Good suggestions guys.


This might wind up in the final cut (not sure right now) but is not reinstated now for the following reasons:

1. Contains tracked music from scene directly afterwards
2. More exposition, which makes later scenes less interesting. Gets political.

As I said, I'm still thinking about it, and I might actually put in an edited version.

I edit the deleted scenes as well as the original ones. A good example of this is the scene with Padme's family. I've cut various corny lines (like "It's obvious he has feelings for you") in that one as well. Remember, one of my goals is to make the films feel older.

I should also add that I've gotten to the chase on Coruscant on my rough cut of this edit (with inferior image quality). I'm just doing it for reference and pacing, before I start on the full quality version.

So there is some progress taking place; I just have a busy and erratic schedule.

Trooperman,

Everything sounds great so far, was just wondering what prog do you intend on using for the final editing of the video?

I'm doing the reference cut on Nero (kind of hard to work with, and not many options). For the final editing, I'm going to use Roxio VideoWave (along with MGI VideoWave, ArcSoft, and VirtualDub). Even so, I'm realizing more and more that for the types of things I want to do (including soft wipes and transitions, filters, and complicated color modifiying), I might need to invest in a higher-end program like Adobe (I've read that it is very good). I might purchase that in the near future and learn to use it.

As for the audio, I'm using AudioHQ, SoundForge, Cakewalk Pyro, and Sonar to do the sound mix, and I'll need every bit of it for the dubbing.

Thanks for asking!

I like your ideas, Trooperman!

I'm thinking of making my own edit of Ep 2 once I get some time. I like what MagnoliaFan did and would use his as a template so I guess it would be somewhat of a hybrid perhaps. Just a few nips here and there. Anyway, some of these are probably pretty silly, but oh well.

-drop the "I think" from when Anakin says it's a short cut. He's supposed to be cocky, right?

-drop Obi-Wan's "Good call, my young padawan" line

-drop Padme's "R2 what are you doing here?" line and just have Threepio tell them he has a message.

-drop the seperatist dialogue/scene on Geonosis. I think it's unnecessary (not to mention poorly done). The seperatists are already there. Why do they need to pledge their allegiance? I would only leave in Dooku speaking.

-When Obi-Wan picks up the dart, I would overdub "Kamino". While it might not work perfectly, it would eliminate any need for Dex's "diner". I would still leave in Obi-Wan's search for information on Kamino. I know Cleveland is in northern Ohio, but that doesn't mean I wouldn't need directions to get there.

-When Obi-Wan is chained to the post and and says "Good job" I would splice in a shot of the full stadium as he looks up.

-drop the assembly line scene. Show Padme landing and riding the conveyor belt away, then show her being caught by Geonosians. Show Anakin jumping down and being surrounded by Jango and droidekas. I'd even go as far to drop the R2 and Threepio all together from Geonosis (assumably they'd stay on Padme's ship) but this might cue music problems during the arena battle. I know that might be blasphemous considering the droids are always in the think of things in every movie, but I feel they added very little to the Geonosis scenes.

-Restore the hiss of Anakin's lightsaber in the Tuskan camp

-Restore the first "Tell us" when Anakin is accosting Zam

I'm not sure what I would do about the Dooku duel(s).

Darth Editous has been helping me with a similar issue on panning down vs the original pan-up on Ep II. We've almost gotten something for everybody's review. His work looks fan-damn-tastic!

I'll invite him to comment on the specifics, but as I understand it, he gradually flipped the starfield during the length of the crawl so that at the beginning, it matched the background behind the title card and by the pan down, it was flipped vertically. It's almost perfect. I'm having some recompression issues in Womble that's making it look less than perfect, but once we resolve those, it'll be well-worth posting.

I re-wrote the crawl for my own edit. I'll reveal that when it's ready for posting.

Ditto.

Good suggestions though!

Lust leave Dokuu's duels as they are but cut out the lighting and Yoda's Aerobatics.

When is the release date? Is it going to be available to the general public? Will we have to pay for it?

Also I watched the film a couple of times and noticed the bit on Kamino, where Lama Su is talking to Obi Wan, and it just slowed the entire film down.

Oh, and another thing which I don't like is on Geonosis, there are a couple of shots of the Geonosians looking at Obi Wan. I watched the film and tried skipping through those shots. It worked a lot better without them.

Are you going to keep the entire scene where Dooku is interrogating Obi Wan?

Yeah, and i think your project's really great!

Maybe you should think about putting some shots of the Anakin from Ep3 (if you can)? But I guess this wouldn't be loyal to the OT.

Sorry, I missed that part. But sounds like really cool idea!

Hi Jeten San Hett; welcome to the forum.



The whole duel is still a work-in-progress, so I'll let you know when I figure out exactly what I'm going to do.


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Another change I have just integrated: I always hated how Padme bossed Anakin around inside the ship on Tatooine (before they left for Geonosis). Especially cringeworthy was the line, "If you want to protect me...you'll just have to come along." And Anakin, who's supposed to be so cocky and strong-willed, smiles passively and gives in a few seconds after having argued the other side very strongly. I couldn't stomach the scene. But- here's where completely re-dubbing Anakin comes in really handy.

Anakin: But you heard Master Windu. He gave me strict orders to stay here. (very serious).

I've spliced in a shot of Padme's hand pushing a button- only I've cropped it so that her white sleeve does not show, making it Anakin's hand. And during this shot,

Anakin: Therefore, we're leaving immediately. Cut to shot of Padme staring at Anakin disbelievingly. Cut to the shot of Anakin smiling (which has different meaning now) and they take off.

A bit of humour, and also establishes that Anakin made believe he would follow Windu's orders, only to turn around 3 seconds later and break them. Padme also contributes; she just no longer completely bosses Anakin around.

Thanks for the input!

How did you crop the film so the 16:9 ratio is still in?

Understand that I haven't actually cropped it yet. What I do is I use the unaltered shots for the rough cut, and then I make a list of the shots I need to crop for the final version. And what I'll be doing is taking just the widescreen, cropping it so as to preserve the exact dimensions, and then insert the anamorphic bars afterwards. I'll encode these shots separately as anamorphic before I splice them in with the rest.

I know that this is little stuff, but I'm going to try to raise the brightness on specific frames in shots when blasters are fired, to make it look more like the original SW. I think it'll look more realistic and not as "CG".

NO!!!!!!!!!!! DO NOT DO THAT! That is the one thing I cannot stand about the OT. I swear am I the only one that gets a headache from the screen flashing white every time a blaster is fired!? Please don't do that!

If nobody besides me likes it that way, then I won't do it (for general release, anyway). It would be less work anyhow.

But if I did do it, it would probably be more subtle than in the original SW. I do think that there were times that the flashes were a bit overdone.

Why don't you just make a white "muzzle flash" picture in photoshop with a blue background, then chroma key it until you get a nice feathered effect, and put the opacity right down. Make this 6 frames long, and key frame the opacity and the shape to go up then down as the shot progresses. Then just put that over all the blaster nozzles. You can adjust the opacity depending on your view. also, you might want to make it more yellow.

The comment was made a while back (in another thread) that watching the CG computer graphics of the prequels in black-in-white made the effects look more realistic. I tried it and it was absolutely true- the black-and-white actually looked better.

I recently began to wonder, though, how well it would work to de-saturate the colors on some obviously CG scenes to make them look more realistic (like the Jedi Council room and the Droid Factory). It makes an amazing difference. It looks like you're actually in a real room- the bright, phony looking colors are muted and realistic. I am so pleased with how this simple adjustment improved these scenes that I am probably going to use it a lot in the time to come.

Another change, pertaining to the moment when Boba Fett says: "Get him. Fire!" If there was ever a moment when dramatic music was needed, that was it. So what I've done is taken a dramatic cue from "The Wrath of Khan" and started it when Slave I races towards camera, firing. And it was an amazing feeling to watch it. It felt like Star Wars again! (ironically enough, by using a musical clip from Star Trek). I've done it so that the brass hit two dramatic chords as the ship races towards camera, and it's synchronized so that the following orchestral crash coincides with the cut to Obi-Wan's cockpit. It works beautifully, and is really an amazing moment.



Good advice! Thank you very much; I think I'll do that.

Technical stuff: The finished film will not contain 5.1 surround sound. I simply don't feel as though I can do a very good job on it, considering the new character voices and the amount of stereo-only material I'm putting in. So it will be PCM stereo, and I will actually probably use the audio from the pan-scan VHS (filtered) for the base, because not only is it uncompressed, it's Pro-Logic encoded. So the final mix might actually wind up with 4 matrixed channels; I don't know.

Sorry, I don't really get it. Are you going to put all the CGI shots in AotC into black and white? Man, thats a lot of shots! That might really destroy the film - maybe some people didn't realise that the b/w shots were FX shots. Also, what about the "one element" CGI shots?

No no no! Sorry I didn't explain myself well enough.

Nothing is going to be black-and-white at all, but for certain scenes where the computer graphics looked too bright and phony looking, I have desaturated the colors by about 60% (differently depending on the scene), so as to mute the color palette and make it look more realistic. There is no loss of brightness, detail, or clarity, and I'm not changing any of the FX (aside from the flashes we were talking about). I simply experimented with putting it about halfway between full-color and black-and-white, and it looks more gritty and more like the OT.

That's great. I wonder if it would work in the Coruscant chase scene.

BTW, I still say leave the muzzle flash out entirely. It isn't really realistic to have a bright white flash everytime a blaster fires. It's not like they have any powder to burn. The only light from a blaster should come from the beam itself.

Trooperman --

So many things to comment on and my DVD player is rejecting my copy of "The Clone War" so I cannot yet give the detailed comments I intend to.

But I want to toss out an initial note, if I may:

I want someone to emphasize how important (and overlooked) Anakin's bad dreams are to understanding him. If we understood at the beging of AOTC that he was having accurate premonitions that his mother is being tortured, but Obi Wan and the council were preventing him from going to her -- then everything he did would make more sense.

This concept should be really valuable in re-editing this film. It'll make almost anything Anakin does feel more natural because we would know up front how difficult it is for him every day to stop himself from running off to his mom.

I think this can be done, but I want to give specific notes when I get my disc working again -- assuming it's even interesting to you.

Have you decided on a name yet?

Which of the CGI shots are you going to desaturate?

Of the "half bluescreen half CG" shots, are you going to desaturate parts of the shot?