Of course tinkering too much with a sacrosanct franchise can be as detrimental as a dearth of bells and whistles. But Nicholson says Thompson has a strong hold on exactly how to balance the old and the new. "There is a great fan base. We hope we have improved the car significantly from the original series, but have not broken too many laws of physics so [that] you say 'that's impossible.' The fun thing about the original series is that it was all done with practical stunts. Now we are doing things more with CG and greenscreen techniques, yet we still want to adhere to realistic camera position and realistic moves for the car.

"Any transformation has to be believable," Nicholson continues. "What we were doing in the pilot was more of a sci-fi morph. You can sit and justify it with logic all day long in terms of nanotechnology, but we are coming out of the Industrial Revolution. I think audiences relate more to mechanical transitions than molecular transitions. Gary is very aware of that. Plus, [mechanical transitions] are a lot more visually stimulating."

Aside from the KITT transformations, Nicholson says they also do a wide range of other complicated visual effects every episode. "We did take a unique approach in regards to shooting the [driving] plates. I shot most of them with the Ultimate Arm (Camera Crane System) using an F23 and doing some very interesting speed shutter ramps so we could have the backgrounds as exciting to watch when the car is driving as the foreground is. The plates are exciting to watch by themselves and then you put in the CG car transforming and it is great footage.

The vfx team must walk a fine line between tinkering too much with a sacrosanct franchise and offering fans new and exciting vfx. In the end, the team adheres to realistic camera positions and realistic moves for the car.

And KITT's dash has also gotten an impressive upgrade with an assortment of digital screens, monitors and vehicle feedback controls. Nicholson says at first they were concerned that they had created a potential accident waiting to happen for Michael Knight. "But when you get into touch screens and holographic displays and all that, if you had a car that could drive itself, then it's OK to be watching a whole bunch of monitors and screens with Internet and GPS. So that became one of the design criteria -- the graphics could be very heavy inside the car because KITT is driving itself. And that connects stylistically to the KITT cave, where they park him and work on him."

In the premiere episode of the season, Nicholson is also particularly proud of the work they did having KITT go up in flames. "The flaming car sequence is an interesting one because I think that we achieved a look. Ghost Rider was probably the best example to date of CG fire and I think we have ended up with a look that is better than Ghost Rider."

"That was an interesting discussion," Nicholson chuckles. "When you bypass the look of a $100 million movie, you do think we must be doing something right. And I think the fire sequence, particularly in the exterior shots of the KITT on fire, looks beautiful. It was well executed and the artists here did a great job on them. We are proud of that shot. We did a lot of shooting of fire and then mapping it onto fabric that we could bend and shape around the car. It's like trained fire. You are looking at real fire but it's shaped in a way that we can control it."

Looking ahead, if Knight Rider gets picked up for a full season Nicholson says he can see Stargate Digital perhaps having to let go of the series due to budget demands. "The show is very ambitious and they are fighting the budget every day," he explains. Right now the show averages 100 to 200 effects shots per episode -- an astounding number for a TV series.

"Ultimately I think our job has been to establish a look and a template for the show and then most likely they will probably take the show in-house and do it with in-house artists. It's an option for a lot of shows where you can have someone down the hall with computers and they can respond immediately. Without any overhead you can do some interesting things. But they don't have the horsepower that we have here in terms of render farms, processing power and number of artists. At any one time, we have a dedicated team of 10-12 people in 3D and sometimes 18-20 people in 2D. And at any one time, we had 40 or 50 people working on the show. But at the same time, I think one of the goals has been to move the show in-house from the beginning, to try and contain the costs. It's certainly an option with any show. We did four years of CSI and then they took it in-house. I like to think we deliver a superior product, but if producers are faced with ever-tightening budgets, part of our responsibility is to set it up and get it going and then pass it to their artists."

Tara Bennett is an East Coast-based writer whose articles have appeared in publications such as SCI FI Magazine, SFX and Lost Magazine. She is the author of the books 300: The Art of the Film and 24: The Official Companion Guide: Seasons 1-6.