Friday, January 27, 2012
Data Can Be a Real Boy!
On G4's Attack of the Show (AOTS) today, I saw a snippet of the new release of Star Trek: The Next Generation (ST:TNG) on Blu-Ray...
I'm all for improvement of technology, (I upgraded to an Samsung Galaxy S II...) and Blu-Ray is supposed to make the movies and/or TV shows come to life, but seriously, how much more real can CG from 1987-94 get without seeing the lines to cover up the green screen? Having to buy new copies of movies you already own is annoying, isn't it? Maybe I'm just retro-fashioned, but I like my DVD drive in my laptop, and my XBox just fine. The graphics are MADE to be blurred so the general populus has a more difficult time discerning reality from the fantasy.
Did it ever occur to anyone that, perhaps, people might LIKE the fuzziness and the less-than-adequate special effects? In my opinion, I think the original release of the first three Star Wars movies (and by "first three", I mean 4, 5, and 6) was good enough. The special effects were COLOSSAL for 1977, and they still made the world of "a galaxy far, far away" believable in 1997, when my fourteen-year-old self was watching them for the umpteenth time on VHS. (I like BOTH Star Trek and Star Wars. Don't judge me.)
The realism that Blu-Ray produces is almost eerie to the point that I don't even want to watch, anymore, and that's just the demos I see in the electronics section of Fred Meyer (NW chain of one-stop-shop stores)!! I can't be alone here. Leave a comment, and tell me how you feel about Blu-Ray in general, or what you think about ST:TNG on Blu-Ray.
WHAT SHOULD I TALK ABOUT NEXT?
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I'm addicted to Blu-Ray; I didn't think I would be until I started going back and buying "essential" titles for my collection- the movies that speak to me personally are great to revisit in the "fancy" format. The Trek footage did look odd, but not as jarring as the remastered Original Series.
ReplyDeleteI don't want to get into what Lucas is doing... ;)
Keep up the blog posts!
--Griff
I'm going to buy ST:TNG on blu-ray DVD. I just get excited about stuff like that. Plus I need to buy so I can stop trying to find it online to watch it, lol.
ReplyDeleteOK, I've been following the ST:TNG blu-ray project for a while now. I am full of opinions on this topic!
ReplyDeleteTNG was shot on film, and the film cans for all but 40 seconds of one episode have been accounted for. So no HD conversion problem there.
BUT. The special effects were all done on a 480i videotape machine, which looked just fine back in 1987. Some of the effects were composites of elements shot on film: all shots of the ship, pretty much all of the other ships, some of the space-bourne alien creatures, some of the alien landscapes, etc. This is a simple fix: just take that film and re-composite it with the film from on set. Nothing to it.
Thing is, many other effects were early CGI, originally RENDERED in 480i, and these are the problem. These include the phaser fire, the tractor beams, the starfields, a lot of the energy beings and clouds and such, and (I'm guessing) all of the electricity and lightning effects. And others besides.
For these, the blu-ray team had two options: Progressive scan and up-convert the effects from the standard def. videotape and just live with the pixelation, or recreate them from scratch, using sexy modern CGI.
They opted to do the latter. Check out the DVD/blu-ray comparison video.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZQetJVRu0I
A few things.
First: Encounter at Farpoint sucks a dong. The only good parts are the Q parts.
Second: PERSONALLY, I would have preferred a faithful hi-def tracing of the old CGI. Looks like that's not what they did. Look at the stars on the viewscreen. Totally different. Stars of different brightness, and new bright stars don't match up with the old bright stars.
Third: I am VERY glad they didn't re-render the filmed models in CGI, like they did when they crapped a bunch of ugly new computerizing on the Original Series a few years back. Other than the "sweetening" of the old computer effects, the hd version looks very faithful. And even the new effects are a very, very tasteful and subtle modernization. There were PLENTY of ways Paramount could have screwed this up, and they've got it 95% right. And like Griff said, compare it to what Lucas is STILL doing to Star Wars...
But this brings us to...
THE BIG QUESTION: Is any modernization desirable? Is the old Standard Def fuzziness an indispensable part of the magic?
Um... yes and no. Well, mostly no. Thing is, the EXACT fuzziness cannot be reproduced on LCD or LED TVs. The scan lines don't match up exactly, the frame rates are different, it just can't happen. To get the proper nostalgic blurriness, you'll need the old school 800 lb tube TV.
A lot of you goddamn rich people got rid of your tube TVs long ago. I think, for TNG, HD is the next best option.
So there. :P
P.S. I know this is heresy, but I'd like an option to watch the episodes in tastefully cropped widescreen. Looks like the blu-rays are in fullscreen. First world problems, yes, yes...
Okay. I watched the clip, and you're right. There were a LOT of reds in the original film version, and it's nice that they were balanced out, to comment on 1/64th the tip of the iceberg.
DeleteJust a chick with a love for Star Trek giving her, evidently uneducated, opinion on Blu-Ray vs Standard Def. I appreciate the in-depth analysis. :)
P.S. Tastefully cropped widescreen would be AMAZING. The show is epic enough that it deserves that.