[horatio]

Originally Posted by chator

Here's another problem though, I want to watch TNG the way I remember it. Remastered is not the way I originally saw the series and though I'm not quite sure how I'd react to a remastered episode. Maybe favorably, maybe not. I went through this with the remastered Robotech cartoon. I bought the Dvds of the series when it was first released by ADV. Later a remastered version was released, I didn't like it, it was too cleaned up plus they changed the theme song and title intro and introduced new sound effects. Well, that killed it for me. A friend of mine couldn't get into TOS remastered because it wasn't the way he remembered watching the episodes as a kid and was buying the Dvds for the naustalgia factor.

Originally Posted by Enterprise Captain

I wouldn't want anything less then that quality so a half a$$ed job off it wouldn't be worth it. I do like that they are putting in a lot of effort to restore the original effects in HD though.

That's the dilemma of every remastering/remake. Some want it to be totally new, some want it to be virtually unchanged.
If the second version is meant to overwrite the first one I am for a conservative approach, even if it implies effects that are not state of the art. It worked well for TOS. Nothing worse than effects that stand out and are not in harmony with the rest of the material.

[kevin]

TOS-R was a great job done, I have to say I would never watch anything but it now because the work done was so careful and appropriately done.

If TNG-R isn't going down that route (which I agree would probably be too expensive to do quality CGI for 179 episodes that matched the quality of the original effects - which mostly are not THAT bad in TNG as it was healthily resourced in that department) but just going for HD image quality based on the original effects then it becomes more doubtful I would spend on it.

But, really I'd still need to see a group of episodes properly.

[kevin]

Originally Posted by Enterprise Captain

I'm also not a big fan of how Paramount always releases Star Trek with higher price points then every other show

Yeah, I think they need to rethink the pricing - until recently even in the UK there remained a slight premium for Star Trek sets that I doubt can be justified anymore.

I see that starting to alter a bit in the UK, but not by a lot.

[NCC-73515]

They will not recreate CGI stuff from scratch, but they have the original FX footage
http://trekweb.com/stories.php?aid=4edbdee70b119

[kevin]

I like that they are using the original elements with digital recomposition and finishing, because much of the model work still isn't at all that bad.

But I can't help but also do a teensy bit of a switcheroo and take the opportunity to do some CGI alterations to some of the ship modelling scaling and get rid of the same 'Angel One' matte painting that was used as the same city about fifteen times over the run of TNG (or at least, it felt like it was used that often).

Not wholesale CGI the whole thing again, but just take the chance to do a little spring cleaning in areas that budgetary constraints meant they couldn't vary up as much the first time around.

Oh, and at least fix that idiotic blooper from 'Darmok'. For the love of anything that is precious................fix that! Even just insert a stock shot from another ep...................whatever.

[samwiseb]

Originally Posted by kevin

Oh, and at least fix that idiotic blooper from 'Darmok'. For the love of anything that is precious................fix that! Even just insert a stock shot from another ep...................whatever.

Which blooper is this?

[kevin]

That was the episode where somehow, someone had a phaser strike come out the front dorsal torpedo launcher.

I'm not normally anal about that stuff, but it was such a clanger I would totally be fixing it if I was in charge of the work.

[samwiseb]

Seems like it would be easy enough to recomposite the phaser strike in such a way that its origin point is modified. Even if the perspective was 'off' as a result (which happened a lot of the time on TNG anyway), it's not like the shot would be on the screen for more than a couple seconds.

And that's assuming the paintbrush animation effects were ever even captured on film in the first place. They may have been applied strait to video and then composited in some way. At least with models, you can make the case of using film to get the lighting texture right. But it could be that animation effects such as phaser shots would need to be recreated entirely.

Was there any additional weapons fire exchanged during the shot? Or any reverse-angle shots of the alien ship immediately before or after? Those are the only issues I can think of in regards to simply replacing the shot as you suggest. As long as the 180 rule isn't violated (as TOS-R did a couple of times!), I don't see why not.

I've never been one to notice such details where spaceships are concerned. Even now, after all the hours I've of Trek I've watched, I doubt if I could tell you 'exactly' where the phaserbanks are, especially on the D. I know a couple of phaser/tordedo effects on TOS always 'looked wrong' for some reason ('The Corbomite Maneuver' seems a likely instance), and then during the remastering project it came out that mistakes like what you've cited had been the reason. Go figure.

[kevin]

Ah, my turn - what's the 180 rule?

[samwiseb]

It's among the first of your more rudimentary rules relating to the visual language of film.

Basically, if you have two objects interacting with each other (such as two actors in a conversation), you draw an imaginary line between them. In the case of two actors it's relatively easy because their line of sight would be the 180 degree line. Now your camera must choose either one side or the other for its vantage points. In a typical shot-reverse-shot sequence, you might have an over-the-shoulder vantage point behind each actor, but all your camera shots need to stay on that side of the line. Now as the scene progresses, hopefully your actors are moving around (either that or you have a really static scene), and you are constantly redrawing the line. The addition of still more actors walking into a scene results in more complicated spatial relationships, in which the positioning of the line may become more ambiguous or open to interpretation. And there are even numerous instances when you can 'supposedly' get away with crossing the line (though I couldn't tell you what those are, but as with everything else the most skilled directors are usually of the belief that rules are meant to be broken). With enough establishing shots, you can probably skip around the 180 degree line all you want. But do it incorrectly, and even the most untrained eye will recognize that 'something' is very wrong with the spacial continuity.

The rule also applies to moving objects. If your object is a car zooming past, then the road becomes your line. Break the movement into two shots (the car coming, the car going), and you still want to shoot from the same side of the road in both shots. Needless to say, the classic TOS main title sequences -with the Enterprise whizzing past- are a very obvious example of such shots. But whereas 'The Cage' frequently violates the 180 line during its opening/closing titles (and I don't recall whether this is still true with the remastered effects or not), the 1st and 2nd/3rd season TOS titles execute it properly (if pedestrianly).

(I'm not even sure how it was possible to break the line in the first place... wasn't the TOS Enterprise model supposed to be incomplete on one side? Maybe the film got flipped.)

With two starships facing off, the mutally-exchanged phaser fire (or the hypotetical trajectory thereof) makes up your line, so that a ship facing one way is seen from starboard and the other from port. This is unfortunately very elementary when it comes to traditional ST, as the creators seem virtually 'allergic' to imagining the possibility ships coming at each other from multiple plains or trajectories, resulting in some of the most choreographically unsophisticated 'horizon shot' face-offs space opera has to offer. Granted, the saucer-and-wing ships on ST probably don't lend themselves to being shot from very many angles... particularly in relation to each other. I often think it's because of ST that many other space operas (seemingly) go out of their way to avoid horizons and vanishing points in so many of their shots! But I suspect even with the 'cinema verite' documentary style of Galactica, that 180 lines had to be carefully established with each scene before they could be broken.

Um... sorry for this sounding like a lecture...