Star Trek: The Tour

I've got a new Flickr photoset up; it's got all of the photos I took this past Saturday during my visit to Star Trek: The Tour.

This was something that regular readers will remember I brought up in December; as a lifelong Star Trek fan, I couldn't pass this up. Lucky for me, Josh at work is an equal (or greater?) Trek geek, so I knew I could count on him for company.

Josh and I managed to convince our girlfriends to come to Long Beach with us while we engaged in geekery of the highest order. Lots of costumes, faux-sets, and props were scattered throughout. Some nice information displays... but with the advent of the Interwebs, and sites like Memory Alpha, the "Timeline of the Future" is less impressive. The myriad TV screens through the "tour" had pretty cool behind-the-scenes pieces, based on B-roll and interviews with various designers and craftsmen. A DVD is available with all of these specials, and Josh and I both liked them quite a bit. We agreed that we could have done better, of course, but hey, what can you do.

The annoying thing was the manner of display for these videos. The screens were predominantly HD 16x9 monitors... but the content was SD 4x3 letterboxed material. There is a way to set up HDTVS to display this footage correctly: either "4x3 mode" to "pillarbox" the content with black bars on the sides, or "Zoom Mode" to zoom in and crop off the letterbox bars to fill the screen.

Star Trek: The Tour did neither, but stretched the material, distorting the image to fill the screen. This is one of my pet peeves, check it out:

Squashed!

Aside from bad video formatting, I enjoyed the exhibit. It didn't blow me away, but it offered a unique experience, being able to see so many actual costumes up close. I tell you, Khan's corset/shirt looks soft and comfortable in person, like a velvet sweatshirt.

It's safe to say we all had a damn good time... Michelle and Tracy were excellent sports, and we're all glad we went.

Check out the photos if you dare, but be warned: there are a lot of them.