The part where he lets a camera drift over a good still of the refit reminds me how animating a high quality still photo can look better than low rez cg.
I was thinking the opposite since there was no shift in perspective...
Precious little change in perspective in most of the DE cg refit shots ... kind of surprising if you look at the some dynamic moves that were already in the original film ... I figured if they added 'energy probe approaches ship' you'd see a 180, when the thing comes out of the cloud, passes camera which follow pans, then winds up on the E as the probe dives right in on the bridge. No fancy 'track to infinity' -- just a 'geography' kind of shot that takes advantage of widescreen, like tracking a torpedo fired toward a ship.
Doing something in the wormhole from 'behind' the asteroid, which blows and then you see E fly through into camera, would have been preferable as well, IMO. I'm also of the opinion that the parts of the Dykstra asteroid explosion you can see in the original longer trailer are better than what was in the theatrical anyway, so there were misjudgements made in 79 as well as 1999/2000.
Seeing that DVD and being dissatisfied with what they did is what started me off thinking on the still cutout animation notion (you do need an animation stand, since you need to add running light type interactives), which would have been achievable and would not have resolution issues, since you use stills that are higher resolution than the taking film, a la earlier Trumbull works. Such stills should have been in abundance since trek had 35000 stills taken before the show went into post, and the post process was documented as well, and the high quality stills used for at least some of the model publicity were blown up VERY large (I wish I still had my poster, a pricey pickup from a 1980 con, of the refit passing camera -- it was a photographic print, probably 20x24 -- it showed more detail than I've seen on any film frame from any trekflick.)
