a different aspect ratio than the theatrical release, for some reason? Then for the initial blu-ray release, Paramount went with the theatrical cut alone. But then in 2022 they released their new 4K discs and blu-rays, which have much improved transfers, and this one, like Wrath of Khan, includes both theatrical and director's cuts, now in its proper aspect ratio!
... But unlike the Wrath of Khan discs, here that director's cut can only be found on the 4K disc. The included blu-ray only has the theatrical cut.
It would have been trivially easy for Paramount to include the extra few minutes of footage needed to do this correctly, but they're nothing if not lazy fucks! (The only reason Wrath of Khan got both cuts on the blu-ray is because that movie had a bespoke blu-ray release back in 2016 with the sole purpose of releasing the director's cut in HD, so they already had that blu-ray master laying around.)
Since I now have a blu-ray drive and PC capable of it, I'll be ripping the UHD copy of the director's cut, and compressing it down in Handbrake to a standard SDR 1080p file. This will involve colorspace and bit-depth downconversion, from BT.2020 to BT.709, and from 10-bit to 8-bit, respectively.
As a result of that process, I'll effectively be asking the encoder to make its best approximations for bringing the video down to SDR. In my experience, Handbrake is fairly accurate in preserving colors and shadows, but brights tend to be crushed somewhat, leading to a sort of dull look, bright images don't pop quite like they should, even for SDR.
One might ask "why not just leave it in HDR and make a note that it's only compatible with HDR devices?" to which I would reply that I'm working within the limitations of Telegram. I have to compress this movie down to 3.9GB, and I want it to be playable and perfectly compatible within Telegram's native video player. If someone wants a fully HDR-compatible, 10-bit file, there are plenty of other places on the internet one can get that sort of thing that aren't restricted to 4GB file sizes.
Anyways I just wanted to complain about Paramount's home video division again, really.
Now watch Telegram double their file upload limits after I make this post or something