I don't want to get into a fight about this, but photographic
proof certainly does convince me.
The second render that I posted specifically addresses the point that just because a movie
appears to show blinking lights, that, by itself,
isn't proof that the lights were actually blinking.
We can all see that the effect
looks like aset of vanes rotating around a set of blinking lights, but it's kind of the
whole point of "special effects" photography that what appears on screen isn't what was actually happening. In SUPERMAN THE MOVIE, it
looks like Christopher Reeve can fly. In JASON AND THE ARGONAUTS, it looks like Todd Armstrong fights off a bunch of skeletons grown from dragon's teeth. What actually happened on the soundstages was completely different from what appeared on screen.
As I said earlier, in three of the four Golden West photos that I've seen, the lights in the domes certainly appear to be unlit, but why
assume that that means that the motors also weren't running? Those photographs
are photographic proof that whatever exactly is inside the outer domes is visible even when the lights are off. If the lights were off because they were having some problem with them, it doesn't automatically follow that they would also have turned the motors off while the model was on display, because the spinning innards would still be a visible part of the display.
If the motors were running, ambient light would shine in through the outer domes, reflect off the mirror shards, and shine back out through the inner domes like the light from the bulbs, and the
apparent shape of the "vanes" would be largely the same as it is with the lights on.
It's not like I'm digging my heels in and refusing to acknowledge the obvious in the face of overwhelming evidence. Plenty of people have tried to replicate the effect seen on screen; few, if any, have entirely succeeded. I'm pretty sure that I've either seen a video, or read an interview, in which Malcolm Collum, who's a pretty smart guy from what I've seen, explicitly stated that they couldn't precisely replicate the original effect on the model as seen in person, because the movie camera shutter is a crucial part of the equation.
As I've said, I was completely ignorant of the fact that in the US, "Christmas tree-type lights" could refer to any one of dozens of different contraptions. Having learned more about that I feel stupid for not considering the fact that US Christmas tree lights might not have been the same as the kind that we had here.
I'm entirely open to the idea that there
may have been blinking lights, but I want to see evidence that
clearly shows that it was actually the bulbs blinking rather than something else (like the render that I posted) going on.I'm not trying to
prove that that the bulbs didn't blink, I'm trying to establish, to my own satisfaction, whether they did or not. If the shots shown on the show were conclusive evidence that they did, I wouldn't have had any reason to doubt it in the first place.
This "Vault Series" blu-ray, is that this?:
https://www.amazon.com/Star-Trek-Original-Roddenberry-Blu-ray/dp/B01LFUORW0
I know a Trekkie who will almost certainly have a copy of that. I'll see if I can borrow it. I notice that "
Metamorphosis" is on there; is that where your grabs came from? If so, it could explain why your grabs are more sharpened than the series blu-ray footage.
This is the theory that I currently have: Richard Datin, who designed and built the original effect, specifically referred to it as a "spinning light" effect. If you built the gizmo that he described, with a solid inner dome with slots cut into it, and a set of lights and mirrors inside, when you spun the inner dome, bands of light would appear to be spinning around the outer dome, with the appearance of each band changing as the spatial relationships between each of the bulbs and the slots changed. Spinning the dome faster would eventually merge the bands together, in the same way that a plane's propeller blades eventually look like a transparent disc when they spin fast enough, giving the effect of scintillating lights whirling around the surface of the dome.
If the inner dome that Richard Datin made had had narrow vanes with wide open spaces between them, it wouldn't have produced this effect.
Seen with the naked eye, this was probably quite an impressive effect. However, filmed with a movie camera, the effect wouldn't really work. A movie camera (running at normal speed, with a normal shutter angle) records everything that happens in 1/48th of a second, none of what happens in the following 1/48th of a second, then everything that happens in the following 1/48th and so on. Then when the movie is played, each of those little 1/48th of a second slices of time are presented
all at once so that all of the movement that would have been visible to the naked eye
during each individual 48th of a second is lost.
The effect on film would essentially resemble the first render that I posted, but with all of the individual lights showing through the dome rather than just the plain white illuminated background in my render.
At the time when he started working on
Star Trek, Richard Datin had made a few models for various movies, but he wasn't actually officially working in the movie business because he didn't have a union card. He was a model maker by trade, not an effects technician. He probably wasn't fully aware of the way that filming the device that he designed would change its appearance.
Possibly, when they filmed the effect, they realized that it was a bit "meh" looking on film, so they put in the coloured bulbs (which may or may not have blinked) to spice it up a bit, and it's possible that some bright individual figured out that since the slotted dome didn't really work as intended, you could achieve the same effect by replacing it with the transparent domes with black stripes that Jeff Szazly describes in the
Starlog article. I think, for this to be the case, though, given the tight budget, there'd need to be a compelling reason for doing it.