trevanian, leave the personal rancor outside.
For Blu-Ray, will TMP have to have all new FX?
- Thread starter Mr. Laser Beam
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ST-One
Vice Admiral
trevanian
Rear Admiral
Well, you could search older threads to get this stuff, but here's a digest version.
The surface textures on the top shot are very nice, but they are all over, as opposed to being spotty (the way they would be on an actual object, where the speculars are not consistent in appearance. More significantly (and easier to ID) are the bits of ship that show a photographic dynamic range, which ARE present in the model shots. The CG defects manifest in two obvious ways: either the whites are dead, like mailing label stickers, or the blacks are milky. You CAN get around this with ships in CG, as evidenced by some of FIREFLY and the really high end CG work in SOLARIS. In the case of Zoic, they do multiple passes so that you can get a highlight and deep shadow in separate goes, and it adds up to something like a full range image, but that is apparently not what happened with Foundation on TMP (even though a lot of zoic folk came from Foundation.)
I was very impressed when I first saw the still image of Dochtermann's cg refit many years ago, and so i was really disappointed when I saw the TMP de, which seemed to squander some of the image quality. In still form, it seems great (Stringer is a good artist IMO), but in the context of the film, it doesn't cut well, probably because the high quality of miniature photography creates too great a chasm for this level of cg to reach.
I have to think about this stuff to explain it, because it just looks obvious to my eye. Whether that is because I have made a study of this or whether it is just because I'm colorblind and see things differently, I don't know; it just is that clear to me in most cases. It is not objectionable for everybody, but it drives me bugfuck, ESPECIALLY when you're cutting into modelwork that is for the most part superb.
My honest opinion, years ago AND now, is that you could have achieved a more successful (i.e., better-matched) effect by just animating really high quality stills of the ship and dropping in animation for the lighting, rather than doing the whole digital business. The new shots have almost no perspective change, so you don't lose anything by using stills, but you have a higher existing image quality level with the large format stills (which is why when you do it right, stills are great -- use something like a hasselblad and you have a still that is much higher range and higher quality than the movie camera being used to photograph it -- sort of like using IMAX for process work [see newest BatFlick], it doesn't look like process because it looks as sharp as the live action foreground.)
Something else to keep in mind w/ respect to home video is the timing (hotness) of the transfer. While folks claim that the DE most resembles the theatrical version, I strongly disagree. I saw exactly one print (six months after the film came out) that was as bright as the DE ... the rest were all a lot darker (the 1980 calendar gives you a good read on how it looked in the theater) presumably because Wise had the prints darkened to hide bad matte line work. When you brighten up a transfer, you can make perfectly decent matte paintings look bad, and mediocre matte paintings look godawful. At least one of the wingwalk shots (the first one, when the people come up) looked good in the theater, but awful on home vid. Then again, the side saucer view always looked horrible, even in the theater. So there's a lot to take into account when evaluating this stuff, both then and now.
trevanian
Rear Admiral
hey, i ain't the one flipping the universe the great bird.
Trevanian ain't crazy, though I think his being color blind may have a hightening effect on his ability to see the difference. I know that I can, and always have been able to, tpod CGI ships in a film. No matter how good the CGI gets, it never looks as good as high quality model work.
trevanian
Rear Admiral
One of the problems with the last decade in vfx is the scanning film elements at 2k thing, which essentially wipes out half the information. This has the effect on occasion of taking a very nice miniature (or even a real life element) and making it look like whole cloth CG, because you lose the qualities that make it look real in the first place. The example I point to is the xjet in hangar (not flying, that is the Digital Domain CG jet) in the first XMEN. That is actually a well built miniature by Matte World Digital, and it was well photographed too, but the final comp LOOKS like a cg shot because the nicest aspects of the plane somehow got squeezed out after it was filmed. (I've seen the miniature in person and also the original plate work, so I really do have a good basis for comparison on this ... in the theater I was astonished at how bad it looked, given it was just fine before.)
The last 3 pics you have here are really good examples of what I was talking about earlier, where the whites just don't have luminescence and the darks are unnaturally ... well, light, instead of falling off into black. You can get that by doing a bad job of comping a model (like the xjet example, I point to TRIALS AND TRIB, because they took good models there and made them seem like CG due to bad contrast), but it is far more prevalent with CG originated stuff. The level of detail that just REGISTERS in the shadow area makes the image very painterly instead of photorealistic.
The top image with the pyro looks good to me, but I don't know this version of the movie. The daylight ocean ship shot is a bold try, but I prefer most of the stuff in the original (not the capt's POV stuff, that is bad.)
the middle image (between the jog shot and some dark shot) is the one I find most objectionable ... it just doesn't have any life at all, just spectacle.
The last 3 pics you have here are really good examples of what I was talking about earlier, where the whites just don't have luminescence and the darks are unnaturally ... well, light, instead of falling off into black. You can get that by doing a bad job of comping a model (like the xjet example, I point to TRIALS AND TRIB, because they took good models there and made them seem like CG due to bad contrast), but it is far more prevalent with CG originated stuff. The level of detail that just REGISTERS in the shadow area makes the image very painterly instead of photorealistic.
The top image with the pyro looks good to me, but I don't know this version of the movie. The daylight ocean ship shot is a bold try, but I prefer most of the stuff in the original (not the capt's POV stuff, that is bad.)
the middle image (between the jog shot and some dark shot) is the one I find most objectionable ... it just doesn't have any life at all, just spectacle.
ST-One
Vice Admiral
Not a word you say here makes any sense at all.
We can just file this under 'trevanian's hatred of CGI'
Sorry, he makes perfect sense on that count. That you can't see it doesn't make him wrong. I don't always agree with Trevanian, but he's spot on in that particular post.
An easy test on how real an effcts shot looks is to take all the color out of it and check the contrast and highlights. I once did this to some shots from Dragonheart and you could instantly see that the blacks didn't match. The CG elements had a much flatter dynamic range that the photography it was being combined with.
ST-One
Vice Admiral
These comps are made for color-film and -TV.
So, who cares if they don't match in black-and-white?
If you cannot see a difference until you have to fiddle with the image the comp is good.
trevanian
Rear Admiral
Actually that B&W idea of his is a good one, because it clues you in to how far off you are on tonal range.
But I would put the converse of your question to you ... how bad does a comp have to be before you have to ride the darkness on your tv? In the case of NEMESIS, for most of the stuff in the nebula, I have to take the brightness down twenty points (and I'd need to turn the set off to make the last shot in drydock look any good.)
Go rent SOLARIS and look at the docking sequence (it is in the first reel or two, you won't fall asleep that soon.) I sure don't hate that work (in fact I love it), and that is CGI, but the work is done to a much higher standard (I think it was all done at 4K.) And it doesn't matter how you screw up your TV, the picture looks amazingly good IMO.
ST-One
Vice Admiral
I actually don't care how far off the comp looks in black-and-white when it looks perfectly fine in color.
Ever considered that your TV isn't properly set up?
In the Nebula sequence I only the one fly-by badly lit when we see the Rift for the first time in the distance (the Enterprise flies towards the camera - here the main light source seems to be coming from the camera's POV direction; almost always a bad decision - then passes until we she her from behind)
The drydock is indeed over-lit.
I bought Solaris this year, and boy do I regret this (it is even more boring than 2001).
I don't think there is any reasioning with ST-One...
trevanian
Rear Admiral
The 2001 comment sounds pretty damning, I'll agree ...
Well, I love that one and it still has a tendency to put me to sleep before the end sometimes.
I don't study film for a living, and I've agreed with everything trevanian's said.
Does that mean I'm old and bitter?
Does that mean I'm old and bitter?
trevanian
Rear Admiral
I don't study film for a living, and I've agreed with everything trevanian's said.
Does that mean I'm old and bitter?
If that was meant as an insult, it is among the nicest I've ever received (and better than a helluva lot of lip-service compliments.)
ST-One
Vice Admiral
Even though I agree with trevanian that there are some horribly lit shots in Nemesis, but do not agree with his assessment about these images from Poseidon?
Could either of you show me (in these images - without fiddeling with them) what so screems CG that makes them look so fake to you?
ST-One
Vice Admiral
I don't study film for a living, and I've agreed with everything trevanian's said.
Does that mean I'm old and bitter?
Well, the only real visual difference between the original TMP-miniature and this CG-version is that the (larger) windows (unfortunately) lack the same depth (probably because they just illuminated the window-surfaces instead of putting some geometry behind them - but it safes time and isn't really noticable when animated/in motion)
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