Perfect example of what they SHOULD have done with the TNG-R FX

[Christopher]

^You're quite right about the strategy. Still, the problem with both the original and CG versions of the sequence is that space is mindbogglingly huge, and ships in a battle would probably be hundreds of thousands of kilometers apart and travelling at very high speeds, not sitting in naked-eye view of each other and crawling along at construction-vehicle speed. Of course, an accurate depiction of a space battle would be incomprehensible to the viewer because it would just be a few faint points of light whizzing by in the distance, if even that (since the ships would probably try to minimize their EM emissions for concealment, so you'd only see flashes of light when engines fired or explosions happened). Still, I have always found TNG space battles like this one, which seemed to be emulating the style of TWOK, to be implausibly sluggish and compact.

[Harvey]

davejames wrote:

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I will admit, though, the episode looks pretty damn good in widescreen.

Ugh, it looks horrible. The frame just looks cramped, and it doesn't help having the tops of people's heads cut off.

[Christopher]

Yeah, I don't get this idea that widescreen is the only worthwhile format. It's good for things that make sense to be wide, like spectacular landscapes in a Western or big dance numbers in West Side Story, but not everything needs to be wide and flat. Go to a museum and you'll see that not all paintings fit in the same frame. Read a comic book and you'll see that some frames are wide while others are tall and narrow. It depends on what you're trying to show. TNG's shots were composed and framed with a 4:3 fullscreen aspect ratio in mind, so cropping the top and bottom is as wrong as cropping the sides of a naturally widescreen image to force it into 4:3.

I recently got a new computer monitor, and the only kind they had available was widescreen, and I'm not happy with that. Sure, it's cool for watching videos and such, but for reading columns, writing manuscripts, looking at digital comics, things like that, it's totally wrong. I'd prefer something more like my old 4:3 monitor, because widescreen images would fit fine within it, but so could taller images.

[trekker670]

Widescreen monitors are much better for multitasking though.

[Tomalak]

Indeed, and you can fit two pages on one screen, which I find really useful when writing documents. And they are brilliant for spreadsheets.

[NewHorizon]

Well, I've bought the season 1 bluray and I can honestly say that the quality of the recomposited model FX is far better than that CGI example posted here.

This is not TNG: Reimaged, this is TNG: HD...and all of the model footage IS in HD, so there is no reason to remake it with half baked CGI like they did with TOS:R. I would never buy another season if they started doing that. They have 7 years worth of top quality model work that is going to look better than it could have ever hoped to look 25 years ago.

[davejames]

Christopher wrote:

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Still, I have always found TNG space battles like this one, which seemed to be emulating the style of TWOK, to be implausibly sluggish and compact.

I frankly preferred it that way. Realistic or no, it really conveyed the huge, epic scale of these ships to see them moving around a lot like giant ocean liners in space.

When ENT started having the NX-01 zipping around and doing barrel rolls like the Millennium Falcon, it bugged the hell out of me, and didn't look nearly as realistic.

Plus it just looks a lot more elegant the way TNG did it.

Harvey wrote:

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Ugh, it looks horrible. The frame just looks cramped, and it doesn't help having the tops of people's heads cut off.

It didn't look that horribly cropped to me. And in any case, that's the style most TV shows use today anyway-- to really push in more on the characters and action.

Don't get me wrong, I definitely see the value in preserving the original aspect ratio, but I also like seeing the show look a lot more modern as well. As it does in that clip (minus the crappy CGI, of course).

[Christopher]

Tomalak wrote:

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Indeed, and you can fit two pages on one screen, which I find really useful when writing documents. And they are brilliant for spreadsheets.

Maybe that could work if I'd gotten a bigger monitor -- assuming it had sufficient resolution that I could reduce the pixel size commensurately. But I kind of underestimated the monitor size I needed, plus I went for the smallest, least expensive one.

davejames wrote:

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I frankly preferred it that way. Realistic or no, it really conveyed the huge, epic scale of these ships to see them moving around a lot like giant ocean liners in space.

Well, maybe if I saw it in HD that would work, but I never got that impression watching them before.

It didn't look that horribly cropped to me. And in any case, that's the style most TV shows use today anyway-- to really push in more on the characters and action.

But they're composed that way from the start. This wasn't. And removing parts of the original image never makes sense, regardless of whether you're cropping widescreen to fullscreen or vice-versa. They're both equally destructive to the original image and its composition.

[Trekker4747]

The CGI in the OP looks like it came out of a video game. A PC game designed to run on a mid-power computer.

Thanks but no thanks, I'll stick with the excellent effects work we already have with the series. The HD film of the -D model looks fantastic.

[JoeZhang]

Was the size difference between C and D as big as that video suggests? the scale looks entirely wrong, the D looks about 50 times the size of the C!

[Trekker4747]

The -C was slightly smaller than the -D but not greatly so.

[davejames]

Christopher wrote:

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But they're composed that way from the start. This wasn't. And removing parts of the original image never makes sense, regardless of whether you're cropping widescreen to fullscreen or vice-versa. They're both equally destructive to the original image and its composition.

Eh, I thought the story and drama were still perfectly well conveyed.

I mean, we're not talking about a Stanley Kubrick movie here, where every shot is a gorgeous, beautifully-composed work of art; it's an 80s TV show that was usually shot in a pretty standard, routine way.

If that show can look a lot more dynamic by losing some of the picture here and there, then I'd be perfectly fine with that.

[Christopher]

And I don't see what's so "dynamic" about making a picture wider -- let alone slicing off nearly half of it. There are contexts, as I said, where a wider composition better serves the purposes of the shot, but it's not some simplistic one-to-one relationship where that shape is always better for everything. Probably you just feel that way about it because you've been conditioned to associate the widescreen format with feature films and modern television. So it's not really about the aspect ratio, it's about the other things you associate with it.

[Harvey]

There have been plenty of films that have looked dynamic in 4:3 (including much of the aforementioned work of Stanley Kubrick).

The framings of Star Trek: The Next Generation may have been routine (I'd even argue that Berman's house style, which really imposes itself in season three, is rather quite dull) but they weren't framed haphazardly. Re-framing them to 16:9 doesn't make the images more dynamic; it just makes them claustrophobic and awkward.

[Christopher]

It's probably worth noting that the main reason movies adopted widescreen format was because people were staying home from theaters to watch television, so movie studios decided they needed to offer something TV couldn't -- like a picture too wide to fit on a TV screen. Although of course the only reason TV had a 4:3 aspect ratio is because that was the original movie aspect ratio!

Of course, now history has repeated itself and modern TVs use the widescreen ratio, so movies have to do other things like go to IMAX and 3D, or that superhigh frame rate Peter Jackson's using for The Hobbit. But now movie theaters have commercials before the films and modern screens are just really big digital TVs, more or less. So the lines keep blurring.