I hope to get back into LW after a major upgrade.
Visual Effects in Discovery
- Thread starter Galaxy
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Just ran across this photo on Instagram, showing that the Orions are indeed a VFX trick rather than body paint.
How does it show this? His skin looks green(ish) to me in this one.Just ran across this photo on Instagram, showing that the Orions are indeed a VFX trick rather than body paint.
Goddamit!
Not just the visual effects. The entire productions syle - props and all - look a lot more aligned with what I expected from a Star Trek show! Dang. That looks like real technology. I don't know why, but even flat starship surfaces without any details look better in the Lost in Space-trailer than on DIS. Not a big fan of the Mass Effect-inspired design of the robot though...
I dunno why DSC went with that aesthetic
It's a pain to watch, like having someone fly food past you repeatedly at the dinner table, so you just get a 2 second glimpse, when you just want to eat it.
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8K is beyond silly for a home video setting, unless one is sitting like six inches away from the set, in which case nobody needs a 70" set (10' back for 4K res)... even at 480i, the optimal distance for a 70" screen is 24 feet back...
Maybe everything is blurry in order to cut down on compression, which will use selective blur to help improve in the compression process. More details = more bandwidth required to show the detail without blocky artifacting... and it also renders all the hyper "4k sharpness, cooee!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" to be untrue, what's the point of a sharp set if all the content shown is going to be blurry? Especially on cheaper panel sets where uneven background lighting, ghosting, motion blur, and other artifacts will be more prevalent? At least nobody uses TN panels anymore, hue shift at wider angles was horrible... PVA panels are still the best for native contrast ratio (avoid the dynamic garbage altogether), despite a somewhat limited viewing angle restriction...
Streaming will always be lower in bitrate, leading to jagged edges, fuzziness, blurriness, dropped framerates, color bleed, etc, compared to a high density physical disc. Depending on original film quality/graininess, even 4K becomes overkill.
Modern day shows are given stylized, "template" color palettes and grading, teal/orange for evoke one feeling, reds for another, yellows for yet another, etc. The filter makes it all easier to change the grading into what amounts to muted monochromatric muck. You'll also see how almost every poster made in the last 20 or so years has the same teal/orange and/or monochromatric palette. Looks more expensive but is ultimately cheaper...
I want STD to look like this: 8k
I don't care how they do it. 8k TVs are coming by EOY, by next EOY they will actually be more affordable. I'll probably buy one when I can get a 60inch model or so for under $2k
Did i read correctly,that the VFX are blurred to support a lower download rate?
They really don't seem to look that bad when they're tiny and cute like that.
Here are the Klingon ships from above in still images and not an off screen video
https://imgur.com/a/C6DU7
https://imgur.com/a/C6DU7
I think the Jach class is my favorite..
Just watched the first episode of Lost In Space on Netflix. That starship CGI was A+. Definitely more photoreal than DSC. Hopefully the VFX team will get better art direction and more time on Season 2.
The Lost in Space pilot was sooooo good!
One main difference I identified: The LiS pilot has almost perfect, flawless top-notch CGI. But they use it only very sparingly. There are only a few CGI-shots in the pilot sprinkled all throughout the hour, and mostly just background extensions. But most of the time, it was actors on a set or outside, talking.
OTOH the Discovery pilot had laaarge swaths where it was entirely CGI: Burnhams EVA-mission, the battle at the binary stars, her cell force field protecting her from space... It had like 10 times more CGI shots than LiS - and they looked mediocre. Not bad. But not better than those on Enterprise either.
I think LiS - like previous Trek series - used vfx the right way. It's still mostly character drama, and the big vfx shots are mostly to get from one scene to the next - and they look the best what the industry has to offer. DIS on the other hand tries to be a big blockbuster movie - where large vfx-scenes take over the narrative. The problem is: It sill has only a tv budget. And it shows.
I hope for future seasons of DIS that we will actually get less CGI-shots - and then mostly for background extensions, alien worlds, exotic monsters - but that those then look hopefully a lot better and more finished than what was presented in season 1.
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kept thinking towards the end of the pilot when the space stuff started to kick in, "why can't discovery look like this?"
realistic ships, planet and space, a little lens flare, but - most importantly - clear, understandable shots.
Here is a vfx-breakdown for Lost in Space.
Just FYI: This video contains MAJOR SPOILERS for LiS, it basically spoils the entire season! Luckily in chronological order - So you can safely watch the first few minutes of it. Just be warned: Major revelations towards the end of the series are spoiled here via vfx shots.
Of interest to note:
This vfx look MASSIVELY better than those in Discovery! Which is extremely impressive: LiS also has a lot more on-location shootings than DIS (which is usually more expensive), and much better production design. It's hard to believe that DIS is a waaaay more expensive show than LiS. Someone really dropped the ball behind the scenes.
A big difference is: There are only very limited vfs-scenes in LiS. But those look magnificantly flawless. Whereas on DIS, we often times have large sequences entirely dependand on CGI. It seems LiS was a bit smarter in their use, by trying to limit the total amount of vfx shots, but ensuring those look amazing. DIS OTOH was clearly written with blockbuster-like CGI-sequences in mind - and that may have just been too much to execute convincingly on a TV-budget.
Only about half way through LiS. But as the beginning of that video shows, there are vfx in many if not most of the outdoors shots, if only to put in the implausible backgrounds with the sideways mountains and fake trees. In contrast, it seems like VFX in Discovery are 90% used for space shots, which are of course 100% fake. I know that there are little VFX added into many of the live action scenes (holographic displays, turning the Pahvo vegetation blueish, etc) but these seem to be much more limited (other than the scenes on Vulcan, which were heavily CGI). Which actually makes it seem more "fake" in a way, because they're not seamlessly put together.
Honestly though, due to the structure of Discovery vs. Lost in Space, I think Discovery had the harder task ahead of it. The designers (both of special and practical effects) basically just had to come up with one set of designs for the whole season of LiS. On the other hand, DIS needed to waste time on designs which would be used for a single episode and then thrown away (like those weird butterfly-like Klingon fighters). In a certain way the series would have benefited tremendously from more, rather than less, serialization. Like, having a two-parter on Pahvo would have both made the location shooting cheaper, along with cutting down on the VFX budget (since they could use the blue sparkly aliens again).
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