Shik
Starship database: completed; History of Starfleet: done; website: probably never
Member # 343
posted
That's sass, right? You're sassing me.
Heh. Yeah, second nature. and I remember FC being a hologram. It didn't really look like it, though. It looked like the wall was actually fake. It was, as they say in the vernacular, "neet."
-------------------- "The French have a saying: 'mise en place'—keep everything in its fucking place!"
Registered: Jun 2000
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posted
So I didn't just imagine that. In the pre-release hype for ST:FC I heard something about there being a holographic viewscreen, and I wondered how it would work; then I got to see the real thing when the movie came out. . . but I never heard any more about it. Plus they replaced it with a standard viewscreen in Shitesurrection, so that was that. But it was a really cool effect, and I always wondered why they'd make such a point of it then drop it completely.
posted
Wouldn't a holographic viewscreen be one in which the viewer can have a different perspective of a scene depending on where he stood? It's not just a Star Wars-style mid-air projection. Didn't they already have these capability on some episodes of TNG? I think I remember sometimes when you could see the sides of the faces of persons on the bridge and people on the viewscreen as they faced one another.
Registered: Oct 1999
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posted
Well, yes, but as for the varying perspectives I'm not sure - put that down to artistic license and dramatic effect during each scene. Remember when the Edo God appeared in "Justice?" It was on the viewscreen, yet Geordi went to look at it through an actual window to see what his Visor could reveal about it. I think as you say, the point was an ordinary viewscreen was a flat image while the ST:FC holographic viewscreen was effectively 3D.
posted
It was the defiant that had the holocommunicator. And i read in some book (secrets of star trek insurrection, i think) that they dumped the viewscreen because they wanted it to be all the time, like a normal viewscreen. They made all the changes to the ship suggesting it had to be repaired extensively after FC. Things like changes to the bridge, the warp core changing colour etc....
-------------------- "Marge, trying is the first step towards failure!!" Homer
Registered: Jun 2002
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quote: Well, yes, but as for the varying perspectives I'm not sure - put that down to artistic license and dramatic effect during each scene.... I think as you say, the point was an ordinary viewscreen was a flat image while the ST:FC holographic viewscreen was effectively 3D.
No, the varying perspectives on the TNG viewscreen were intentional. They make a point out of it in the tech manual and the Companion book. When you saw the viewscreen from the ready room door, the stars were steaking sideways, correctly with the perspective.
It was suppossed to be a 3d image, although I'm not sure whether than meant the image actually went backwards from the viewscreen, or whether it was flat and just looked different from different persepctives (through the medium of science and magic).
The whole Geordi thing was, I suspect, an implication that the viewscreen would have still filtered stuff out that only Geordi's visor could see. That way he could stand at the window and say "wow! It's a range of colours. Things I've never seen before! I can't descrie it."
Thank god he got a real job.
-------------------- Yes, you're despicable, and... and picable... and... and you're definitely, definitely despicable. How a person can get so despicable in one lifetime is beyond me. It isn't as though I haven't met a lot of people. Goodness knows it isn't that. It isn't just that... it isn't... it's... it's despicable.
Registered: Mar 1999
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posted
Making the TNG viewscreen 3D actually made the task of the VFX people easier.
Had the screen been portrayed as an ordinary 2D "television screen", it could only have been photographed from directly ahead, like they always did in TOS. Any attempt to shoot at an angle would have required lots of extra effort.
If you watch a television image of a person from the side, you see a flattened image of his face, not an undistorted image of his cheek. But in Trek, the image on the viewscreen is inserted using bluescreen techniques - and that means that one would have to first film this person from straight ahead, then artificially distort this image somehow, and then paste it on the bluescreen of the bridge set.
But if you pretend the viewscreen is 3D, you can shoot the person from the side, and directly paste this on the bluescreen of the bridge set, without needing to distort the image.
With the smaller viewscreens, bluescreens are not necessary - those can be actual monitors playing back an image of the person. So they can be made to look 2D without the need to distort the image artificially. But it was only in DS9 that Paramount could afford the special kind of monitors that can be synched to the camera refresh rate. And the main viewers have always been too big to be real (although one wonders why these couldn't be done as minatures, like the Cardassian command center screen in DS9 "Defiant"?).
posted
Possibly because then they wouldn't have been able to have people stand in front of it? Not that they did it much anyway. I wonder if they were originally planning to have Data and whoever always in the shots of the viewscreen (like Sulu and whoever were often in shots of the TOS viewscreen).
I always wondered about DS9. I knew there had to be a reason there was suddenly a lot more animation on screens everywhere, and I suspected something like that. The downside was though that displays now couldn't be truelly flat, as they had to hide the back of the monitor somewhere. Regarding "affording" it though, was it that Paramount didn't have the money in TNGs time, or where they a LOT more expensive?
And on the other subject, making it 3d would have been easier in that sense, but it would also having given them a bit less freedom in filming, as the blue screen stuff (which would presumably be second unit) would have to match the regular shoot. I don't think they ever got the angles wrong and were forced to fudge it though.
-------------------- Yes, you're despicable, and... and picable... and... and you're definitely, definitely despicable. How a person can get so despicable in one lifetime is beyond me. It isn't as though I haven't met a lot of people. Goodness knows it isn't that. It isn't just that... it isn't... it's... it's despicable.
Registered: Mar 1999
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posted
I don't think cost is the issue, but rather what technology is available at the time. Consider what computers were like in 1987; nowadays, they don't balk at putting loads of Silicon Graphics screens on the NX-01 bridge set.
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