Trek Thread

[Veef]

http://www.entertainmentearth.com/prodi ... yCSSPldWSp

This isn't specifically Star Trek related but I thought you guys might be interested in an action figure of William Shatner as he appeared in The Twilight Zone.

With perfect hair forever.

[Crazedwraith]

watching trek 2009 and it never fails to amuse me that no-one even attempts to stop Captain Spock just murdering Kirk in a fit of rage.

[evilsoup]

nuKirk is such an utter dipshit

[uraniun235]

Someone over at the Something Awful trek thread is answering questions about working on TNG HD at CBS Digital; some very interesting tidbits:

Oh, and [season 2] was also "supervised" by Mike and Denise Okuda; Mike Okuda has this really weird idea on how a "remaster" should look, his vision is basically taking the original def show and making it in high res. Both of them would come in weekly and "advise" on shots and assets and commented on every minute detail that didn't fit with their ideas. The matte painter for the project, Max, would be asked to make the planets more blurry so they didn't look so detailed. I shit you not.

Season 2 was done completely by another production house and Mike Okuda was there giving his opinion and following it perfectly, where [CBS] Digital basically said "let him talk and do it (mostly) our way" they listened to Okuda like he was the gospel. Season 2 is basically his awful vision. I think the backlash on Season 2 changed things for the better.

There was talks about redoing Season 2 among the people internally at Digital but it was probably never went through the executives head because it would have cost more to redo the season than it would sell. We knew it was looking like shit when shots would come back to us. We noticed a severe dip in quality and couldn't wait to see fan reviews. TrekCore was a major factor in seeing fan reactions. We checked the comments when preview shots of the seasons would be released and laugh when people commented on Season 2. When release date came we'd also check Amazon as well and share a laugh.

All of the VFX stuff was redone in HD, nothing was future proofed. Film can be scanned (so I'm told) up to 4K, but we didn't have the capacity to scan or store 4K media. Most of our work was stored on HDCAM SR stock, once the episode was cleared to go on the disc the SAN would get backed up to an LTO tape and then wiped because we just didn't have the digital storage space for it.

If they want to redo this project for 4K or anything else it's going to be from scratch.

Sound was done out of house, we had it shipped in, we didn't have a sound department.

Enterprise was filmed in digital HD we didn't have to scan it, it was all on tape for use to digitize and give it a quick color-pass, outside of color nothing had to be done to Enterprise. In the time it took us to finish "remastering" all four seasons of Enterprise we could do about half a season of TNG.

To mostly everyone it was just another job, thought everyone got a kick of the significance of the show. Funny enough there was only single Trekkie there, and outside of one person who worked on the series when it was airing, I don't think really anyone watched the show. The whole department owes a shit-ton of it's success to it though. It did grow on people who did the color and editing on the show because they got to watch the episodes as they worked on them.

Side-note: The scenes of David Rappaport from "The Most Toys" on Season 3 were found and put together by me. I was tasked to scrub through all of the dailies and see if any of that footage still exited or if it was just scrapped after his suicide, they said I it wasn't too big if I found it. I spent 2 to 3 hours looking for every shot that I could that had him or his voice (if he was talking to Data or whatever) and put them all together. The footage was never lost, it was with the rest of the film, just people were too lazy to look for it in the past. Probably my biggest achievement while at CBS Digital.

All of the shots of the ship were kept on hand because we knew there was a lot of those shots going to be reused throughout the series. Part of my job was to help collect all of the shot information and compile it into an Excel Spreadsheet so it could be referenced to so we would know what shot was used and were. That was just a giant clusterfuck of a mess to go through. The film was stored and "logged" with complete disregard for order on an archaic computer system that I wouldn't doubt was as old as the show. It was a complete fucking mess that I could write a good chunk about if anyone wants. Might have some pictures too.

DS9 and Voyager are going to happen, talks of getting DS9 were already underway for months before I left. We had film rolls of DS9 in for test scans and to potentially look for missing shots from the TNG film which we thought might have been pulled for use in DS9. CBS Digital was a really small operation during the remastering of TOS, around 10 or 15 people I think. When I left they were around 50 or 60 people and most of the equipment and people were brought in specifically for TNG, the other shows we worked on didn't require half of it. All of the other series we worked on tended to be old westerns like Bonanza and Gunsmoke, but the film for that only required to be scanned, colored and had some light editing done to it. Every other series we dealt with was cut negative, so most of the tedious work was already done and there was obviously no special effects to be redone. Production was ramping up specifically for TNG and it generated a lot of numbers, so you will be getting the other series, I'm sure of it. I wouldn't doubt if they already started scanning DS9 by now, the last episode of TNG was scanned within the last month I was there if I remember correctly.

[Stofsk]

Very interesting to see that stuff about Mike Okuda. I got a feeling from a few hints that he was very big on not redoing the show, just taking what was there and upping it. It's kind of interesting that S2's lacklustre look was a direct result of his input and preferences. IF this source is genuine and on the level. (I'm not saying I don't trust the guy, but he does come across as having an axe to grind)

Good to hear about DS9 and Voyager. I figured it was a foregone conclusion but it's nice to hear the strongest indication yet that they're next in the pipeline. Bare minimum they would have to do some preliminary work for DS9 at least because the station had a cameo in 'Birthright part 1'. I remember reading an article on Trekcore about one of the guys who was responsible for doing CGI for late-DS9 and maybe Voyager as well, and how he basically saved all the work he did back then in the expectation that later down the track there would be a project like this. So like the vast majority of the CGI shots are basically already in high-res, or can be worked on a hell of a lot easier than starting from scratch.

[adr]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRp92HX ... ture=share

[RogueIce]

tl;dr

[Stofsk]

It had some interesting discussion on numbers which appeals to people who are nerds

[adr]

yeah it is awesome take the twenty minutes

one of the funniest ones: despite popular opinion you have better survival odds as a redshirt than a goldshirt

because while the majority of deaths seen are redshirts, so are the plurality of the people... so among the whole crew, the percentage of surviving redshirts are higher than the percentage of surviving goldshirts

that made me howl with gleeful lolghter

[Stofsk]

I'm pretty sure I've read that before, somewhere on the internet. Fucked if I know where though.

[RogueIce]

I'm pretty sure I've read that before, somewhere on the internet. Fucked if I know where though.

Memory Alpha actually has the numbers for that, helpfully labeled with shirt color.

[Dude]

54?

Ouch. That's a lot of men.

[RogueIce]

Apparently he lost 96 over the whole five year mission. So about 19 per year. Or ~5% of his crew if they had around 350 total.

[Stofsk]

Exploring space is dangerous work

[adr]

yeah hey at least he CAME back

so many of the starships didn't

crazy captains, dead crews

hey isn't the plot of "obsession" that kirk himself was on one of those dead crews? mang I need to watch tos again

[RogueIce]

I actually wonder how that would compare to, say, some of the old Age of Sail voyages. Not Columbus per se but other exploratory missions and the like, since that's sort of what the Five Year Mission was supposed to be.

Granted they don't have as many issued with disease and stuff in the 23rd century, but I suspect Negative Space Wedgies balances that out, so it's still somewhat comparable IMO.

Of course IIRC Kirk and the Enterprise were so famous because they were among the few to make all five years or something like that. So if that's the case, losing "only" a quarter or so of your crew during a FYM is pretty good.

[Veef]

https://twitter.com/berman_rick/status/ ... 92/photo/1

[Kuja]

hey isn't the plot of "obsession" that kirk himself was on one of those dead crews? mang I need to watch tos again

I've been slowly going through it on netflix lately. The updated special effects are actually quite charming.

I actually wonder how that would compare to, say, some of the old Age of Sail voyages. Not Columbus per se but other exploratory missions and the like, since that's sort of what the Five Year Mission was supposed to be.

It would probably depend on the precise era. To use a famous example, Magellan's expedition to circumnavigate the globe set out in 1519 with 5 ships and 270 men. 1 ship with 18 men came back 3 years later.

Fifty years after Magellan, Francis Drake also performed a circumnavigation, raiding Spanish ports and charting new waters. He set out with 5 ships as well, and came back with only his own.

In 1598 a Dutch expedition also made a 3-year circumnavigation. 5 ships left, 2 came back.

The HMS Dolphin was the first ship to survive two circumnavigations, two centuries after Drake's expedition: 1764-66 and another from 66-68.

The HMS Endeavour (under Captain Cook) was the first ship to make a successful circumnavigation with no men lost to scurvy - 1768-71.

So, if you want to imagine Star Trek trying to emulate those very first expeditions (or at least early ones, since they weren't completely alone out there) to lose 5% over 5 years is doing pretty good by comparison.

[uraniun235]

so for the next trek blockbuster, the sole piece of new filmed trek media for the 50th anniversary and undoubtedly a critical paramount tentpole for 2016...

...paramount has given the director's chair to roberto orci, who has literally never directed a film before.



on the plus side no lindelof soooooo maybe the plot won't be quite as hot a mess as STID?

[Stofsk]

No Lindelof is the only thing that might conceivably make the next ST film better than Into Dickness

[Crazedwraith]

When I heard ORci was lobbying for that position I assumed he didn't have a hope. One time I want the studio to be cautious and risk adverse they go for the first time director for there very expensive sci-fi blockbuster? Damn.

[Stofsk]

Makes you wonder whose arse he's been kissing

[RogueIce]

I liked the two nuTrek movies perfectly well.

Does this make me a terrible Trekkie?

[joviwan]

No.

[evilsoup]

I liked the two nuTrek movies perfectly well.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=znGBU5oODz8

Does this make me a terrible Trekkie?