I really don't see how your examples speak to what he is saying at all; maybe you can reread them. Earth orbit stuff with fill light coming off the planet isn't an OVERlit scenario, and neither is a rear view of a ship moving away from the sun. However, your Abrams examples are really good examples of the sort of mushiness I associate with problematic CG. The atmospheric crap may be there to hide imperfections, which is one excuse for the Emmerich GODZILLA being in rain as well; I'd figure ILM is well beyond that point, but there isn't any other ready example in mind for why so much of this flick is fuzzed up in space scenes (then again, not much justification for a large percentage of lens flares either, inside or outside the ship.) Dark and murky isn't necessarily realistic, especially if your murk is tacked onto the vacuum of space (and it is still a vacuum unless your shots are going to be inside the ergosphere of the BH.)
I agree. vacuum of space would mean that in dead space there are no visible atmosphere-like particles to distort light. Nebulas, and gaseous areas are a nother matter.
Yeah, well... interestingly neither of the TMP shots are realistic either. Or better - despite what you and 3DMaster say. Fill light cannot explain how the orbital office is so evenly lit, with the strongest lightsource coming from behind the camera (notice that the sun is supposed to be behind and above the station though - if we go by the terminator on the Earth). The Enterprise may move away from the sun, as we can see in the orbit-leaving shot and the sequence where she passes Jupiter, but, oddly, the main lightsource is always on her left side. So, in TMP as well as in Star Trek the effects teams gave us something nice to look at but not something realistic. What 'atmospheric crap'?
Every bit of non-lensflare related distortion and diffusion that shows up in the Abrams space scenes ... the stuff that makes the TMP examples seem so sharp by comparison.
As unrealistic as that may be, I can't fault the creative team for doing it since they're targeting their visuals to a land-bound, atmosphere-breathing species who's used to light behaving that way. It's no more out of line than any of the other conceits used by Trek over the years to sell these images to an audience.
When Enterprise attacks narada with phasers, all the atmosphere ... in most shots moving around the E, there is a softness that one can only assume is atmosphere (unless you want to say that the mushiness is due to shields?!) In fact the top shot you use to illustrate your point at the top of this page is very soft and mushy to my eye. The one under it looks that way too, but it is probably due to motion blur, since the nacelles look a lot better than the foreground. Edit addon: is it possible they are trying to indicate that the running lights are so bright that they fog the lens? That is the only (far-out) justification I can think of, but I'm not in the Abrams-Excuse-Producing biz, so ...
But I think that means we're losing ground. For 2010, they deliberately chose to represent video from space without starfields, since they knew the public had seen NASA stuff enough by then (25 years back) to accept it. We've had a lot more time since to know that a certain clarity is a given in space, what with NASA Channel and all the rest since, PLUS most space movies respecting that to some degree. This seems to be following the Gary Kurtz SW quote in CFQ notion that 'we're inspiring the next generation in a way reality cannot' ... where they think people are going into science because of their picture. I would figure anybody who got into science because of SW probably shouldn't have, given that they have virtually no overlap. Then again, TOP GUN suckered tons of people too, to see it and to enlist, and I've never understood ANY of that pic's appeal.
Well, that the awful jpg-compression could have anything to do with the image-quality never occured to you? Or that the camera-movement blurs the image? And that 'atmosphere' you'd like to see in those phaser-firing sequences is nothing more than glare on the (virtual) camera lens.
The TMP pictures you posted are those of the recent Blu-Ray release. They are not good examples of what the movie is supposed to look like (i.e. how it did in theaters in 1979). Check this link for a comparison.
Doesn't change the fact that the lighting in TMP was determined by artistic license - just as it was in Star Trek.
I can't think of a single realistically lit Star Trek space shot, except perhaps a few shots from "Where Silence Has Lease," and even those shots were probably overlit and were certainly overly "hazy."
Exactly, the lighting in the space shots is just as 'manufactured' as it is in the interior (on-set) shots.
No. No space movie, ever, outside maybe some stuff in 2001 and 2010 has respected realistic exposure, f-stops or overall lighting. Pick any random shot from any random movie and I guarantee you you'll find visible stars, planets with fill light on their dark sides and suns that don't blow out the image at an exposure that lets us still see stars and spaceships. From the Star Wars films to Event Horizon to Armageddon to any of the Star Treks they never treat this stuff realistically. And I think you're vastly overestimating the amount of attention most people pay to how space really looks – hell, I love this stuff and even I don't watch the NASA channel. Fantastic if you want more fidelity to NASA images in your space movies, but most of us don't care.
That's not bad. You can still see stars, though.* *Yes, I know the body of the ship is in the shadow of a shield so the aperture probably would be open enough to show stars. I'm just being obnoxious. I also forgot to list Apollo 13 as a film that got space mostly right, though again they added a starfield.
In all sorts of ways (for me at least.) I think a lot of SUNSHINE's work is excellent, though not to SOLARIS quality. As for the seeing stars thing, GEP might reread my post. When I cited 2010 not showing stars, I specified it was for VIDEO used in the film, because the public had seen video with no stars. I wasn't suggesting doing a whole movie without stars. Just that the audience was perceived even 25 years back as being slightly smarter -- even in the direct wake of STAR WARS and its nonscience -- than it had been in the time of TOS. Not sure that is still the case. But on that visible-stars topic, the reveal of the -D in GEN was originally comped with almost no stars in frame, due to sunglare, according to vfx supe John Knoll, but Paramount had ILM redo it to include a lot more because, I guess, they should be there. ... If all that atmospheric stuff in the spaces scenes that bug me in the abramspic is supposed to be due to lens halation, they are using virtual lenses that have poorer qualities than were used in Normandy during WWII. Either that or the virtual cameraman put virtual fingerprints on the virtual lens, which is a crime (real not virtual.)
Sorry if this is a dumb question, but why should there be no stars visible when depicting space realisticly? If we can see them in the night sky with all that interfering atmosphere shouldn't one expect to see them in outer space as well?