Season 1 VFX Breakdown

[Tuskin38]

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Heh, there is possibly an error on the little worker bee in Episode one, while it says USS Shenzhou, it's also has '1031' on it.

Mind you due to the lighting, you can't actually read it in the final episode.

 

[PixelMagic]

"Stark Trek"

 

[pst]

that was a really well put together VFX breakdown. the ship models are clearly extremely detailed. it's a shame they covered up all that work with garish lighting.

 

[Gepard]

Really shows how good they are at the environmental work, which makes it all the more bizarre that so much of the ship work was so terrible.

 

[PixelMagic]

that was a really well put together VFX breakdown. the ship models are clearly extremely detailed. it's a shame they covered up all that work with garish lighting.

I think the lighting is fine on most raw renders. The ball seems to be getting dropped in compositing.

 

[Midquest]

Love this show as I do, the one thing that irked me was the tendency to add chromatic aberration to VFX shots, something that I strive daily to avoid and remove in my own work, and something one typically associates with unpolished or unprofessional work. Not a choice I would have made.

Still, I very much appreciate seeing how these shots come together. It never gets old!

 

[F. King Daniel]

I love seeing this kind of stuff, it's always so impressive to me just how much gets replaced in post-production.

 

[Rahul]

They do amazing work integrating CGI into live-action footage. Everytime th eimage is only CGI like in the starship shots, it looks like crap. I'm not sure if the behind-the scenes problem of the first season are to blame, or the art direction, but it just doesn't look realistic. Then again, I think Pixomondo often has the problem of looking "too much" CGI, even in their big budget work - for example the Kronos chase in "Into Darkness" looked at no time "real". But the touch-ups (changing the sky over the Jordan desert, adding two more arms to the alien) are genuinely great.

Another thing to notice is that almost all of the exemplary shots in this video are from the pilot two-parter - which is apparently where the show blew all their budget, as almost every space scene after that looked like real crap, and even in this video they had to use some heavy editing (zooms, fast-forwards etc.) to obfuscate the finished shots some time, because they simply didn't look as good.

That being said: Great video, and it really shows how much CGI actually went into the show, and how good most of it (especially in combination with live-action) actually is. Yes, the tMP model starships looked more realistic. But for everything else, a lot of it simply wouldn't have been possible without CGI.