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Perfect example of what they SHOULD have done with the TNG-R FX

Ian Keldon

Ian Keldon

Fleet Captain
Don't know why I can't get "embed" to work, so link will have to do:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9Kk2GINcW4&feature=related

Completely respectful of the style of the original FX with improved dynamism and production value.

This guy picked a good one to "redo"...Love the Ent-C/D vs Klingon fight in "Yesterday's Enterprise" in concept, but it was WAY limited by what they could afford to do with the models.
 
Have you somehow miraculously traveled to the future and brought back with you a copy of the TNG Season 3 Blu-Ray? Because unless you have, I don't see any reason why this video applies to how Paramount "Should" have done anything with the visual effects for the currently released Blu-Rays, nor why you would be complaining about them.
 
The announced "mission statement" for the remastering effort for TNG is to simply re-scan and re edit the original film elements exactly as originally presented, as opposed to rendering NEW scences and sequences as was done with TOS-R.

This is a missed opportunity, and the above video demonstrates how the FX could be substantially improved while remaining faithful to the tone and style of the show.
 
First question: Have you bought the season one Blu-Ray set and watched it yet?

Second question: Has it occurred to you that perhaps this is being done this way to save money?

Re-scanning original elements may cost less and take less time to produce than hiring out a company to render all new CGI. Perhaps the season one Blu-Rays aren't making the crazy profit Paramount was hoping for/expecting and they've decided that since they've basically re-opened the show's post-production department to do this, they've already spent enough excessive amounts of money?
 
Ian Keldon said:
Don't know why I can't get "embed" to work, so link will have to do:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9Kk2GINcW4&feature=related

Completely respectful of the style of the original FX with improved dynamism and production value.

This guy picked a good one to "redo"...Love the Ent-C/D vs Klingon fight in "Yesterday's Enterprise" in concept, but it was WAY limited by what they could afford to do with the models.
Click to expand...
Actually based on what we have seen so far, I think what we will get in the blu-ray will show considerably higher production value then that you tube video.

While I might like to see some of the generic flyby shots replaced with high quality CGI fx, CBS is already spending more on this project then any other tv show has ever had to be released on any home market, and I don't think CBS is going to spend the time or money to supply top of the line CGI work after all the other expenses they have. And most of the model work for this sequences isn't previously used footage, we might wish it had more movement, but it should actually still look extremely good.
 
I hope to God they end up disappointing the OP when they get round to season three. That youtube video is horrendous. The FX looks like something captured from Bridge Commander or somewhere like that. This stuff can't hold a candle to the remastered FX or even the SD FX for that matter.
 
Yeah, I don't think they should do this at all. They're remastering the series, not changing things (errors aside).
 
You know, as much as I like the improved fight choreography in the OP's video, they're not going to replace the VFX despite the myriad reasons for it (one of them being the fact that it would make the alternate Federation not look like retards like the original does). They don't have the time or money, nor the mindset to do it.
 
If the season 1 remastering is any indication, I think the HD models are gonna look better than the CGI in the original post. in fact, I'd bet on it.
 
So, let's get this straight...

-You want to crop the image to widescreen from it's original aspect ratio, ruining the composition of the shot.
-You want to replace the original model photography with mediocre-at-best computer generated visual effects -- effects that don't even bother to be any more visually dynamic than the originals.

What a horrible, awful idea. Thankfully, not one we'll have to witness, except via fan-made YouTube clips.
 
From what I've heard Mike Okuda say, money isn't the issue; they want to be as faithful as possible to the original episodes. If anything, I'd imagine that tracking down, remastering, and recompositing all the original bits of film that the FX shots were made from would be longer, harder, more involved work than creating all-CGI reconstructions, so I'm not sure any money is being saved.

As for that YouTube video, I don't see any material difference between the original shot choreography and this version.
 
What they should have done for TOS-R: reshoot the sequences on film with real models. The CGI reconstruction just look way off. They don't fit into the episodes at all.
 
Um, I don't get it. Except for the ships being CG, it looked like the pretty much the exact same sequence.

Why go through all the trouble to make this if you're not going to at least come up with some cool new shots and choreography? :wtf:

I will admit, though, the episode looks pretty damn good in widescreen.
 
Christopher said:
As for that YouTube video, I don't see any material difference between the original shot choreography and this version.
Click to expand...

Well quite, I was pretty baffled by the whole thing. Why bother if you're just going to replace the models with inferior CGI?

I actually don't think the battle needs to be more "dynamic" or exciting - the whole point is that the Enterprise-D is protecting her predecessor, taking the fire from the Klingons. If she were trying to defeat the enemy, I imagine there would be more evasive manoeuvres, but they would leave the Enterprise-C exposed and vulnerable to a couple of shots from the Klingons. Picard is essentially making his ship a sitting duck, as long as the Enterprise-C can get back into the rift.
 
^You're quite right about the strategy. Still, the problem with both the original and CG versions of the sequence is that space is mindbogglingly huge, and ships in a battle would probably be hundreds of thousands of kilometers apart and travelling at very high speeds, not sitting in naked-eye view of each other and crawling along at construction-vehicle speed. Of course, an accurate depiction of a space battle would be incomprehensible to the viewer because it would just be a few faint points of light whizzing by in the distance, if even that (since the ships would probably try to minimize their EM emissions for concealment, so you'd only see flashes of light when engines fired or explosions happened). Still, I have always found TNG space battles like this one, which seemed to be emulating the style of TWOK, to be implausibly sluggish and compact.
 
Yeah, I don't get this idea that widescreen is the only worthwhile format. It's good for things that make sense to be wide, like spectacular landscapes in a Western or big dance numbers in West Side Story, but not everything needs to be wide and flat. Go to a museum and you'll see that not all paintings fit in the same frame. Read a comic book and you'll see that some frames are wide while others are tall and narrow. It depends on what you're trying to show. TNG's shots were composed and framed with a 4:3 fullscreen aspect ratio in mind, so cropping the top and bottom is as wrong as cropping the sides of a naturally widescreen image to force it into 4:3.

I recently got a new computer monitor, and the only kind they had available was widescreen, and I'm not happy with that. Sure, it's cool for watching videos and such, but for reading columns, writing manuscripts, looking at digital comics, things like that, it's totally wrong. I'd prefer something more like my old 4:3 monitor, because widescreen images would fit fine within it, but so could taller images.
 
Indeed, and you can fit two pages on one screen, which I find really useful when writing documents. And they are brilliant for spreadsheets.
 
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