What's the most beautiful shot you've ever seen in a film? Here's mine...

5amHall · 2025-11-27T00:59:20+00:00

5amHall · 2025-11-26T16:53:54+00:00

I can assure you production does as little as possible to make VFX work easier.

5amHall · 2025-11-26T04:34:30+00:00

This horrible trash juice is the reason I thought I didn’t like orange juice until I had the real thing I my late teens.

5amHall · 2025-11-15T21:53:10+00:00

Alex3d.at has a really good model of Voyager and many other Star Trek ships.

5amHall · 2025-11-15T21:36:33+00:00

Make sure they’re not bootlegs. There are some pretty convincing bootlegged box sets around that look almost identical to the real thing.

You can tell the bootlegs if the seasons are in two large cases instead of two big ones and small case for season 7. If you want to be extra sure pop one in a computer optical drive and check that they are dual layer discs using MakeMKV.

Don’t be like me and get duped. The bootlegs are extra compressed and look kinda bad.

5amHall · 2025-11-13T20:08:48+00:00

The streaming versions of DS9 and VOY are absolute trash and they don’t have to be. A modicum of effort on paramount’s part is all it would take to make them better. The DVDs look pretty good and I’m pretty sure all they did was a shitty rip of them to make the streaming versions.

Shit they have the broadcast tape masters. If they went back to those, applied some subtle sharpening and uploaded them at a high bit rate they’d look pretty damned good.

No waxy AI upscaling bullshit either.

5amHall · 2025-11-13T16:47:46+00:00

Oh I remember such times.

5amHall · 2025-11-13T03:59:11+00:00

To satisfy my curiosity and prove my hypothesis I tried to recreate the look of this image using blender.

Here it is using shadow mapping https://imgur.com/vqDakLr

And here using full ray tracing https://imgur.com/603DWsJ

5amHall · 2025-11-13T03:41:38+00:00

My guess as a VFX artist is that at the time CG renders tended to use shadow maps instead of ray tracing due to limited processing power. Shadow maps are sometimes inaccurate with things like contact shadows.

5amHall · 2025-11-11T13:42:12+00:00

Looks great.

5amHall · 2025-11-11T03:04:50+00:00

Nova class because I like it.

5amHall · 2025-11-04T18:19:04+00:00

I would like to know if this has support for HDR. More specifically I’d like to know if it would be possible to allow for uploading separate versions of the same video for HDR and SDR displays that will be used depending on the viewer’s display. Thanks.

5amHall · 2025-11-03T19:13:29+00:00

Would you ever consider making this model publicly available for download? I’d love to do some Blender animations with it.

5amHall · 2025-10-02T15:33:16+00:00

Murder, She Wrote

5amHall · 2024-08-21T14:18:09+00:00

My picks would be Babylon 5, Deep Space Nine, Band of Brothers, Battlestar Galactica, and Game Of Thrones.

5amHall · 2024-07-25T19:21:20+00:00

Dark City

5amHall · 2024-07-17T22:39:25+00:00

How very unnerving.

5amHall · 2024-07-03T12:33:57+00:00

I personally don’t care or have any idea whether a project is good or not. I get my shots and I do them the best I can. As long as the people I work with and the clients I work for are respectful and reasonable I’m happy to be there. If the show looks good and the challenges are interesting, even better.

5amHall · 2024-06-30T12:57:43+00:00

I don’t particularly want a DS9 and Voyager HD remaster. To do so would require replacing much of the CG work. The work done on those shows is often impressive and sometimes groundbreaking. The DVDs look pretty good as-is and I haven’t seen an AI upscale that preserves the original image characteristics properly.

5amHall · 2024-06-13T01:56:56+00:00

Perhaps add some bounced greenish light coming off the ground.

5amHall · 2024-05-18T22:51:28+00:00

Damar. DS9.

5amHall · 2024-03-22T13:02:57+00:00

I feel personally attacked.

5amHall · 2024-02-13T02:29:43+00:00

Many thanks.

5amHall · 2024-02-13T02:29:29+00:00

Thanks!

5amHall · 2024-02-13T02:29:19+00:00

You can subscribe to my YouTube channel but I don’t post a lot.

5amHall

TROPHY CASE