10 Times Star Trek Accidentally Filmed Things You Weren't Meant To See

Apparently the device for stitching the carpet didn't work until Picard made it sew.

A long time ago in a universe far far away I worked as a technician for a large TV broadcaster and content producer. One of my jobs was to check shows for these sorts of issue, and then decide whether or not it needed to be "fixed". The trouble is, once one has been trained to spot this sort of stuff it becomes quite difficult to learn to un-see things, which can make watching TV very frustrating. Undoubtedly the most common problems are a sound boom in shot, and a shot which over-spills the edge of the set. Using a modern LCD TV both effects can frequently be found in TOS and TNG. However what most people don't realise is that most of these things would never have been seen, because back in the days CRT displays, the picture tube was overscanned by up to 6%. This means that a significant area of the image on the film or tape would never be seen by the audience because their TV sets were deliberately set-up to display a cropped picture. Only technical anoraks like me, would have had the knowledge and/or technical skill to adjust the scan yoke to display edge to edge, and the penalty for doing so was that one then saw the messy instability and disturbances to the picture edge, which came from the primitive early TV sync pulses. That's why the overscan was chosen - so the average viewer wouldn't have to see any of the technical flaws. This also included an allowance for framing imperfections of the sort to which you allude. TV production manuals from the area refer to a SAFE AREA - which is the area of frame which is guaranteed to be viewable. This is a 16:9 chart https://www.hdhead.com/illustrations/1080_safe_chart.jpg and here is a 4:3 https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d5/Pal_safe_area.svg/320px-Pal_safe_area.svg.png Only the GREEN area would be considered "safe" and by extension important to the shot. So for example the newspaper, and many of the carpet tears - and indeed most of my sound booms would not have been considered important enough to fix, because the vast majority of viewers would simply never see them, as their sets would crop the picture so that the fault or object in shot was outside the safe area frame. These days changing the picture is as easy as going into the display menu and changing the display from TV-overscanned to edge-to-edge mode, which anyone using the screen as a PC monitor will have had to do so as not to lose things like the start menu button into the over-scan area. So these intrusions into the picture, which were previously considered as invisible are now viewable. Sadly this does destroy the "magic" - as did the move HD which, alongside showing things like your black squares on the bridge display, rendered the older styles of TV makeup instantly unconvincing - leading in turn to a lot of work being quietly done in the early 2000's to improve the quality of makeup and prosthetics. This is why sometimes advances in technology like HD are best not applied retrospectively to old shows. Sometimes I think it is better to view the show, with all its fuzzy charm, in the original format, thus more easily maintaining the illusion.

As someone who watched Star Trek on a standard def tv over the airwaves, I can assure you these things were not visible/discernible on screen. People weren't that worried at the time because there was no way that the average viewer could see the gaffes.

I worked in TV for over 25 years as a Post Production Manager. Basically I do special effects and clean up mistakes AKA "Fix it in Post". I think it' important to note how TV production is quite different today versus the 70's to the 2010's. Today, seasons of a show are produced all at once (think Netflix style). In the past, it was quite different. Episodes were created in a monthly production cycle. You would start a show with a pilot and like 4 episodes to get the ball rolling (AKA a 4 month head start). Each month you were tasked to write, shoot, edit, post produce and add sound for an entire episode. Back in the day , some shows too no breaks and kept producing year round with different teams. When you are producing shows like that, it's easy to make mistakes and get too comfortable. You are basically living on set and see your families very rarely. The set starts feeling like home and you start treating it as such, and that's where problems occur. Most people are very professional, but when you are on set from sun up to sundown, and sometimes over night day after day to meet crazy deadlines, the lines between home and work blur.

To be fair, #7 could be explained away as "hey, even on a Galaxy Class starship, sometimes the carpet gets torn and it takes a shift or two before someone from the Lower Decks gets there to repair it."

Like all engineers, Chief O'Brien carries duct tape, not masking tape.

HD has really changed a lot of stuff in television. My uncle used to be a reporter and later an anchor for the local news. When the station started using HD cameras they had to replace the news desk because it was covered in graffiti that could not be seen in the SD camerals, but was clearly visible in HD.

with all of the carpet gaffs in TNG, it re-frames the cheeky in-joke on Picard S3, "Being here, with all of us back together, it reminds me of the one thing I missed... The carpet"

It's an alien dog. Like Martia said, "Not everyone keeps their genitals in the same place."

You can forgive a lot of these. Fun fact: TOS, TNG, DS9 and Voyager where all shot on film. TOS was also edited 'traditionally' (physically cutting film), while the other three series were transferred to videotape for editing. But when shooting on film and using analog editing, it would be massively expensive to do a re-shoot for a minor background problem, and the technology didn't really exist to just 'paint out' a problem (or was too expensive). It's actually pretty funny that I could fix those panel reflections, just crop out the carpet tear or clone out those blocking markers in a few minutes on my laptop today, when back then fixing those shots either wasn't possible, or would take too long or cost tens of thousands of dollars.

I finally found someone who has more free time than I do.

Good thing the writing for TNG, DS9 and Voyager was so good that we were too into the plot to notice little things like these 😊

He wasn't chewing gum, he was called in while having dinner and it is the tough meat cooked by Neelix that he is still trying to chew enough to swallow...

"With the hope that the viewer would never notice." They were right, too. I never noticed. I get far too caught up in the story to worry about pesky background details.

I'm absolutely devastated to now discover that Star Trek wasn't a reality series...

Just imagine, William Shattner is 90 years old, and just went into space. Going strong! Thanks for the memories!

The ONE time he didn't recycle the Federation Daily newsheet and THIS gets a complaint!

I always thought the green ornament was showing some famous Romulan, like her dad or something.

You should have seen the first 12 episodes of the original afternoon soap opera 'Dark Shadows'. Viewers could see cables and wires often, as well as hear the crew working in the background. Once, you could see above the set walls. The show was about to be canceled. Then, the producer's young child came up with the idea to make the show scary. Starting at episode 13, quality improved considerable, and the the show shot 1,225 episodes over six seasons.

Bless the editor. Those last few seconds of Discoveries' crew being SO puzzled was fantastic timing with Sean's commentary 😂