Poll Do you prefer the digitally remastered Enterprise?

[scotpens]

The 11-foot physical model looked and moved like it had mass and substance. The CG Enterprise looks at best like high-quality game animation. And the digital artists never could get the spinning light effect in the nacelle domes to look like the original.

But then again the more outdated it looks, the harder it is to relate to it.

You must find it absolutely impossible to appreciate the original King Kong or Metropolis, then.

This is exactly what Star Trek looked like on TV in it's original TV broadcast.

That YouTube video looks like a third or fourth-generation VHS tape. If Star Trek looked like that when originally broadcast, it must have been in fringe areas where the TV reception was really crappy.

 

[spockboy]

The 11-foot physical model looked and moved like it had mass and substance. The CG Enterprise looks at best like high-quality game animation. And the digital artists never could get the spinning light effect in the nacelle domes to look like the original.


You must find it absolutely impossible to appreciate the original King Kong or Metropolis, then.


That YouTube video looks like a third or fourth-generation VHS tape. If Star Trek looked like that when originally broadcast, it must have been in fringe areas where the TV reception was really crappy.

It wasn't just that. A lot of stations right up to the 80`s would use worn out 16mm prints that were all scratchy and dirty, that coupled with far from perfect TV reception makes the Youtube video pretty accurate.


Spockboy

 

[JeffinOakland]

The problem w "remastered" is it doesn't match w the original acting/sets/clothes/hair etc...1960s show with 21st century fx

 

[Metryq]

I think more it was done somewhat on the cheap

^ This.

and to CBS Digital's defense, the effects are over 10 years old

Piffle. There are CGI effects much older than that which look stunning. For example, James Cameron's Titanic (1997, ten years older still) used a combination of practical models and CGI. The seascape in the "king of the world" shot was grand. All that water was computer generated. The Machine in Contact (also 1997) was impressive in scale and texture. Dare I say it? Lost In Space (1998) had solar prominences and turbulence that were visceral, while CBS Digital gave us a slingshot effect ("Tomorrow Is Yesterday") that looked like a videogame.

CBS Digital went cheap on TOS-R, and it had nothing to do with estimations of how many HDTVs were in the market.

Someone said recently that the trick is to scale your CGI model to 11 feet long, not 947, if you want to create TOS-like fx shots.

Tongue-in-cheek humor. There is no absolute scale in CGI, as anyone who has moved models between apps knows. (How do Granger units convert to English or Metric measures?) Depth-of-field and other scale effects are all relative and can be adjusted. TOS and ST-TMP both used practical models of approximately the same size, yet ST-TMP had shots that made the ship look really big. There were some movie tech advances for ST-TMP, but the difference is mostly due to budget and time available. TOS was behind schedule on the visual effects throughout the first season. CBS Digital could have made Enterprise shots that looked much better than the originals, yet which would fit in with the design aesthetic of the rest of the show. Either they didn't put that much effort into it, or their well-intentioned aesthetic choices were way off the mark.

 

[Forbin]

The 11-foot physical model looked and moved like it had mass and substance.

I always say that too, but I suddenly realize what an ironic statement it is, considering the 11-foot model never moved! The camera did (Of course, it was a large, bulky camera with lots of mass and substance )

 

[Metryq]

That's another example of the Enterprise "swish!" passing the camera. The ship is massive, yet can flit here and there at FTL speeds without flattening everybody inside into wallpaper. From outside—assuming no distortions in the view—the Enterprise would appear to dart about in an "unrealistic" or "out of scale" manner. So aside from the VFX limitations, the slower, more stately maneuvers seen in TOS are also a concession to the audience's expectations.

The "aztecking" of the ship's hull is another example. Suppose future tech makes it possible to produce seamless, perfectly smooth surfaces on objects that big. The specularity (glossiness) and lack of detail would tell 20th/21st century viewers that the object was rather small. What I liked about the motion in The Matrix and Speed Racer is that the VFX artists made it fantastic, yet somehow believable. For example, no one changed direction in mid air, and collisions still produced rebounds or revolutions. Given the right touch, a zipping Enterprise might be made to look right. (Think of the "rubber band" warp drive effect introduced in ST-TMP.)

 

[Warped9]

^^ I think the key might be to establish the ship's size and mass (in the audience's perceptions) before showing the ship executing acrobatic maneuvers. Then they can more easily accept it as the same object.

 

[The Laughing Vulcan]

I prefer the digital FX work in Babylon 5 to what was done for TOS-R, and that was 23 years ago. The reason is consistency. The ships looked the same from episode to episode. In TOS-R, the look of the Enterprise changes from shot to shot. There are some scenes in TOS-R that I love, absolutely beautiful work, getting the majesty and weight of the ship just right. And then in the next scene, the resolution drops, and there might even be glitch in the render. If they could just maintain consistency across the series, I would have been happier to watch the remaster. As it is, I'll stick with the original effects from now on.

And the shuttle scenes all looked like pants.

 

[Warped9]

The shuttlecraft and hangar scenes look horrid.

 

[Jedman67]

Someone said recently that the trick is to scale your CGI model to 11 feet long, not 947, if you want to create TOS-like fx shots.

Tongue-in-cheek humor. There is no absolute scale in CGI, as anyone who has moved models between apps knows. (How do Granger units convert to English or Metric measures?) Depth-of-field and other scale effects are all relative and can be adjusted. TOS and ST-TMP both used practical models of approximately the same size, yet ST-TMP had shots that made the ship look really big. There were some movie tech advances for ST-TMP, but the difference is mostly due to budget and time available. TOS was behind schedule on the visual effects throughout the first season. CBS Digital could have made Enterprise shots that looked much better than the originals, yet which would fit in with the design aesthetic of the rest of the show. Either they didn't put that much effort into it, or their well-intentioned aesthetic choices were way off the mark.

Not quite. It's been a while since I read his blog post; but essentially, you program the camera and the model and the render paths etc based on certain scales. Scaling everything to motion-control rig sizes gives a more "accurate" DOF and "feel" when compared to the actual filmed elements of the ship.

 

[Metryq]

Scaling everything to motion-control rig sizes gives a more "accurate" DOF and "feel" when compared to the actual filmed elements of the ship.

I believe I said that. ("Depth-of-field and other scale effects are all relative and can be adjusted.") Tilt-shift is one example of cuing the viewer that something is very small—even when it really is not.

When I was making medical animations that would be shown with a video projector, the client asked me to render at 24 fps then apply a 3:2 pulldown because it made the motion look more "film-like." The client didn't actually know all this technical felgercarb. He had simply seen one of my other animations prepped that way for NTSC. What he didn't know is that he'd been conditioned to 3:2 pulldown as "what film looks like, as opposed to video."

Likewise, the DOF and other adjustments for "motion control rig sizes" is a conditioned response—also like the aztecking I mentioned above. The trick to making "invisible" visual effects is hitting all the same cues as real imagery, or at least making the VFX shots match the rest of the production design so that they don't jump out and shout, "I'm a special effects shot!"

 

[Mr Awe]

I don't care too much. However, I'm very glad that the original SFx are available on the Blu Rays. I'll often watch the remastered versions, but I love having the original versions too. I would have been bugged if the original versions weren't available.

Mr Awe

 

[Jedman67]

@Metryq:
http://trekmovie.com/2013/05/14/dou...-to-star-trek-continues-exclusive-first-look/
Obviously being a digital model the scale can be *anything*. You can rename feet to inches or miles and if everything is relative its not going to make any difference. But I can't think of any other reason that he would say that matching it up to an 11-foot scale made all the difference, unless he was trying to simply the concept for those not familiar with 3d modeling.

 

[Mr Awe]

That's the player that's doing that, not the disc itself. Any decent Blu-Ray player will let you disable notifications.

Yes, I never see those notification. It just plays which ever version I want to see. I love having the Blu-Rays though.

Mr Awe

 

[Metryq]

But I can't think of any other reason that he would say that matching it up to an 11-foot scale made all the difference, unless he was trying to simply the concept for those not familiar with 3d modeling.

The whole idea of visual effects photography seems to escape you.

Drexler commented, "The difference in the lens distortion alone makes it a non-starter."

He was talking to a reporter. That's all fluff. CGI rendering is not actual photography; the "camera" and lens have no actual size. But distortions similar to those of real lenses can be programmed. If I return to the TOS/TMP analogy used above, one of the things the TMP cinematographers did to make the ship look bigger was use wide-angle lenses, bordering on fisheye. The very same thing can be done with any object in the computer, or real world. All the visual cues we've come to expect from this highly artificial and stylized art form known as photography can be invoked "properly" or "out of context" for the sake of contrast.

Did the real-world city in the photo below have to be miniaturized in order to get the table-top effect? No, tilt-shift photography with a real-world camera forced all the verticals and created a fake depth-of-field effect. That's an example of an "out of context" application of visual cues. Likewise, a CGI model of the Enterprise can be made to look big or small by changing the field-of-view of the lens and adding or removing depth-of-field—all without changing the unit size of the model.

What Drexler did is invoke all the same miniature model cues from TOS. Instead of trying fake a real world object, he is trying to fake miniature photography—the same way my "film-look" client wanted me to fake film by invoking the artifacts one sees on NTSC.

 

[drt]

Piffle. There are CGI effects much older than that which look stunning. For example, James Cameron's Titanic (1997, ten years older still) used a combination of practical models and CGI. The seascape in the "king of the world" shot was grand. All that water was computer generated. The Machine in Contact (also 1997) was impressive in scale and texture. Dare I say it? Lost In Space (1998) had solar prominences and turbulence that were visceral, while CBS Digital gave us a slingshot effect ("Tomorrow Is Yesterday") that looked like a videogame.

CBS Digital went cheap on TOS-R, and it had nothing to do with estimations of how many HDTVs were in the market.

All of those examples are big-budget theatrical releases, so comparing TOS-R to that is apples and oranges, because CBS was never going to spend that kind of money. CBS Digital made TOS-R to sell a new TV syndication package in 2006, they weren't trying to future proof TOS any more than that, so they were never going to spend any more money than it would take to make it meet the price point of the customers willing to buy such a show, which unfortunately, wasn't us.

 

[Jedman67]

The whole idea of visual effects photography seems to escape you.
He was talking to a reporter. That's all fluff. CGI rendering is not actual photography; the "camera" and lens have no actual size. But distortions similar to those of real lenses can be programmed.

I'm aware it's not "real". I have a passing familiarity with 3D modeling, played with it a little in high school and college not much since then. All the settings that can be done with a real camera can be programmed to render a 3D image or video.
What I was trying to say earlier is that Dougs comments in the article of making it "11 feet" rather than "900 feet" was not referring to the constructed size of the model but that the way he had set up his CGI Enterprise cameras, lenses and lights etc. to simulate a camera rig filming an 11 foot model.
That's what I meant to say by "scale"; the difference in size, dof, distance and perspective between the camera and the model.

 

[Nightdiamond]

You must find it absolutely impossible to appreciate the original King Kong or Metropolis, then.

I think the original King Kong is a masterpiece. Because it fools you.

Not all special effects come off right, so it depends on what I'm watching/seeing.

The shots of the original Enterprise fits in with the rest of environment of the show.

I even like the grain and streaks because it made the Enterprise look huge.

The scenes in TOS where someone is firing a phaser and they're standing completely still (freeze frame) you know it looks odd, so you kind of have to nod it off.

Today's CGI is overdoing it, IMO, because it looks too obvious it's CGI. It doesn't really fool you anymore.

 

[seigezunt]

Wow, I had no idea so many people didn't like it. I have to wonder that it probably won't age well as the years continue.

 

[alensatemybuick1]

I see this thread keeps coming TTT; was happy to see the O.P. added my suggested option ("I'll take any version I can get"), which I have now voted for. I'm rather pleased to see that between that option, "I don't care" and "yes", there are apparently 40% of us who at the very least don't mind seeing the remastered E.

It's worst has been well documented, but at its best, the CGI Enterprise could be excellent. I was watching "A Private Little War" this past weekend, and thought the shot of the ship leaving orbit at the episode's end was gorgeous.