Pandora (Avatar fanedit) - V2 HD & SD releases coming soon (Released) — Page 2

Brian Eno's.

Kevinicus said:

Wait, now you've totally lost me.  There was humor in Avatar?

Lol, attempted then.  In other words, all that camp stuff needs to GO.  I see in your edit that that's taken care of, so it's all good then.

Hoping for a response soon, JasonN :(

TV's Frink said:

Whose Avatar thread is this again?

;-)

Funny, I was wondering that myself. :P

For the record, I'm still alive and working on the DVD release - in addition to getting bogged down with work, I ended up having TWO hard drives fail over the course of a single day, which had me lose a sh*t-ton of data (yeah, I was pleased as punch that day...  -_- ). Fortunately, the Pandora DVD data was not affected (as it was on a HD that didn't fail), but I've been too busy trying to recover the failed HDs and transfer the data to new ones to work on finishing the DVD. Hopefully, now that most of my data has be recovered onto new HDs, I'll be able to get back around to finishing the DVD release.

In regards to the new footage and on doing a Pandora Special Edition release later on, I'll honestly have to see the footage myself before deciding on whether or not I'd want to add in into my fanedit (along with any deleted scenes, if there are any at all, that are released with the SE on DVD/Blu-ray later this year...).

However, these new scenes  that were listed on IMDB do sound a bit promising to me (particularly the highlighted ones): 

- When Jake goes on his first sortie in the Helicopter, theres a scene where the team observes a group of Sturmbeasts. Put back in in order to re-establish the Sturmbeast, as it was completely taken out before

 - The group visits Graces old school for supplies. This was a great scene and should have never been taken out in the first place. It also showed another brand new animal, the Stingbat.

 - Extended scene with Jake, Neytiri and the Fan Lizards. A very nice scene where the characters are having fun. 

- When Jake, Tsu'tey and the other Na'vi travel through the mountains to get to the banshees, Neytiri does a flyover around them and shares a greeting with Jake. I really liked this extension. 

- Sturmbeast hunt. A short, but very awesome action scene, it leads into Jakes voice over about him being a hunter now "death from above." Theres a great moment in this scene where Neytiri copies what Jake says. 

- The Love scene. Jake and Neytiri attaching their queues. I actually think this is a good addition, because the scene is edited much better this time. You could tell before that footage was taken out. 

- The Na'vi, including Tsu'tey, burn down the RDA bulldozers, equipment, and kill the soldiers and workers. We're shown the aftermath with charred bodies, etc. This is a pretty short scene, but its once that really should have been in the movie since day one as it provides a better rationale for Quaritch convincing Selfridge to attack the Hometree 

- Finally, the death of Tsu'Tey. This was a GREAT scene. Great acting, and amazing CGI that perfectly capture the emotions.

For those who are remotely curious... yeah, all two of you... I am, in fact, not dead. :P

Now that the Collector's Edition of Avatar has been released and it's various deleted and extended scenes are now available, I am now able to finish the DVD release of Pandora which includes new additions and several cuts that weren't present in the V1 AVI release. New elements for the fanedit's V2 cut currently include:

- uses the alternate "Future Earth" opening, replacing the original theatrical cut's opening (cuts around a third of Jake's internal monologues)

- cuts the scene in the jungle introducing the four-armed lemur/monkeys creatures (no, I don't remember its name)

- adds in the new scene of Jake, Norm, and Grace visiting the abandoned Navi school

- uses the extended "training" montage sequence, along with the new scenes of Grace explaining to Jake what really happened to her Navi school

- adds in the new Sturmbeast hunt scene

- uses the extended love scene between Jake and Neytiri

- adds the new "Drums of War" sequence of Tsu-tey and Navi hunters bombing bulldozers, along with the humans reaction to its destruction

- adds the scene of Grace explaining that the Company destroyed the Navi's sacred site on purpose to provoke a violent response; in addition, I've also cut Jake's "This is how its done" speech (which was way too over the top and preachy, not to mention nonsensical at times).

- adds shots of Tsu-tey falling into the jungle after being shot

- Cuts Quaritch's  "Nothing's over while I'm breathing" line before he fights Jake

- adds in the new "Last Shadow" sequence, where a dying Tsu-tey names Jake as the next leader of the Navi and has him ritually put him out of his misery

Additionally, I will be attempting... but make no promises... to add the deleted scene of "Pandora Rules" (where Quaritch expands on the rules of the Company's instillation on Pandora and belittles Norm for not paying attention) back into the film, along with possibly the "Breakfast With The Scientists" deleted scene. Unlike previous fanedits that I've done, this would be my first attempt at upconverting a 2.0 stereo audio mix into a 5.1 dolby surround mix (although technically it'd be more like building a new audio mix, much like what I did for certain scenes of my Episode 1 edit). If, however, my audio attempts aren't up to my quality standards, then I won't be including those scenes in the V2.
 

Lastly, I will be adding a black "scope overlay" matte over the top and bottom to give the film a 2.35:1 aspect ratio (to better match the video of the deleted scenes, which are in scope AR, with the film's video). Plus (and this is just my personal opinion), I think the movie actually looks better and more, well... "film-like" with a scope AR.

The V2 nearly finalized (just have to give it one more editing pass) and I'll be able to start rendering files for the DVD and AVI releases very soon - with both the new scenes from the Extended cut that I'm added back in along with several additional cuts and edits that I've made to the fanedit, the V2 cut now currently runs over 9 minutes longer than my previous version.

I was able to add the "Pandora Rules" and "Breakfast With The Scientists" deleted scenes back into the film and created/rebuilt new 5.1 audio mixes for those scenes (since they were previously in 2.0 stereo); the audio mixes turned out rather well, I think, and the new scenes add more much character to Jake, Quaritch, and the scientists.
(because those two scenes were added, I have also added a 2.35:1 scope matte to the movie, so that all scenes AR match each other)

Additionally, I decided to not include the "Extended Montage With Grace's Story" scene in the fanedit: while I liked how this subplot of Grace's school adds more to her character and history, my main problem with it is how it introduces Neytiri's sister.... aside from this and one other minor scene, NO other character (not Neytiri, not Moat, not Tsu-tey..) ever mentions this character's existence in the story, so it feels like this plot element is appearing out of thin air and never has any future impact to the story.

doubleofive said:

Did you just put the matte on top of the image, because if I recall a lot of the scenes were reframed for the 2.35:1 version. You may want to reframe some shots, especially look at the video log scenes as they were rendered to fit in frame on the 2.35 version.

I'm not sure where exactly you heard that, but from all of my composition tests and video comparisons from the film's scenes and the "scope version" deleted scenes (the ones which used the exact same shots as the 16x9 version), it seems like the filmmakers really did just add a black scope matte over the video for the 2.35:1 version of the movie (Cameron did frame the entire film for both 16x9 and scope ARs while in post, so that makes the most sense to me based on what I've seen and tested).

(also the video log scenes, which you mentioned as being rendered to fit 2.35, in fact don't completely fit the scope frame and cuts off slivers of the top/bottom text graphics - even if you reframed the shot, you'd lose either the top graphics or the majority of the bottom graphics)

Maybe the video log shots could just be shrunk to fit in the 2.39:1 frame?  As in, black bars on the sides (which, I suppose, would mean windowboxing them, as it'd be black bars all around)?  I don't think it'd be distracting, and it'd make the video log shots feel different than the rest of the film, which they currently don't.

ChainsawAsh said:

Maybe the video log shots could just be shrunk to fit in the 2.39:1 frame?  As in, black bars on the sides (which, I suppose, would mean windowboxing them, as it'd be black bars all around)?  I don't think it'd be distracting, and it'd make the video log shots feel different than the rest of the film, which they currently don't.

That's a good idea - just tried it out and it works well, so I've gone and done that for all of Jake's Vlog shots.

Oddly enough, the camera shots from the new "Drums of War" segment (where the soldier is sending video to Quaritch on the Navi's attack of the bulldozer) doesn't suffer from this same problem and it's overlay graphics work perfectly with the 2.35:1 matte.

I know that news for the V2 cut has been pretty slow and delayed, and that's basically been because I've been working on and testing my newly built workstation on the extents of its HD editing capabilities (to which it can easily handle, I must say :D ).

JasonN, 

First of all, I just want to say that I am a huge fan of your edit Pandora.  You did an amazing job.  I didn't like Avatar much at all really when I saw it in theaters, although I did appreciate it on a technical level.  It was simply too long and not very well written.  I thoroughly enjoyed your edit however.  I haven't seen any of the additional material, but I cannot wait for your V2, because the beginning of the film still feels rushed - through no fault of your own - and I think the future earth scenes will help with that.

Any word on how it is coming...?

Brother Beck said:

Any word on how it is coming...?

Yeah, sorry, it's been a while since I gave any news on this one - technically, the edit is 100% finalized, but rendering and working on the MKV release got delayed due to a few things:

- rendering AVC video in Sony Vegas 10 has proven to be a mega-f***ing pain in the ass... even with the 10.0c program update, the render craps out around the 35-40 minute mark of the video, which results in the video going from detail and perfect to pixilated, blurry, and nasty garbage.

It's taken me a long while to find a solution to this mess, but thankfully, I got some good advice from someone and now am rendering my HD video projects to lossless Lagarith AVIs and then converted those to x264 video files through MeGUI. However, this also leads to my current problem:

- A LOT of hard drive space is required for a 1920x1080 Lagarith AVI file and right now, my HD space is currently dedicated to another Edit project of mine (a Mass Effect 2 episodic video series). I'm ordering another 640GB hard drive soon, so hopefully I'll be able to render the Pandora V2 Lagarith AVI and render the x264 file from that sometime in the next two weeks.

Thanks for the update!  And thank you for all of your hard work!  I can't wait to see the results.

Hi, are there any plans to release this soon ? Because it's been two years since last update.