Ours in the '60s was just satisfaction.
The f/x of TOS....
- Thread starter Warped9
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I for one was thinking in 1975' "Man, I am so dissatisfied I am not watchng this on a 3-foot-wide flat panel on my wall via little discs played by a laser so I can see the actor's toupé line and laces on his fighting boots. My life sucks."
Ok, not really. Nope, life was good. Just as it was last night watching Amok Time in honor of a departed friend.
Ok, not really. Nope, life was good. Just as it was last night watching Amok Time in honor of a departed friend.
The trouble here is that the word "animation" can refer to a lot of different techniques. Are photo-cutouts moved on an Oxberry "animation" in the sense that people upthread meant? Is a motorized camera which streaks a slit of artwork "animation" per se? I was using "animation" in the most colloquial sense. A motion control camera shooting a model is technically "animation" as well, so where does one draw a distinction?
Me too.
Whatever problems there were with matting the ship, reuse of shots and matte paintings, that's what I watched over and over on black and white TV in my "formative" years.
The TOS-R effects just can't hold a candle to the original, in my opinion.
Hi Maurice. I better understand your distinction now and agree with your comments. Having used an animation stand for many years, I personally consider certain cuts of the ships from "2001" to be animation. They were given "movement" by manipulating artwork and/or the camera one frame at a time as opposed to running at full 24fps.
But you correct by stating that an enormous amount of special effects fall under the "animation" category including motion control and slit-scan so the term "animation" is problematic and open to interpretation.
But you correct by stating that an enormous amount of special effects fall under the "animation" category including motion control and slit-scan so the term "animation" is problematic and open to interpretation.
I've always worked in video, but have read a fair amount about film techniques. I generally saw animation stand work classed under "opticals," while "animation" covered rotoscope (such as transporter mattes), light effects (e.g. phasers) and other detail work.
Of course, everything has been recategorized. For example, "matte paintings" fall under "scene extension," which can include models, hand painted art (even if done with digital tools), match-moving—which is bordering on "compositing." I suppose it might also depend on the size of the operation. Today, one capable artist can do everything sitting at a desk.
TV broadcast reception in the 1960s, at least in the major metropolitan areas, was generally much better than the screencaps posted by Shaw. Those look more like fifth-generation copies of VHS tapes!
Yeah. I lived in a rural town with only UHF reception and when the picture looked as bad as those approximations we'd be outside tweaking the antenna. Also, the problem with trying to represent NTSC video with a still misses the fact that it updates 60 times a second and noise gets averaged out, so the picture in reality probably reveals more detail than any isolated framegrab would indicate.
There could be a variety of factors for that. CRTs created the image with light, while "flatscreen" TVs subtract light (with an LCD screen) from a fluorescent or LED backlight. Plasma TVs are much closer to CRTs in their approach.
CRTs are analog, while HDTVs are digital. HDTVs are essentially computer monitors and so may have a wider "gamut" and latitude than a CRT. That could augment any noise that escapes notice on a CRT. And since HDTVs are digital, that also means there is a digitizing circuit if the TV features analog inputs. If the digitizer is crap (by chance or design), then so is the image that passes through it.
All in all, VHS is not a great format. Broadcast NTSC offered about 330 lines of horizontal resolution, while VHS might reach 240 or so at best. DVD could vary, depending on the quality of the authoring, but might be in the range of 500 to 700. HDTVs (assuming "full" HD resolution) are 1920. Since VHS is Standard Definition, that means scaling circuits, and those can vary quite a bit. Even at best, the upscale is going to look pretty terrible. Your eyes have grown accustomed to something better.
(Many years ago when my brother and I shared an apartment, I got him accustomed to seeing Laserdisc, as there was a rental place "nearby." A tape rental place was closer. So he went there when some friends dropped by, and he wanted a movie. He squawked, "What's wrong with your VHS machine? It looks like crap!" Yep.)
VHS had its quirks even on CRT sets. Remember the gap between the record and erase heads, that created a flickering bunch of rainbow striping (or whatever you'd call it) for the first few seconds of any re-use of a tape? It was especially pronounced when you recorded things at the slow speed.
That "rainbow" was due to the subcarrier of NTSC. I never did any "crash" edits with PAL or SECAM, but I assume they had their distinctive color distortions, too. The frame roll and color stripes are due to a mis-timing of the "control track"—the electronic version of sprocket holes for film.
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