2y ago

Ship Lighting

My biggest complaint with Live Action Trek vs the two Animation shows is that they seem obsessed with giving us a black ship on a black background. It’s nice to be given a reprieve, even if for only one episode.

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I definitely prefer the darker version, it seems a lot less artificial. To me, the brighter ship looks rendered, as if I was looking at a video games' screenshot.
- That's because it is rendered, lol. It's a shot from the animated Lower Decks crossover intro.
  
  Oh, thanks, I didn't know that. I'm not much into the animated stuff.
  On first glance it could've been from Picard S03 which had a similar aesthetic that didn't work for me. Too clean, too polished, too much video game.

I've had to download higher quality episodes as the lighting has made higher compression unviewable.

100% agree. Still not as bad as the darkness on GoT. The entire damn episode was just a black screen.
- The one shot with all the torches going out, that the lighting was perfect for, and it looks amazing on TVs that have super great black, like an OLED.
  The rest of that episode, they should've TURNED ON SOME DAMN LIGHTS

the two Animation shows
RIP prodigy

I've never understood the complaints about lighting on the new treks. We're watching on big HDR enabled screens now, the lighting is appropriate for them.
- You guys have hdr?
  
  And here I am on a 1080p plasma screen from 2011. Because it just will not die! Which, is a good thing I guess.
  
  It's not even HDR. I'm a TNG fanboy, and one of the reasons is just because the show is bright. The ship sets are bright, etc. Even VOY and DS9 don't get this quality, and while SNW is probably the best, new Trek gets nowhere close.
  
  Oh man. I work in the post industry professionally - on the documentary side, but honestly 10bit HDR (HDR10) and 12bit (Dolby Vision) are the REAL technological leaps in quality NOT 4K/UHD.
  Sure resolution is nice and all, but if you have a capatible TV, we can literally force change your local settings to optimize what we want you to see (people ever notice Dolby Vision settings turn on and grey out your own settings). Being able to change your TV's color settings natively directly to what we wanted out of the box in post is by far the biggest tech advancement in post to home video in decades. UHD is 4x the pixels but HDR is up to 16 billion more colors. Trust me, it's worth the upgrade.
  
  It's been standard on TVs for years now?
- Tons of people don’t have HDR yet. It takes a while for tech to spread, especially when it’s not something many people are gunna go replace a several hundred dollar device for, nor is it necessarily a selling point when shopping for new TVs.
  I thought my 4k smart tv was new enough to have it by default since I bought it in 2019, but it doesn’t.
  
  Really, I'm on my second HDR enabled screen now and that was from 2020, the previous one dated back to 2016 and had it.
- Part of the issue is compression. Most modern compression algorithms bias towards light areas of the picture. On high bandwidth streams, this is no issue. If the stream is highly compressed, the backs can become blocky and details are lost.
  On top of this are suboptimal viewing conditions. Non HDR, background light, or poorly configured (or limited capability) screens. All of these punish the black parts of the image more than the bright.
  
  I can't speak to the compression on P+ as I'm in the UK so most new Trek is on Netflix, Amazon or the high seas for me and I haven't noticed much blocking it artifacts even on a 65 inch screen.
  I think I optimal viewing conditions are the biggest issue. People who don't know how to set up and calibrate their TV or watch on an inappropriate device like a laptop, tablet or phone.
  I'm not surprised directors like Lynch and Nolan get annoyed. They put all the works into making the best cinema experience, then people ruin it by leaving motion-clarity on on their TV or watching on a six inch screen with tinny headphones on the way to work.
- You mean you are?
  
  If you're not, it's time to upgrade. The rest of us shouldn't get a subpar product because some people aren't up to date. I mean, TOS was partly designed to help sell colour televisions back in the day, being on the forefront of tech is part of the franchise.

Literally a ship in space with next to no light.
The live action version is more realistic.
- the extra light comes from the same place as the music actually
  
  And the pew pews!
  
  I see, the camera just has a sun attached to it then? cool. no problem.
- There's these things called "stars" most planets with life on them have them very close by in the cosmic scale of things, and if you look up pictures of the ISS under one you'll see it's actually quite bright...
  
  Thanks captain

53 comments