Over the past few years there has been this trend towards simulating artifacts that you'd more commonly associate with film, presumably to give games a more cinematic feel. Some of them I find really annoying, like film grain, but others like lens flare can actually be used to communicate something you wouldn't otherwise be able to. Likewise, I find depth of field to sometimes be very nicely implemented, even where the effect is really quite strong. Alien: Isolation sort of made a gameplay mechanic out of it. I find it works best when the game only applies it in a context where it makes sense, like bringing up the scanner in Alien, or zooming into one your cities in Endless Legend. Where it fails, I think, is where it is always on and assumes that your crosshair is always going to be your focus.

Abrams IS a hack. he never even liked star trek but repeated all the old images with added lens flares and fake looking shiny CGI bullshit.
Expect the same.
There is no love or inspiration here, just the product of a billion dollar business deal between fat cynical capitalists and later their mercenary artisitically bankrupt stooge for hire.
Doing anything interesting is the only way to get fired for him (see Antman).
Also, that doesn't look like han solo, anymore than the crystal skull oldie looked like indiana jones.

Looks fake, not enough lens flare.

Fucking horrifying.

All I can think watching this kind of thing is I wish someone could do something, but what? At most all I can imagine is someone going back a few hundred yards and throwing road flares into the road. That'll never happen. The only thing you can do is not drive so damned fast when you can't see what's in front of you. That also will never happen.

Unless there's a news report saying no one was killed, I'm afraid this does qualify as snuff because it doesn't seem possible that the car sandwiched between big-rigs was survivable.

It's viewed at a very long range, through fog and clouds. The perspective is because of the very long range, and the image is very dimmed because of the cloud cover.
The image is underexposed, and therefore we can only clearly see the very brightest part of the image, which is the flames inside the thrusters - that part is hidden in severely overexposed flare blooms in all the other recordings. The rest of the rocket is barely seen through the clouds, and would have been a bit more visible if the image had a lighter exposure, but then the nozzles would have been bright blooms, and we wouldn't have been able to see any details inside.
If you look closely, you faintly see not only the spaceship, but also the huge flickering flame columns behind the nozzles.

He totally deserved it http://www.collegehumor.com/video/6890554/all-the-lens-flares-from-jj-abrams-star-trek

I saw the first star trek film again the other day.. I am laughing, but at the same time, parts of this parody were genuinely no exaggeration on the lense flare in parts of that film.

And it's like trying not to think about breathing.

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Tags for this video have been changed from 'star wars, wookie, oldluke, lens flares, episode 7' to 'star wars, wookie, oldluke, lens flares, episode 7, Fan Made' - edited by Sagemind

The solar flares are very cool. I suggest watching in HD and full screen for maximum awesomeness.

Also from YT description:

The surface of the sun from October 14th to 30th, 2014, showing sunspot AR 2192, the largest sunspot of the last two solar cycles (22 years). During this time sunspot AR 2191 produced six X-class and four M-class solar flares. The animation shows the sun in the ultraviolet 304 ångström wavelength, and plays at a rate of 52.5 minutes per second. It is composed of more than 17,000 images, 72 GB of data produced by the solar dynamics observatory (http://sdo.gsfc.nasa.gov/) + (http://www.helioviewer.org/). This animation has be rendered in 4K, and resized to the Youtube maximum resolution of 3840×2160. The animation has been rotated 180 degrees so that south is 'up'. The audio is the "heartbeat" of the sun, processed from SOHO HMI data by Alexander G. Kosovichev. Image processing and animation by James Tyrwhitt-Drake.

Needs more lens flare. Can we fix that in post production?

There is one thing I hate more then lens flares. simulated camera shake.

Looks like they got lens flare lessons from J.J. Abrams.