do you think TOS should have been remastered?
- Thread starter Clym
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Should TOS have been remastered with new CGI? Yes, if the original film elements weren't available. Which they weren't.
Should more time and money been spent? Yes.
Should they have brought in people who understood how to frame shots? Yes.
Is TOS Remastered objectively better than the original effects? No. Thing of it all is, that had they had the original film elements to restore, the original effects would've blown the CGI stuff out of the water. The only thing the CGI effects have over the originals is that they are not as fuzzy.
All in my opinion. I won't claim that proving something to myself means that it is universally applicable.
Should more time and money been spent? Yes.
Should they have brought in people who understood how to frame shots? Yes.
Is TOS Remastered objectively better than the original effects? No. Thing of it all is, that had they had the original film elements to restore, the original effects would've blown the CGI stuff out of the water. The only thing the CGI effects have over the originals is that they are not as fuzzy.
All in my opinion. I won't claim that proving something to myself means that it is universally applicable.
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Fine reply--and once again, RAMA's ranting and personal attacks flush his posts down the proper channel....along with his obvious avoidance of older film references that did not (as he would have you believe his lie) need "pristine" elements in order to be "fit" for Blu-ray.
No.
It's ludicrous to think that being rendered on a computer instead of a model or a painting automatically makes it better art. If someone came along and said his Mac Paint version of The Scream was better because it was being done on better technology, oh and changed that ghastly green face to a nice SoCal suntan, you'd laugh in his face. Or maybe cringe.
It needed to be remastered for higher resolution, period. They didn't need to change the color of the Enterprise. They didn't need to change industrial bumpy ships to smooth as a mirror ships. They didn't need to change the composition of the shots.
Guys, it's just a damned TV show. Stop getting personal. I get enough petty bickering on Facebook, don't need to see it here.
If you can't post without getting pissy about it, then log off and go take a walk. Or read a book. Trust me, this tactic works when the 'net gets annoying.
If you continue personal attacks, I will warn.
If you can't post without getting pissy about it, then log off and go take a walk. Or read a book. Trust me, this tactic works when the 'net gets annoying.
If you continue personal attacks, I will warn.
Well, thanks, we tried really hard to walk that line. Speaking of lines: we even left in a few (subtle) matte lines.
Here's one of the most elaborate "old school" effects in the show. A few attempts had been made to do the black hole accretion disc in 3D but they never quite looked right. So after mulling on it I remembered that in 1940's Fantasia they generated the galaxy seen at the top of "Rite of Spring" by double-exposing rotating discs of artwork to create something that didn't appear flat even though it was composed of flat artwork. If you'd done this on an animation stand and and optical printer you might not have necessarily done as many layers of trickery as I did here, but this effect was almost 100% something you could have done in 1969.
BTW the "sun" here is actually a shot of rotating crumpled foil blurred and tinted and masked to create this shifting surface.
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Out of curiosity, if TOS was going to be given new special effects, why did they "have" to be stuff that could only be created with the technology that was around in the 1960s. While TOS was made in the 1960s, TOS-R was not. Why should the production team be limited instead of being allowed to use the best tools available at the time of specific production?
To maintain and respect the integrity of the original work.
Of course, that concept appears quite incomprehensible to a lot of people.
I'm one of those people for whom that mentality is entirely incomprehensible. If you have better tools and techniques, it's stupid not to use them. But what I do understand is limiting what could/should be done to the effects in order to match the aesthetic of the original footage. Watching TOS-R drives me crazy sometimes because the effects look like something created with modern tools and tech and the jarring nature of their inclusion removes me from the story. Now that's disrespectful.
Where in nature are there bipedal, upright-walking reptiles that wear clothes?
That is abundantly apparent.
Where in nature are there bipedal, upright-walking reptiles that wear clothes?
Any animal unfortunate enough to have owners that dress them up and walk them around can answer that for you. Roughly before they shout "kill me".
I'd say the remastered versions were worthwhile for a few reasons:
(i) The new establishing shots were well done and really added something - such as those inserted in the scenes of arrival on Vulcan in "Amok Time" and on Flint's planet in "Requiem for Methuselah"
(ii) The all-electronic time readout on the bridge (running backwards in "The Naked Time") was absolutely necessary; the clock with rotating-drum numerals in the original - which I've seen in real life, a clock my grandparents had in the 1960s - was hopelessly antiquated, more than anything else ever shown in the NBC version of the series
(iii) We get to see things we know should be visible given the script (but were skipped for cost reasons), such as the Klingon ship in "The Trouble with Tribbles"
(iv) The new and varied shots of the Enterprise leaving orbit at the ends of episodes are largely terrific - in particular, those where a dayside/nightside terminator can be seen, which was something never shown in the original
(i) The new establishing shots were well done and really added something - such as those inserted in the scenes of arrival on Vulcan in "Amok Time" and on Flint's planet in "Requiem for Methuselah"
(ii) The all-electronic time readout on the bridge (running backwards in "The Naked Time") was absolutely necessary; the clock with rotating-drum numerals in the original - which I've seen in real life, a clock my grandparents had in the 1960s - was hopelessly antiquated, more than anything else ever shown in the NBC version of the series
(iii) We get to see things we know should be visible given the script (but were skipped for cost reasons), such as the Klingon ship in "The Trouble with Tribbles"
(iv) The new and varied shots of the Enterprise leaving orbit at the ends of episodes are largely terrific - in particular, those where a dayside/nightside terminator can be seen, which was something never shown in the original
Just discovered that CBS All Access has TOS with the original VFX, not the remastered ones. And it's glorious to see. So much better.
So what's the problem, then?
A.) The original broadcast versions (in high picture and sound quality) have been kept in circulation. In fact, if you get the Blu-Rays, you get both in one package.
B.) TOS-R was faithful to the original broadcast versions. The vast majority of the effects were re-creations of the original ones with higher picture quality. Even the new designs were made in the style of the TOS models and stuff. And most of the new designs were either stuff we'd never seen before or things that had only been scene as blobs of light.
Most of the time the original cinematography was re-created to follow the original cut (and those that didn't usually had the same visual ideas in mind, so it was like seeing the same scene from a different angle).
So, did TOS-R "maintain and respect the integrity of the original work"? Heck, yeah. Esp. given that it's designed to sit along side, not replace, the original and that the changes fit within the show's visual story-telling style.
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