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Remastered Star Trek: the Next Generation Blu-ray a Huge Leap Forward
MojoKid writes "There's been no new Star Trek TV series since Enterprise limped off screens in 2005, but the huge success of the 2009 Star Trek movie and the gradual growth of Blu-ray has caught CBS' attention (CBS acquired ownership of the Star Trek franchise in 2006). The broadcast company is preparing to release Star Trek: The Next Generation on Blu-ray with substantial improvements (article contains comparison image shots). The DVD boxed sets that exist today were created from the taped broadcasts that were shown in the early 90s. Rather than repackaging that material, CBS has gone back to the original film stock and started from scratch. The difference is enormous. CBS has released a preview Blu-ray titled Star Trek: The Next Generation — The Next Level with three updated episodes; the show's pilot (Encounter at Farpoint), Sins of the Father and The Inner Light."
might have to get a blu ray player for this
Riker shot first!
TNG meh, only a few episodes are salvageable for modern viewing. :-)
Now how about putting ST : DSN on blu-ray ?
Now we can all enjoy counsellor Deanna Troi's tits in HD!!
3 'remastered' episodes of a 20 year old tv show... Big fucking deal.
Look i liked star trek. It was entertaining. But the special effects and visuals were never the draw there..
And hollywood wonders why they have trouble selling shit anymore... They haven't done anything new or orginal for two decades.
They have milked that franchise for too long. Try something new, for once.
Gone!
Did they cut out the first two seasons? That's that easiest way to make a substantial improvement.
But good. I've got the BR and it is good. The effects truly were amazing for the time, and now really! Worried about the cost per ep for something I've seen a million times, but really, if you like TNG at all, this is the way to see them.
Great joy and gratitude!
I'm currently watching the remastered version of TOS, and while it's pretty, it sort of detracts from the old-school feel that the original TOS had --- yes, "the original The Original Series". I don't mind them adjusting the colors a little, but adding and altering effects is too much in my book.
"Live free or don't."
From the article, open them in different tabs and switch between. Wow. I always wondered why the DVD image quality and colors sucked so badly, that explains it nicely.
DVD
BluRay
The bluray shot makes the DVD image look like a photo after it's been ran through the wash.
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
How well does Marina Sirtis hold up in the remastered version?
Paramount is going to spend substantial money on this project. Not only do they have to find all of the pieces of film in the valuts, but the latter four years the special effects were done strictly on low rez CGI. They're going to have to recreate those effects, much like they did on the original series BluRays.
Why would you have to buy a dumb DRM-laden playback device with your hard-earned money when you could download a 720p torrent, probably BEFORE it is released, for free? ;)
Huh? The zoom levels on the HTML that displayed the JPGs on the webpage have nothing to do with it - the bluray will be at 1080p the entire time. Always "zoomed", in your strange vernacular.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
I was really hoping they would attempt to create a wide-screen version of the series by over-scaning the original film, cropping the top and bottom a tad, and stretching a tad to end up with 16:9.
Of course, I don't know exactly what aspect the original film was, and it is likely there will be things that should not be seen to the right/left in the overscan region. And the special effects might be exactly 4:3, in which case it would be very expensive to "fix".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overscan
They should have done episodes that would really show off the process. I would have picked Best of Both Worlds, Yesterday's Enterprise and either The Pegasus or All Good Things... because they are the best examples of what the series has to offer and would benefit from the effects uplift.
Tape > DVD = next generation
DVD > Blu Ray = money grab
I'd rather have it in a downloadable file form but piratebay beat them to it.
Asus O!play + Multiuple HD + torrents = sorry don't want your disks any more I'd rather pirate until you get your head out of your ass.
DS9 season 6 only few more hours to download finish......
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
... Yefremov actually did have some talent for writing
I think his work was much better in the original Klingon. :-)
I bought BSG (the recent version) on DVD but later found a BR pack containing everything on sale - so I decided to snag that. While I rarely buy something on BR that I already own, I must say the improvement in certain scenes was quite noticable. The "inside" scenes weren't really improved, but the difference in space was rather surprising. When I first watched them on DVD, I thought they were great, but when I saw them on the BR, I saw just how much difference it made. The stars in the background actually twinkled, and the overall darkness in space was much more apparent.
While I won't be rushing out to get everything on BR just because it looks this good in BSG, it was certainly a nice eye-opener - even with such a new series.
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
Then I will be fine. In the remastered TOS you could switch between versions. I will be the first to admit I loved the new graphics in the remastered version of TOS because they took nothing from the story while many times enhancing it.
The real scary part for me is realizing how old TNG is.
* Winners compare their achievements to their goals, losers compare theirs to that of others.
I remember DVD and Blu-ray. I wonder when this will be available on Netflix? That's where I watch ST:TNG now. Hopefully they will start streaming the HD versions instead.
I remember watching the first episode of TNG. The studio shooting was as dreadful as TOS, but when the music came up, and the Patrick Stewart voiceover came up, there was a great confort that along with the bad there was going to be a lot of good. Of course, one the quest for rating took hold and the overwhelming militaristic mission took over, it was pretty much over. TNG and the Borg. DSP and the dominion. Enterprise and the confusing and arbitrary Xindi. Peaceful explorations simply does not sell laundry detergent.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
...will this article be enough to make CleverNickName log back on after 2.5 years? :-)
o/~ Join us now and share the software
...fucked with any of the storyline in The Inner Light. That's the only episode of the whole entire TNG series (and any of its spin-offs) that's actually worth a damn.
The new CGI effect example in the article is terrible. The article notes that the animated ship looks noticeably different from the model in the rest of the episode, but it also looks like junk on its own merits.
Now I'd like to see the Original series in HD!
-- By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
Just remember that if you have a Blu-Ray drive, you need to make sure your entire setup is HDCP compliant or it will downsample as a form of punishment. This is especially troublesome for your typical Slashdot reader who has a home-brewed unusual setup.
But the easiest solution I've found is to rip out the copy protection altogether. There's a (commercial) program for Windows called AnyDVD HD that automatically strips out copy protection from DVDs and Blu-Ray discs on the fly, within a few seconds of inserting the disc into your drive. The program isn't cheap, but this way you don't have to worry about copy protection getting in the way of playing the fucking disc you paid for.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
Will the Blu-Ray improve the awful acting in the 1st half of season 1?
Their stupid popup windows force me to copy&paste the image url into new tabs to really compare them.
Didn't they realize that while writing that article?
FAIL
Comment removed based on user account deletion
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mHk7ZkbWo4A
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
um I hate to tell you this but stars don't twinkle in space. That is atmospheric distortions from looking through hundreds of miles of nitrogen and oxygen, and various particulate matter moving around.
Stars as sen from a space ship don't blink unless they are going boom. er BIG Boom.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Except that stars don't actually twinkle when seen from space. I'm sure it looked great to its earth-bound audience, and may even have been worth the trouble to look more intuitive, but it's actually wronger than leaving it alone.
Not quite as good as Blu-ray because it doesn't have the same chroma resolution, but it has the same ratio of chroma to luma resolution: 4 to 1 called 4:2:0 professionally.
The problem is the source. NTSC broadcast material sucks at colour fidelity. Always one of its big problems. A joke engineers kicked around was NTSC means Never The Same Colour. The DVDs were created form archives of those broadcasts, probably on Betacam video.
The Blu-ray has the advantage of getting the original film scanned in digitally and all the benefits that confers, as well as digital colour correction.
However one could take the new Blu-ray release, down convert it to DVD, and it would still look better than the original DVD release. It isn't so much a limit of the format as the source. The only real limit is the rez. DVD is 720x480 using non-square pixels. Blu-ray can be as much as 1920x1080 using square pixels.
Re-edit select episodes of classic shows for HD. Do a complete modern edit, whether it be a re-creation, or even a complete new edit.
Native 35mm Academy format is 1.37:1, right around the 1.33:1 of 4:3 screens. Since that was their target they shot it full frame, and just didn't use the tiny bit extra.
All the widescreen stuff you see is done one of three ways:
1) Anamorphic. A non-circular lens is used on the cameras, and the same thing attached to the projector. The image is actually squashed and then stretched. Very common to do, the telltale sign being ovoid lights in shots with lights in the background out of focus.
2) Matting. Part of the frame is simply discarded and not used. It can be done as a hard matte either with plates on the cameras or in editing, or a soft matte with plates on the projector. Not as common, but gets used. Fight Club is a hard matted movie.
3) Digital. The movie is shot on a digital source, with a camera that natively shoots widescreen.
I am happy with what they are doing. They aren't fucking with the picture, just giving a higher quality version for us all to see.
ST:NG -- Best story lines of all the Start Trek series -- shittiest acting ever.
Will this new blueray feature better acting? Let me know when that happens.
Stars viewed in the vicinity of a warp-capable ship do twinkle, due to distortions in the subspace continuum caused by the calibration of the dilithium matrix to the underlying kreega wave field.
The difference isn't the magic, it is the style. TNG like TOS is a Rodenberry creation and is a Utopia. He had a bright vision of the future and Star Trek is that committed to film. Things aren't perfect, but they are better, humans are better, life is better.
DS9 and Voyager are Dystopias. They are future imperfect, things turning bad. War, strife, death, etc. They aren't hardcore dystopias (Blade Runner, The Matrix, and Equilibrium would be some hardcore dystopia explamles) but still.
Now the dystopias are probably a bit more realistic visions of the future. I've always bought in to the Firefly theory of "technology changes, people don't" but that is neither here nor there. That is the big difference, and is probably the reason for you liking the new ones more. When Rodenberry died, the ST universe went in a different direction.
Please remember this is not the first HD Star Trek. There have been a number of TNG movies which were HD by virtue of being shown on 35mm film.
worked as an action/adventure movie with a thin veneer of spaceships, but it wasn't Star Trek.
You'd think the screenwriters had heard of the series(es), but never actually seen any episodes.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Most of the effects were done in post which means in this case "not on film". They shot and edited it on film, but then effects had to be added in. Since the theater wasn't the target it would be expensive to do them all to a new film transfer, then take that back to Beta. Instead they just did the effects straight to video.
So even if they aren't going to change the effects at all, they still have to get redone or there wouldn't be any.
Also there needs to be some digital effects done anyhow just to deal with problems masked by the original format. Even on DVD, you can tell, for example, that the trubolift doors are painted wood, not metal. Couldn't see it on broadcast because the resolution is so shitty, but it is visible on the original tapes and thus on DVD. On Blu-ray, it'd be downright obvious. So that is the kind of thing to clean up before the release.
I hate to tell you this* but there is a lot of gas and particulate matter in space across the distances between stars.
*: Not really, I love correcting people.
Seriously, you didn't realize BR exists because it's leaps and bounds better than DVD? Wow.
Why! Why!
Did they pick the gayest of all of the franchises!
I watched a good bit of TNG on Netflix recently (I skipped over the worst episodes, 20% or so). I did some research into the rather poor picture quality, and I'm kind of surprised to hear of this BR version. From what I read, the "problem" with TNG was that although everything was originally shot on 35mm film, all of the editing and some of the special effects were done on video tape. Editing on video tape saved a lot of money and time during the production process. Thus the quality of the finished version of the show was merely broadcast / VHS quality of the day, and nothing better. Now maybe people were just making stuff up and that information is incorrect, but I was under the impression the picture quality was fuzzy and poor because, well, that's how it was produced originally.
So the BR version must involve more than just digitizing the original film stock - they must have re-edited all the various camera shots together again, matching the original edits, because it never existed as a complete version in film in the first place.
Here's a source for that info, although this is not where I had heard of the video editing before:
http://geekchocolate.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=174:star-trek-the-next-generation-the-next-level-
It's good to see that CBS put the time and money into doing this properly.
Better known as 318230.
Despite what Hollywood and their senators want you to think, ripping off copy protection from something you legally bought is not the same as piracy.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
In "The Doomsday Machine", one of my favorite episodes as a kid, the prop they used for the destroyed USS Constellation was a Revell model of the Enterprise, which they took a lighter to melt the plastic. Yes, the same one I bought for $3 as a kid!
"Be grateful for what you have. You may never know when you may lose it."
To you and peragrin who basically commented the same thing:
stars don't actually twinkle when seen from space
I am quite aware that they don't. I was using it as an example of better picture quality. On the DVD, each star (and other details like windows on the ships, particles from explosions etc) was basically a bright hazey spot that covered a few pixels on the TV. On the BR, these details are in fact a pinpoint of light while the surrounding pixels are black - which actually makes the whole sky look black and shows much more contrast which is pleasing to the eye.
I am not replying to end up with "naanaanaaa!" but rather to say that I used that as an example of the improved picture quality. I do find it hard to resist a jape though, so I will say that you do know that spaceship fighters, capital ships and cylons don't exist right? :P I kid, I kid.
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
There may be individual episodes I'll pick up (best of both worlds, for instance) but in general I'm not anxious to watch hours of conference room meetings in high def.
Has anyone considered, I dunno... maybe spending some of that special effects budget on a new star trek series? I'd be interested in seeing what direction it would take now that Rick Berman was out of the picture.
Oliver's law of assumed responsibility: If you're seen fixing it, you will be blamed for breaking it.
Except that it has Wil Wheaton in it.
By every account I have ever heard, Wil Wheaton is a good guy who deserves your respect. Wesley Crusher, on the other hand, was a Marty Stu character[1] who alienated many fans, and if you want to hate Wesley, go right ahead.
Just keep the two separate. Wil Wheaton didn't write the stories, didn't write his dialog, and in general should be held blameless. I know if I had the chance to be part of a Star Trek series, working with Gene Roddenberry, I would do it even if my character wasn't popular.
There were some episodes with Wesley that many fans accept. I never saw "The First Duty" but I heard good things about it, for example.
And finally... Wil Wheaton has been known to post on Slashdot, and might be reading this thread. Did you write those words with the idea that Wil Wheaton might read them? Remember, he's a real person.
[1] A while ago I went to a lecture in Seattle, featuring a writer who had written scripts for Star Trek TNG. They announced that first they would show an episode he had written, and then he would talk about it. My heart sank when I saw that the episode was one I had seen before, and it was a Wesley episode and it was annoying. When the writer began to talk, I began to feel more sympathy toward him. He told us that the basic idea of this episode came direct from Gene Roddenberry, and it was just his job to flesh it out. He also told us that Gene Roddenberry's middle name was "Wesley" and he made it clear that Roddenberry was the one pushing for Wesley to be this super guy who is constantly saving the ship. So I'm not just claiming this "Marty Stu" thing, I have evidence.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
to CBS for doing this right. I always thought ST:TNG looked a little murky and soft, even back when it originally aired. This is because, while it was shot on 35mm film, it was posted on videotape, including, I believe, all the special effects (all that layering and compositing in the analog tape world really loses quality with each pass). I know this is a tremendous undertaking, one that if done right with all the original raw film elements is going to take a long time. But man, I would really like to see ALL the episodes done this way! I hope I can someday see them all in this vastly improved way!
This is a huge undertaking by CBS/Paramount and I hope they do justice to the series by not tampering too much with the special effects (which have to be redone in HD). From what i've seen of some of the episodes in HD the content looks impressive but does have its flaws. Part of one episode (Sins of the father) looks upscaled from DVD whilst the rest looks like a direct lift off the 35mm source.
Sorry, not hapening here. No blu-ray, never gonna be! it was invented by sony, so Its EVIL!!!
Really, anyone on slashdot disrespecting Wil Wheaton hasn't got a fucking clue. In the past Wil had a presence (still has a presence?) on Slashdot. Read and learn.
Sounds like the twinkle you saw was more likely from compression artifacting than intentional effects by the FX crew.
Single pixel, high contrast points will flicker like mad when compressed. Hell, they flicker even straight out of the renderer at times.
I different people are different. I'm about halfway through a DS9 rewatch, and I haven't seen it at all since it originally aired. I loved it then and this time around it's as great as I remember. (And it's creepy how closely on target we are for the future predicted by the two-part episode "Past Tense", set in 2024.)
Space game using normal deck of cards: http://BattleCards.org
Will Picard shoot first?
"Sadly, Paramount hasn't ... asked Marina Sirtis to re-dub a few of her lines to sound a bit less like an overwrought heroine from Victorian erotica"
Hmmm, I'll be back to my keyboard once I've checked out this space age Victorian erotica you speak of...
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
"There's been no new Star Trek TV series since Enterprise limped off screens in 2005"
Star Trek Voyager
I just recently watched a few episodes of the remaster of the original series, and I'm quite amazed at how good it is. The details are crisp, the color balance is very appealing, and, most importantly, the graphical tweaks remain true to the original show. This is what George Lucas SHOULD have done when remastering Star Wars. I also got a chance to compare it with some episodes from The Next Generation, and surprisingly, the remaster of the show from the 60s looked better than the non-remaster of the show from the 90s.
So I'm very eager to see how The Next Generation turns out. People could scoff and say that this is just a money-grab, and I guess it kind of is, but it's definitely worth it to the viewer. If you don't believe me, watch an episode of TOS Remastered alongside a non-remastered version. (And then put a non-remastered TNG next to that.)
I've always disliked blu-ray, but this may be the thing that coerces me into buying a player at last.
Nooooooooooooo!
I've heard theyâ(TM)re including an additional 21 seconds of previously unseen footage. It will be almost like watching a whole new series!
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely.
FYI: The -X switch to GNU ls(1) already does this.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
or asked Marina Sirtis to re-dub a few of her lines to sound a bit less like an overwrought heroine from Victorian erotica
What the hell are they comparing her to?????
Lastly, very little is shot in 1080p. that has changed recently, but all United states braodcast cameras are either 1080i (1/2 the resolution of 1080p)
1080i is not half the resolution of 1080p. It is the same resolution with half the frame rate. I.e., 30Hz rather than 60Hz. This isn't very important for most film transfers since movies are classically shot at 24Hz. Since TNG was a US television production, it should have been shot at 30Hz but I'll admit: I haven't looked it up.
The stars in the background actually twinkled
Scintillation is mainly caused by an atmosphere, so twinkling would not occur to a high degree in space (similar situation with the sounds the space ships make all the time, that would also require an atmosphere to be heard).
I don't know this word. Is this some obscure language? Can you give me an English equivalent?
Encounter at Farpoint was two episodes, at least outside the US.
You may think me a tired, old, cynic. I'd have to disagree about the tired bit.
his arms wide!
(as overheard in the CBS boardroom by our investigative reporter)
Exec 1: "Well, well boys they've fallen for the old format shift, make the customers buy it one more time routine AGAIN."
Exec 2: "Yee haw ! Champagne, hookers and blow all round !!!!"
(Meanwhile back in a basement near you...)
Dweeb 1: "WOW ! LOOK AT THAT ! You can even see the boogers in Captain Kirks nose"
Dweeb 2: "AWESOME !"
Of course I watched ST:TNG when it ran, and if I come across a rerun and there's nothing else on I may still watch it. But I don't think I'd buy Blu-Ray. Maybe put it on the xmas list since I'm always struggling to find stuff cheap enough for family to buy for me that I haven't already gone and bought myself. But what I really want fervently is Hill Street Blues. Fox released seasons 1 and 2 on DVD and then just stopped. Bastards!
ENHANCE...(click clack click clack)...Enhance...(click clack click clack)...enhance...(click click clack)...
1. Easier to tell Michael Westmore's humanoids apart with greater detail in head ridges
2. Enterprise-D now runs on heavily subsidized solar power instead of warp reactors from Big Antimatter
3. Big Bang Theory and How I Met Your Mother reruns on the main viewer during night watch
4. There are THREE lights
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
Does it include the best episode ever? - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7jbP1_H9sA
or will it have to be recreated in HD?
. . . stay for the scene when Locutus saves his (now) son Riker and shouts "nooooooo"
I would love to see a followup on the story. Something like this:
Picard is a very old man now, retired, and keeps having strange recurring dreams about the his experience from the Kataan mind probe.
He decides to do something about it and steals the USS Voyager, which is now an old derelict mothballed in storage but still mostly usable, and flies it to a star near where Kataan used to be, and does the slingshot-around-a-star trick to travel back in time before Kataan's sun went nova. The ship makes it back thru time mostly intact but something mechanically goes wrong and the crippled Voyager barely is able to travel to, and suffers a hard forced landing on the planet Kataan. The sun is in very bad shape and people on Kataan are dying from the radiation, Picard meets the real Kamin (played by Daniel Stewart of course), who turns out to be the probe's designer, and shows him the pendant and flute and tells his story. They try to repair the Voyager together but it seems futile since materials and technology on Kataan and still too primitive. In a last ditch effort, Picard thinks something fishy is going on and shouts up at the sky, "Q!!!!!!!!!!!!!" (like Kirk's "Khaaaaaaaan!!!!!"). Q suddenly appears, also as a very old man, and mocks Picard's age and mortality, and begins lecturing him on "playing God". Then Q relents, and tells Picard that the Kataan sun did go nova, but not 1000 years ago, but rather it did it 1,000,000 years ago, and Picard had actually travelled back in time a million years. It turns out that the Kataan people evolved into the Q, and that Picard's efforts to save them actually did save them, and that's the real reason why the Q were so interested in humans, and particularly Picard himself. Q returns Picard back to his own time, and Picard wakes up in his bed, not knowing if it had all been a dream or real. He gets up and checks his computer to find that not only has the old USS Voyager not been in mothballed storage, but there's a news event describing how its been fully restored and its grand opening as a public museum ship is being announced. Picard is confused, walks to his kitchen and starts to prepare tea using an old fashioned teapot. Q suddenly appears and says, "I told you I'd be seeing you... out there... didn't I?", smiles and winks at Picard, and disappears again.
I typically buy the entire series for what I like - e.g. I've bought all of Star Gate, Pretender, and 5 or 6 other TV series. However, the Star Trek series is just way too expensive. Star Gate was at most $40/season and even then I typically only paid $20-25. The cheapest Star Trek I've seen (even on BD) is still $60/season, and typically far higher than that.
Though if the DVDs were really that poor of quality, it makes on wonder just how sad/abused/etc the Star Trekkies are to pay that much for such poor quality, especially if they did so little to convert it. Glad to see they're doing the right thing for the BD editions, but they really should lower the price considerably.
Until then...I'll just enjoy any Star Trek on NetFlix/Hulu/etc, or skip it entirely.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
I hope they finally fix that pesky problem where only four lights were actually shown. Apparently the CG at the time was too expensive to include the fifth light, so they played it off as Picard trying to pretend he wasn't insane.
This is how cycle moves forward. 95%+ people interested in this new version already paid for rights to use this intelectual property, many more times than once. VHS, VCD, DVD, ...
No problem, we can pay again, and again... As long as they improve resolution, add new beneath-the-scenes, how-we-did-it and similar sugar.
Why don't they change anything? Because IT WORKS!
http://opencm3.net, http://www.nongnu.org/gm2/
Given that TFA provided sucks, I took the liberty of looking for another one. Here's the straight dope:
- CBS is starting from scratch using the original film negatives, and editing the episodes together precisely as they were when they originally aired between 1987 and 1994.
- Visual effects will not be upconverted from videotape, but instead will be recompositioned from the film elements available.
- The freshly cut film will be transferred to high definition with 7.1 DTS Master Audio.
- Work is being done in conjunction with Denise and Michael Okuda, who are on board as consultants.
- Aspect ratio for Blu-ray release is the original aspect ratio as it aired on televsion – 1.33:1 (4:3)
Source
Additionally, see TNG Remastered Process & FAQ
You are aware that star twinkling is an atmospheric (as in air) effect?
Partly - the atmosphere causes the slightly varying refraction of the rays of light from the star, but the reason this looks like twinkling is because as starlight a point source, the rays are narrow enough to stimulate one rod or cone in the retina at a time and the slight variation in angle "jostles" the beam over several receptors individually. Which is why stars don't "twinkle" on film even though the light goes through the same atmosphere on the way to the camera!