Re: The OFFICIAL STNG-R discussion thread!
You know, at the very least there's two things in the series I'd want to see corrected in this whole project -if they end up doing the entire series.
1. That damn phaser coming out of torpedo tube in Darmok. There's no way that should have gotten by anyone when that episode was made. Yet, somehow, it did.
2. The consuming, odd, darkness/blackness in the corner of the screen in EaF during parts of the episode, especially the scenes with Picard in the 22c "courtroom."
Not the energy beam being fired from the captain's yacht in EaF? [Move it to the deflector dish, where such stuff would always come from in later series]
Oh, yeah that too. But in terms of the show that can easily be excused as first episode "jitters" and I had always assumed that energy beam came from the saucer deflector or, for some reason, it could've came from the yacht's
own deflector or other external system.
The Darmok phaser and the video shittiness in EaF bother me a lot more than that "energy beam."
It is great to see all of the original effects elements will be used it'll be interesting to see how they'll be re-composited into new CGI effects (the ship flying through the Wolf 359 battlefield and the junkyard in "Unification" should both look good with new CGI). It would be nice, too, to see some new angles and shots of the Enterprise using CGI including the warp/impulse flybys and such.
I'm of two minds on the 4:3 and 16x9 issue. On one hand I watch all of my DVDs "stretched" to fill the screen (not out of not wanting "black bars" but out of not wanting to unevenly wear out the screen) and it doesn't bother me to do that (the stretching is "smart" enough and subtle enough that it doesn't bother me) so making it 16x9 by editing isn't necessary from my POV. I'd likely watch the 4:3 BDs "stretched" as well.
I think cropping the shots to make it 16x9 could run into... issues with cropping out objects that "add" something to the scene, making the scene more cramped by the reframing an adding in false camera moves to switch focus from one actor to another in a cropped shot would be just as bad as when the same was done when going from "Widescreen" to "P&S" in the days of VHS.
There's a shot up-thread of Worf, Yar, Picard and Riker all talking on the bridge. It was said the scene could be cropped to focus on whomever is talking. Well, suppose if in the middle of that scene (or a similar one) Yar or Worf starts talking you'd have to add in a "fake camera move" to change the focus of the picture. This gets into the whole "director's intent" thing that was always an issue with P&S.
I'd say to leave in 4:3 and if you really "have to" have something on the sides of the screen for airing on TV to fill space and to prevent people from wearing out their TVs put some flowing plasma or something over there for an effect or something, I dunno. The local news does something similar for field reports still using 4:3 cameras/editing even though the rest of the newscast is 16x9.
