captaincrusher
I may be a weird nerd thinking about random stuff but I do find it interesting to think about how in Star Trek TNG when there's an animation signaling that there's"interference" in a transmission, the effect looks like a wonky VHS tape. For the kids in audience, this effect could look like this.
But when we go forward towards Discovery of course media recording has changed so now when there's interference there's a more blocky effect, like a page that isn't fully loaded.
It's an unintended way of dating the different shows. VHS was the dominating form of viewing media for a relatively short time. For the people creating TNG this was the best way they could conceptualize what was happening when a signal was lost, despite VHS tapes not being present at all in TNG, or at least not visible. They could imagine digitization, because that was on it's way. But of course it's hard to imagine how a paradigm shift will play out in terms of aesthetic or otherwise.
And besides - even if you do invent a new way to show signal loss, how would you convey this to the audience? It's possible that the way we now view interference or signal loss, that is shown in Discovery, will seem equally obsolete in 20 years.
As technology advances, so does how we conceptualize the world around us.
I went out and tried to find more modern examples of what I'm talking about. This is from the Voyager episode "Hope and fear" (1998).
This doesn't look exactly like the VHS tape effect in TNG. It isn't as "wonky" (The technical term). But it has some of the horizontal lines. It looks more like static to me, like your tv doesn't have the right settings.
I think this illustrates how Voyager was made in one of those middle eras, between two ways of producing media. In the beginning of the series a model was used to shoot some of the ship scenes, but later on CGI was used. So the conditions and concepts of how media is produced actually changed - maybe in 1998 they knew that the big VHS effect was unrealistic or dated, but something similar was still expected from the audience.
As for a modern example, here's Star Trek Beyond (2016).
Here is that block effect I was talking about. This is how modern digital "interference" or "signal loss" is conveyed to an audience. In both "Hope and fear" and Star Trek Beyond the scenes are of transmissions being "buried" or "restored" so they don't exactly correspond to the TNG scene, but I think they are close enough to show my point.
Remember too that it’s just not VHS-style interference. 1980-1990s people still have over-the-air tv signals when you don’t have cable (rabbit ears, satellite dishes), which resulted in static and snow, which could get clearer or worse depending on factors like distance, weather and physical structures.
here’s a good mix of both:
(note that it says 1980s but there’s a healthy dose of 90s mixed in)
Star Trek II has some of my favourite TV Snow:
Carol also gets the video treatment, although hers is more scrambled/locked channel that’s not on your cable package
Carol can you hear me?
Carol?
I went back to TOS but offhand I can’t think of any times their viewscreens had weak signals. Balok has the funky lava lamp interference so that no one knows its a puppet:
we know bud. otherwise there’s a very specific sound effect when there’s interference on their communicator.
Finally, there’s evidence of pixelating/tiling as far back as 1986′s Star Trek IV 1991′s Star Trek VI, which I always found kind of interesting, especially since the pixels include Klingon Characters (in the Praxis transmission before it switches over to Brigadier Kerla)
The Star Trek IV one mixes some kind of rolling element to it:
