Star Trek TNG Seasons Remastered on Blu-Ray - Page 32

Well if we're talking about reality...we shouldn't see any stars at all. At proper exposure levels for objects in space the stars are so dim they disappear unless they are incredibly close. I could buy a few...but all of them?

But for this argument reality doesn't really matter. There's an old adage in vfx if it looks right it is right...and too me it looks wrong. In addition not true to the original shot...the original shot shows dim stars.

So, em... any of you guys catch the game last night?

Have you been in the desert at night? You see *all* the stars.

In any case, most of the time starfields are there to add movement and dimension to space shots.

Well, everything is a lot less saturated in the original (SD) version, so you may as well dim the whole image.

In reality you would hardly see the ships at all most of the time unless they were near enought to a star in a solar system. The only trek to get this right was TMP which added running lights to the ship.



Attachment 228058

Love that movie, love the effects.

Yeah me too

As good a job as ILM did on the later films, the ships just looked kind of flat compared to TMP. You really got a good sense of scale and depth in the first film.

Now we know that we are in a Star Trek thread.

Sure did, up until they pulled Rogers in the 4th, though they probably could have pulled him in the first and Flynn would have been okay with the way the Vikings were playing.


Right because that's the only thing that you're looking at. If we had a large moon filling a good portion of the sky all those stars would disappear because your eyes would adjust to the most prominent object.

Actual photo for reference...extremely faint stars.
http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/gallery/...027e036712.jpg

I'm fine with them. I was never expecting a BSG or Firefly like re-visioning of TNG's special effects, although I wouldn't mind it as an option ala TOS. That said, if they have all the raw elements to reconstitute the finished effects into HD, I'd stay stick with the originals and only fix things where they were done quickly or in hast (there's quite a history where the intended shots or effects had to be ditched and something quick used; lots of scale issues, scenes not matching whats going on in the story, even a shot where phasers are coming out of the torpedo tubes...)

As for the star field, either that's one quick moving camera pan shot or they messed it up!

Depends on the EV bias of the device used.



Most film and digital cameras have a 3 stop threshold, but there's nothing stopping something larger. Human eyes are around 9-12 or so.

Yes, the Enterprise looks great in TMP but there's a single little problem...

She doesn't maneuver.

Watch the film again. The ship never moves. The camera always looks like it's moving past it. The best motion-control photography makes the objects look like they are moving, not the camera. The Enterprise just kind of drifts. This is an issue with Doug Trumbull. Compare it to the Klingon sequence which was shot by John Dykstra. It's much more dynamic and the Klingon ships actually look like they're moving.

ILM (& Nicholas Meyer) didn't want an Enterprise that "lists lazily to the left". They wanted an Enterprise that looked like it could outmaneuver the more nimble Reliant in the Mutara Nebula, so they went with bluescreen (which tends to flatten the image) rather than the frontlight/backlight technique they used on the Enterprise in TMP (the Klingon ships were shot bluescreen).

Good point

Funny thing is that that framing actually kind of works and could easily be the kind of thing you'd see in a 2.35:1 film. Of course, it's not the way it was meant to be seen so it doesn't matter.

Also, Sins of the Father appears cropped on the bluray. Look at the picture of Worf, specifically his sash.

The reason why it "works" is that it turns a medium shoot to a closeup. If I would have cropped it to 16:9 it would have stayed somewere in the middle. Reminds me of Predator were they framed it differently when they filmed it, but changed alot of the framing during editing.

But for the record, im do not want them to change TNG to 16:9 (or 2.35:1 for that matter).

I am puzzled why they release some terrible low bitrate 720p trailer instead of a 1080p one. Are they not trying to pimp a Blu-ray release here? The trailer barely qualifies as being the beginnings of high definition.

I hope the people doing the transfers and Blu-ray authoring are more competent than the marketing/YouTube people.

Would you be happier if they released some terrible low bitrate 1080P trailer?

Even that is overthinking it.

The reality: it makes the background more interesting with the stars. Otherwise, it's just blackness with no sense of movement.

It's like when stunt drivers throw leaves or dirt down on a road so something gets thrown up by the tires as the cars pass. It makes them look faster at safer speeds.

It's the same for space shots. You need something there to express movement. Sure, a planet is good, but if you tone the stars down when you have something like than in the frame, it looks odd to go to deep space shots where they start popping the stars so they take over giving the sense of movement. Next thing you know, people are complaining that there only seem to be stars when they aren't in orbit.

So, yeah, in theory, if this were a documentary, the stars would be invisible if you could see the ship properly exposed. But, if you're going to nitpick the stars, you need to nitpick the swooshing sound the ship makes as it passes out in space. Then you have to nitpick the fact that the ship's gravity plating never fails, even under the most dire conditions (air is running out and the warp drive is down, but my latte stays firmly in the cup sitting in the cup holder). Once you get past all that, the eternal question becomes: do these people ever have to go to the bathroom? If so, where? Are they allowed to flush while in orbit?

I'm OK with the stars.

Exactly, if you are going to nitpick, then every single shot in space should be totally silent because it is in a vacuum. Would be a pretty boring show if there was zero sound when a ship blew to smithereens (even though that would be closer to "real").


I watched "Best of Both Worlds I/II" on DVD last night on my 55" TV...wow the PQ is pretty awful. Background noise and banding all over the place. The DVDs are also over-compressed so there are plenty of compression artifacts. But the episodes were still great fun to watch after all these years.

Reminds me of that old joke that needs to be updated for this TNG thread:

Q: What did Riker see when he visited the head in the Captain's ready room?

You have to say "Picard's ready room" or you'll foretell the punchline.

YouTube's 1080p videos aren't the greatest but they look a lot better than their 720p videos. They have 2-3x the bitrate of the 720p videos.

They also have 2x amount pixels to encode. While I wouldnt complain if they release a 1080P trailer. I dont have high hopes for the quality issues. Youtube is not the place I would go to examine future BD releases.

The video is more aimed to give us a glimps in how they solved the special effects.

True. They really aren't that bad. I shoot videos for clients and most of the time they watch, share them via YouTube rather than the direct file.

OK, I give. What did he see?

So is it just me or is the Klingon home world moving very fast through space in that trailer? Also the brightness of the planet would far outshine any of the background stars so you shouldn't be seeing any unless you really let your eyes adjust. That's just a nitpick though lol.

The captain's log.

...oh, come on, it was begging for it.

Dragging this back on topic for a minute: was I the last one to notice Amazon had a pre-order up for the sampler disc?

True the planet is spinning too fast...but it was in the original shot, so I'm willing to let that slide. But the stars are definitely an issue and moving incorrectly. The original shot had a better star field.