One of the greatest Trek undertakings ever: the remastering of Star Trek.
Trekmovie does a thorough retrospective.
http://trekmovie.com/2016/09/06/retrospective-the-original-series-remastered-project/
While we tend to quickly forget, the 40th anniversary year (2006) was actually a rather bleak time. Star Trek Enterprise had been canceled after only 4 seasons the year before. Many Trek products were put on semi-permanent hold or canceled outright. Organizationally Star Trek as a franchise was a mess because of the big Viacom split up that occurred in late-2005. The split resulted in all kinds of purging of Star Trek archives on the Paramount lot through auctions. Later on, while TOS-R was actively being produced, StarTrek.com was shut down for over 2-years (2007), and The Experience in Las Vegas was dismantled (2008).
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You can read more about CBS Digital’s workflow in our article from 2006.
CBS realized they were in a bit of a rock-and-a-hard place with TOS. Unlike the much newer productions (such as TNG, which would later get remastered from the raw elements), they only had the finished episodes. So they did not have the isolated original elements to work with.
The old visual effects were looking worse for wear, by modern standards they never looked spectacular because of all the layers of printing film-onto-film and splicing in the visual elements, and there was lots of generational loss on the frequently re-used stock Enterprise footage. CBS made the controversial decision to replace the VFX sequences entirely with a new CGI Enterprise, and new more realistic planets.
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Perhaps the largest part of the controversy with the fans and the CGI model of the Enterprise was the color of the hull. The CGI Enterprise was much more of a battleship grey, lacking the blueish tint we had all known. The blue tint, of course came from the bright lights and the blue screens behind the models needed to shoot the visual effects in the 1960’s.
The fan backlash was quite loud, the producers eventually made a statement that they had researched the paint of the physical model and their model was derived from how it looked in person. This started an interesting aesthetic debate, what was more appropriate: how it looked on the screen (with the blue spill), or the color of the model as it was in more normal lighting?
It’s interesting to see that the new 2016 Smithsonian restoration, which was painstakingly researched to be as accurate as possible, looks similar to the CGI model the TOS-R team used. The TOS-R version is still a bit darker than the model in the Smithsonian, this was a stylistic choice by the team, they purposefully lowered the level of light that hits the Enterprise as a nod to the fact the ship is in space.
Trekmovie does a thorough retrospective.
http://trekmovie.com/2016/09/06/retrospective-the-original-series-remastered-project/
While we tend to quickly forget, the 40th anniversary year (2006) was actually a rather bleak time. Star Trek Enterprise had been canceled after only 4 seasons the year before. Many Trek products were put on semi-permanent hold or canceled outright. Organizationally Star Trek as a franchise was a mess because of the big Viacom split up that occurred in late-2005. The split resulted in all kinds of purging of Star Trek archives on the Paramount lot through auctions. Later on, while TOS-R was actively being produced, StarTrek.com was shut down for over 2-years (2007), and The Experience in Las Vegas was dismantled (2008).
--------------------------------------------------------
You can read more about CBS Digital’s workflow in our article from 2006.
CBS realized they were in a bit of a rock-and-a-hard place with TOS. Unlike the much newer productions (such as TNG, which would later get remastered from the raw elements), they only had the finished episodes. So they did not have the isolated original elements to work with.
The old visual effects were looking worse for wear, by modern standards they never looked spectacular because of all the layers of printing film-onto-film and splicing in the visual elements, and there was lots of generational loss on the frequently re-used stock Enterprise footage. CBS made the controversial decision to replace the VFX sequences entirely with a new CGI Enterprise, and new more realistic planets.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Perhaps the largest part of the controversy with the fans and the CGI model of the Enterprise was the color of the hull. The CGI Enterprise was much more of a battleship grey, lacking the blueish tint we had all known. The blue tint, of course came from the bright lights and the blue screens behind the models needed to shoot the visual effects in the 1960’s.
The fan backlash was quite loud, the producers eventually made a statement that they had researched the paint of the physical model and their model was derived from how it looked in person. This started an interesting aesthetic debate, what was more appropriate: how it looked on the screen (with the blue spill), or the color of the model as it was in more normal lighting?
It’s interesting to see that the new 2016 Smithsonian restoration, which was painstakingly researched to be as accurate as possible, looks similar to the CGI model the TOS-R team used. The TOS-R version is still a bit darker than the model in the Smithsonian, this was a stylistic choice by the team, they purposefully lowered the level of light that hits the Enterprise as a nod to the fact the ship is in space.
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