I've gone back and reimaged the sequence. I wanted the lights in the ship's windows to show a little better. I've always wanted to make this sequence and do it with some justice to the original. In other words, I hope I'm close. When I splice it into the correct spot and render it all out as a movie in the original episode, it gets all jittery. I need to fix that. Once I've got that fixed, I'll show the short movie. Thanks for looking in!
Beautiful! One small observation. The lighting in some of the saucer windows as well as the sensor domes look perhaps a bit too yellow or too faint. I think they were brighter on the original. Even so it looks stellar!
Thank you! Yeah, I'm not done with the ship, but I haven't had the time to go in and complete the work on it. I appreciate your encouragement!
This looks really good Eric, itll blend in perfectly to the live action footage. Looking forward to seeing this in animation. when you say jittery, are you referring to noise in the render or hickups in the framerate?
Frame rate ... I think. I'll have to look at the frame rate of the HD version. Perhaps my 29.9 FPS is too high. Thank you, Santaman!
I'm not sure how this works, but anytime I've messed with the frame rate from DVD or blu ray, it still comes out to 24 fps.
It took a little work to find the frame rate of the HD version, but you're right @Tallguy. Tomorrow I will re-render the sequence at 23.9 frames per second. I hope I'm almost there!
Not to derail the thread, but do we have any experts that know why this is? I'd expect the video formats to be 29.whatever. But I understand the episodes were shot on film at 24. So how does this work?
Okay, this is only a few seconds, and I think it is still a bit jittery, but here is my attempt at the opening titles for Where No Man Has Gone Before.
The look is perfect! We need Star Trek Continues to... continue! Your work would fit right in I see what you mean about the jitter, and dang it does seem like a frame rate issue... but you said you matched it so.. I guess Ill ask you this: When you make just pure animations, with no live action footage, and then compile a movie (at any frame rate) does it come out smooth or does it still hickup? As I see it, either you still have a frame rate mismatch, or else theres something going bungled in the movie encoding.
Thank you, you are very kind! Yeah, I took apart the Blu Ray Star Trek video sequence and it said the frame rate was 23.9 or something close to that. I have it written down somewhere. So, I matched that. I'll have to experiment to come up with something. I may even try full 2 MP renders and then crop out the sides. Who knows? I'll keep trying.
Do you have it as an actual video clip? Or did you export it as a sequence of frames and reimport it that way? As for the ship: It's not perfect but darned if I could tell you what's wrong with it! I don't want to give you a swelled head, but I was going through image files trying to clean up the other day and a few of yours were in the mix. I had to do a double take to see that they were yours and not screen shots.
Yeah, I created two versions of the effect as video clips, and each of the elements is available as individual images in case I want to work on them. I really was trying to get this to look more like the original. And for everything you said in your second paragraph, God love you, Bill! You, Sir, are spectacular! Thank you very much.
Okay, I want to see Eric film his model for every ship exterior sequence in WNMHGB including opening theme. If he can mimic the original energy barrier then it will rock! THAT will really be TOS enhanced.
The video has ended up with a framerate of 30 fps, which means that every fifth frame is a duplicate of the previous frame. I hope you don't mind, but I've converted it to 24fps here, removing the duplicates: It's still very slightly juddery, because there's no motion blur, giving it a stop-motion look. Here, I've post-processed some motion blur, and also added a little gate weave to match the original footage that follows your shot. Because it's all post on the original video, it's added some artifacts, such as "twinkling" stars. If you want me to delete these, just say, and I'll be happy to oblige.