Paramount’s first foray into the ultra high definition home media market begins next month, as the first two Abrams Star Trek films will be released on 4K UHD Blu-ray on June 14.

In a new interview with Broadcasting & Cable, Paramount Home Media Distribution VP Ed Hoxsie spoke about the challenges behind bringing the two most recent Star Trek films to the new format.

We’ve gone through about five or six sessions… at Paramount looking at masters, all the way to compression, as well as having third party vendors look at it as well. And we don’t just give it to a vendor and say ‘do it,’ we actually spend days at these facilities, and we’re integral in the set-up.

At this time, we’re realizing not all TVs are made the same, so we looked at them on studio monitors, and then we’ll pop them on commercial monitors… a lot of this is coming down to power consumption: a lot of these TVs are rated to go a lot higher than they actually show. If it seems very bright, for example, it takes a lot of power, and the TVs are not hitting that high end we expect

We figure our discs are future-proofed. We’re making them for the top of the line TVs, and when the technology [catches up], this stuff will already carry through.

The B & C report also reveals that the original sound team on the 2009 Trek film came back to the studio to remix the movie’s audio for the high-quality Dolby Atmos system.

Additionally, these new 4K UHD releases are being issued on 66GB Blu-ray discs, leaving not much room for extras:

The reason we have enough room is because we’re not putting anything else on the disc, no special features. We’re not overloading it with 20 audio tracks. We’re keeping it like a domestic, movie-only release. And it’s more than enough for what we want to do right now.

Two years from now, if we want to put UHD [bonus features] on these discs, the 100 GB [discs] will come into play. Or if one day we do a movie that’s three hours long, the 100 will do that. We’re fanatics with our bit rates, and I can say that both are sufficient, and hold enough to adapt the Atmos tracks.

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