NebulaClassGuy
Lieutenant Commander
In the meantime... calling Mike Okuda...
Anyone recognize this image?
- Thread starter TrickyDickie
- Start date
Just had a reply from Curt and he requested some preliminary low-res scans which I have just sent, so we are working on this. 
Just received the clips in the mail. Did a hi-res scan, but with the scanner I have it really didn't improve matters much, so I will be mailing them on shortly to Curt.
At first I thought there was a little more of the saucer visible in that scan, but I think it's just an artifact of the scanning/image processing, since there are other similar faint blobs of color that don't conform to the Enterprise shape.
I take it the white specks are damage to the film rather than stars.
Hopefully Curt will be able to restore the image.
I take it the white specks are damage to the film rather than stars.
Hopefully Curt will be able to restore the image.
I'm wondering if this is from the opening frames of "The Corbomite Maneuver"--with a re-use of the "push-in on the bridge dome" shot from "The Cage." Since the opening of "The Corbomite Maneuver" starts with a fade-in from black, it's possible that as the shot fades in at the very beginning, it does so a bit unevenly--and that some parts of the image fade in a tiny bit before the rest of the image.
It's just a thought.
It's just a thought.
Well, the first one looks like this:
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v176/wpthomas007/TOS FX/vlcsnap-00013.png
And the second one looks like this
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v176/wpthomas007/TOS FX/FlyAwayb.png
(seen in The Tholian Web, but first seen in Balance of Terror). Or maaaaaaybe this http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v176/wpthomas007/TOS FX/BotanyBayDropf.png from Space Seed. But the shot looks like it has more space around the ship, so I'm guessing Balance of Terror.
The wild part of that third shot is that it LOOKS like it comes from The Cage http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v176/wpthomas007/TOS FX/vlcsnap-00015.png but it's framed completely differently from what we saw on screen. Which makes me rethink my comment on the second shot. Could go either way.
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v176/wpthomas007/TOS FX/vlcsnap-00013.png
And the second one looks like this
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v176/wpthomas007/TOS FX/FlyAwayb.png
(seen in The Tholian Web, but first seen in Balance of Terror). Or maaaaaaybe this http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v176/wpthomas007/TOS FX/BotanyBayDropf.png from Space Seed. But the shot looks like it has more space around the ship, so I'm guessing Balance of Terror.
The wild part of that third shot is that it LOOKS like it comes from The Cage http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v176/wpthomas007/TOS FX/vlcsnap-00015.png but it's framed completely differently from what we saw on screen. Which makes me rethink my comment on the second shot. Could go either way.
Curt said that he was having some computer problems, so I found a good local photo studio that took care of this. The white specks that you see are from the bed of my scanner as I scanned the 8 x 10 enlargement:
First off, you should get some glass cleaner for your scanner. 
Second, that's definitely the pilot-era ship, but that bit of a protrusion atop the saucer is odd. Could it be the extra-high "Cage"-era bridge dome? The angle seems wrong for that, as does the width and shape of it.
Third, the cutoff doesn't seem to be quite a straight line; the angle of it across the saucer is different from that across the nacelle pylon. I was thinking maybe there was some kind of matte in the way, but now I'm wondering if maybe only part of the model is illuminated. But then, that would suggest they shot the ship against black rather than a bluescreen.
If it was shot against bluescreen, then this could be a botched matte shot.
Second, that's definitely the pilot-era ship, but that bit of a protrusion atop the saucer is odd. Could it be the extra-high "Cage"-era bridge dome? The angle seems wrong for that, as does the width and shape of it.
Third, the cutoff doesn't seem to be quite a straight line; the angle of it across the saucer is different from that across the nacelle pylon. I was thinking maybe there was some kind of matte in the way, but now I'm wondering if maybe only part of the model is illuminated. But then, that would suggest they shot the ship against black rather than a bluescreen.
If it was shot against bluescreen, then this could be a botched matte shot.
Seems like no matter how much I clean the surface of the scanner I still get the tiny particles.
It was definitely shot against black, rather than a blue screen. The guy at the photo lab said that he color-corrected the red shift as finely as possible and the background that resulted is very black with no hint of blue like the Space Seed shots, etc.
It was definitely shot against black, rather than a blue screen. The guy at the photo lab said that he color-corrected the red shift as finely as possible and the background that resulted is very black with no hint of blue like the Space Seed shots, etc.
^Yes, but the familiar "Space Seed" shots are just still photographs documenting the shot setup on the bluescreen stage. They aren't the actual footage that would've been shot by the FX camera itself. The way it works (or worked, rather) is that the scene is shot through a red filter that blocks out the blue light, so that what ends up on the film is a shot of the ship surrounded by blackness -- or, on the negative, by clear film. (And that's then processed to create the inverse matte, a silhouette of the ship which is used to burn a ship-shaped "hole" into the starscape footage so that the two can then be combined without the stars showing through the ship.) If this were a frame from the actual film shot by the FX camera, then the blue light would've been filtered out and you would've gotten an image of the ship against blackness.
And if it were that raw FX footage, then it would've been shot through a red filter which might've changed the color of the ship (which would've been color-corrected in processing). The overall red tinge of the deteriorated film may have obscured that.
Often the bluescreen was only part of the matting process; black sheets or partly blacked-out plates of glass, called "garbage mattes," would be positioned in front of the camera to block out the stand that supported the miniature or any other equipment or stagehands that would otherwise get in the shot. It's possible that what we're seeing here is the result of a misaligned garbage matte that blocked out most of the ship instead of just the stand.
Although I can see two problems with that proposition. One, the photos we have suggest that the miniature stand was painted blue, not blocked by a garbage matte. Two, the red filter isn't always perfect so there can be a difference in the quality of blackness between the bluescreen area and the garbage-matte area. (In the original FX footage of The Empire Strikes Back, this difference produced visible angular "blobs" around the matted miniatures, which were nearly invisible on the big screen but quite blatant on television.) So your photo-lab person could've probably detected that difference.
Anyway, I checked out Star Trek History and it shows some test shots the Howard Anderson Company did of the miniature in 1964, which do seem to have been shot against a black background (although some of the shots there look like the background has been mostly painted out by the restorer, so I can't be certain). So this could come from those test shots. Maybe they were specifically doing a lighting test on the nacelles and didn't bother to illuminate the whole ship?
And if it were that raw FX footage, then it would've been shot through a red filter which might've changed the color of the ship (which would've been color-corrected in processing). The overall red tinge of the deteriorated film may have obscured that.
Often the bluescreen was only part of the matting process; black sheets or partly blacked-out plates of glass, called "garbage mattes," would be positioned in front of the camera to block out the stand that supported the miniature or any other equipment or stagehands that would otherwise get in the shot. It's possible that what we're seeing here is the result of a misaligned garbage matte that blocked out most of the ship instead of just the stand.
Although I can see two problems with that proposition. One, the photos we have suggest that the miniature stand was painted blue, not blocked by a garbage matte. Two, the red filter isn't always perfect so there can be a difference in the quality of blackness between the bluescreen area and the garbage-matte area. (In the original FX footage of The Empire Strikes Back, this difference produced visible angular "blobs" around the matted miniatures, which were nearly invisible on the big screen but quite blatant on television.) So your photo-lab person could've probably detected that difference.
Anyway, I checked out Star Trek History and it shows some test shots the Howard Anderson Company did of the miniature in 1964, which do seem to have been shot against a black background (although some of the shots there look like the background has been mostly painted out by the restorer, so I can't be certain). So this could come from those test shots. Maybe they were specifically doing a lighting test on the nacelles and didn't bother to illuminate the whole ship?
