10 Amazing Behind-The-Scenes Secrets From Star Trek: The Next Generation
6. The Starfield Was Real
The advent of digital effects was a major reason for Star Trek's revival during the late 20th century. Practical effects were great, but incredibly time-consuming and heavy on logistics for a fast-paced TV show. Indeed Gene Roddenberry was forced to make significant compromises to his initial vision purely because there wasn't the budget to realise them.
Case in point, how many rooms on the original Enterprise had windows...?
Thankfully for the Next Generation, chroma-key and greenscreen were commonplace by the time they moved into production. Meaning that all manner of wonderful alien worlds and spacial anomalies could be easily visualised in the same shot as the cast. Naturally, you'd assume that every shot of space from inside the ship was done this way.
Not so though, as the static starfield often pictured outside Captain Picard's Ready Room, Ten Forward, the conference room, and any smaller windows on the ship was actually real. A heavy black curtain, on rollers, with small pieces of silver metal stitched in doubled as the backdrop, and would move slowly in the background of scenes.
Unless of course something more dramatic was called for, in which case a green curtain was lowered in front of it and edited digitally. Incidentally, the stars don't move in Season One because the curtain was too heavy for the rollers to work properly.