The OFFICIAL STNG-R general discussion thread!

Take another look - it looks like the same pattern to me, but with some of the lights on the original dimmer against the overlit hull than in the new version.

 

http://www.randomtuesday.com/archive/?view=./Star Trek: The Next Generation/bluray/court.gif

 

It's the same model that they used in the original shot. Every window lines up. The CGI model they used in the other shots is not that precise and simply couldn't line up exactly. For whatever reason, they did some weird stuff with the lighting / shadow passes.

 

What about the weird square black boxes sprinkled throughout? And no windows on the saucer rim? And the fact that it has the same weird glow around the saucer edge that we see in the acknowledged CGI work from Sins of the Father?

 

I adore the remastered quality but if those are CGI ships as the Klingon Vs. Enterprise D shot seems to be i'm a bit put off to be honest.

 

Dude, what do you want me to say? I put the two images in photoshop, overlaid one on the other and they match EXACTLY. It's the original footage but over manipulated.

 

That is weird. The more I look at it, the more the HD Enterprise doesn't look like the same model. Look at the Neck/deflector, the contours don't seem to match up, the remastered one looks thinner than the original, which if it were a cleaned up chroma key the opposite would probably have been true.

The recessed windows on the inner saucer also look much more flush with the hull rather than indented.

But then why this one shot? The original looks like the 6 footer rather than the 2 ft model. Its certainly a weird one.

 

I guess if you're the expert, but they really don't look anything alike.

 

Something wrong with the original negatives I would imagine. But it does stick out like a sore thumb against the rest of the Encounter at Farpoint footage.

 

I'm no expert, I'm just saying that the shots line up perfectly when overlaid. The CGI model they have isn't an exact replica and would have to show some differences when overlaid. The biggest difference when I overlaid the images is from the extremely dark shadows. Makes it look very different indeed.

If it is CGI, then they painstakingly matched all of the lights and position of the ship.

That transition you posted isn't lined up properly, so it's not an accurate representation.

 

Take a real close look at what Dac caught. I actually missed it the first time around, the inset windows from the original shot look like they were painted on in the new shot...

I think it's a CG model. Why preserve the lighting of every other ship shot in the episode yet flood this one particular shot with so much light that makes shadows that masks the details of the model?

 

The tape really distorted the shape of the ship. Check the early TrekCore comparison screencaps of the ship from the end of the TNG opening sequence. There's a huge gap between the lines on the old DVD screencaps and the cleaned up Blu-Ray stuff. It seems like the tape they used added a fuckton of blur or something and that's what throwing people off.

Look here. The top of Shuttlebay one is a lot thicker on the old DVD footage, while on the Blu-Ray, it's fairly thin.

 

This'll probably stretch the page but I made this little spot check:

EDIT: Here's a rescaled version.



Now, some areas match while others don't. This is most likely down to the movement of the ship (these are two different frames for example) but I don't recall it moving in that shot. That may have changed, or it may be a new shot altogether. Either way, its a real close match and it shows they did try when it came to keeping it as it was.

Oh, and in case you can't tell the SD is on Top, HD "through" the holes.

EDIT 2. Electric Boogaloo: Of course, what bullethead said is probably spot on. The distortion of the video could have created the incompatibilities seen here.

 

I'm thinking they are the original elements (exterior of the ship, and internal lighting pass) made to look very different through artistic choices in digital compositing. Perhaps they were experimenting with this shot to see if they could get more of a theatrical look to the ship, rather than the uniform, brightly lit TV look.

 

It's not the model so much as the lighting that make me question whether it's a model or CG. Why be so faithful to the lighting schemes up to and after this particular shot, yet have this one look so different?

 

Well, to be fair Encounter at Farpoint originally was a bit of a botch job. There were a few shots which were incorrectly lit or not lit at all, had no windows or completely blue nacelles with a badly overlaid/painted on glow.

The original shot in this case isn't the worst of the worst, but the lighting on the nacelles still looks a bit cheap, and the colour is a bit washed out all over. At the very least the remaster is more dynamic, because it has dark shadows and bright brights. Of course, while the original is a bit overexposed, I think the remaster may have pushed the contrast a bit too high, but this is only a second long shot after all thats used only once in the series iirc.


If anything, the bigger question is why has the phaser beam colour changed from a fairly normal looking yellow beam to the TOS style blue one?

 

^It's not a phaser beam. It's an energy beam.

 

I think it might have been to contrast it from a phaser beam. Either that or to reflect that they were transferring a whole of energy to the space jellyfish.

 

My two cents - certainly worth no more than that:

The two shots in question seem to be slightly different angles, but I think it's very unlikely that the new one is a CG model. Too many of the complex curves, spatial relationships and so on are identical when overlaid, and something to remember about the original 1701-D model is that it was a painstaking hand-made sculptural piece - there's nothing machine-precise about the many curves of its hull. Even if scanning/digitizing the six-footer would be a technological option, it's unlikely that the studio has access to it in anything like its original form, and a CG model built from blueprint reference (even blueprints carefully prepared by someone who worked with the model) wouldn't match all those elements that perfectly.

The original model photography, as someone has doubtless mentioned, would have been done in multiple passes - at least one separate pass for the window and hull lights, for example - so these elements could be "dialed up" or down, color corrected etc. relative to one another for the new composite.