There’s a full version of my Mandalore episode - but with crushed blacks and some frame sync issues - available by request if anyone would like it to review the story flow and cuts.
There’s a full version of my Mandalore episode - but with crushed blacks and some frame sync issues - available by request if anyone would like it to review the story flow and cuts.
Yes, I would like the episode please.
I’d appreciate having a look over it, please, though be warned I’ll have a long list of extremely minor nitpicks.
PMs sent. Nitpick it to bits.
EddieDean, great work so far! I am sure I won’t have quite a list of nitpicks as sade1212, but I do have some.
My opinion and nitpicks are my own thoughts on it. You may have other views on the matter, but these are mine. I loved the work that EddieDean put into this so far. Keep it up!
00:00 is treated as a Timestamp and if clicked upon will redirect you to the homepage of OriginalTrilogy. It is decorated as is for FLAIR
Fixes for Mandalore episode 02
Other than that great work! My favorite segment of the episode is 28:14, “Go save your girlfriend…” still gets to me haha.
Thanks for reading this and hope to see further progress on this! Happy New Years to everyone!
Right, while letting other tasks do their thing, I’ve taken a closer look at the necessary cuts to the Malevolence arc - our episode four.
All of the wheat, none of the chaff. And Grievous got to be a savage who just got overwhelmed by superior firepower.
I’m really on board with your suggestion of trimming the arc in a way that keeps Grievous 😉
Right, while letting other tasks do their thing, I’ve taken a closer look at the necessary cuts to the Malevolence arc - our episode four.
All of the wheat, none of the chaff. And Grievous got to be a savage who just got overwhelmed by superior firepower.
I’m really on board with your suggestion of trimming the arc in a way that keeps Grievous 😉
Haha, no worries. I don’t want to do anything too radical with these edits. As I’ve said before, I don’t want to break its relationships with other canon, though I don’t mind changing little things. For example in my Malevolence episode, having Abregado near to Naboo. (I don’t know if it is officially.) But I think changing the ordering, and cutting out certain sequences, are going to be necessary to make this a stronger show.
Excellent feedback kerperlo, thanks! Detailed feedback like this is extremely useful. I’ll check over all of those. The quick cuts you mention are all part of the original episodes, though.
As for the 13:00-14:00 sequence (which is also the sequence in my clip above), if that doesn’t work for people that’s tricky, because this uses as much as possible without the conveyor belt. I wonder if there’s an alternative ordering which goes like:
Hi folks, I’ve produced a new version of the tracker, listing all episodes, their status, and links to clips/finished episodes. PM me for a link.
Hopefully Vegas stops giving you framerate issues shortly because I am very irritated by stuttering, haha. I was an early adopter of G-Sync monitors, even… The black crush is less annoying but still something to experiment to correct.
Anyway, nitpicks:
What was your plan with the Duchess of Mandalore episode, again?
Irrelevant general TCW ramblings: I always knew Pre Vizsla was Jon Favreau but this is the first time I’ve really noticed it. I also forgot how many suicides there are in TCW! I wonder if Bad Batch will be like that. Having this episode so early is still a really good idea: it’s definitely good to get the darksaber involved so early for anyone coming to this from Mando. I love the banter in Voyage of Temptation - “collection of half-truths and hyperbole known as Obi-Wan Kenobi”! “Yes, but he usually leaves out the undercurrent of remorse…”. I really enjoy Obi-Wan’s ‘relationship’ with Satine as a contrast to Anakin’s marriage to Padme; one of the best bits of the show for setting up ROTS. “Right… no Anakin, she’s not my-”. The spider controlling the clone’s corpse is very spooky. “…and slugs are so often trod upon!” is awful though, but I love it. I also love how Anakin just stabs Tal Merrik. Classic.
Love the nitpicks that sade1212 gave and like I said it may just be me. The way TCW was edited and cut (jump cuts) haha, puts my mind out of whack. I enjoy the show, don’t get me wrong. I’m more of a pacing and flow kind of guy. I get that way when I see any movie/episode with the editing and pacing quickened.
EddieDean you can reorder the sequence as mentioned above if you like.
Thanks for reading ✌
Thanks as always Sade.
Glad you spotted why I had to have the brief scene of Obi-Wan arriving on speeder where it is. There’s a little more tension if Viszla’s explaining shadowy forces when we don’t already know they’re active around the corner, so I needed something to split the two early scenes in his dining room (one standing, one seated). It’s a bit of a short shot but I don’t think it’s egregious, and it gives us more benefit than it takes away.
Glad you thought the cuts were clean (and liked the comedy background punching, which I thought was fun) - while I might not end up with this version, it’s good to know my skills are halfway decent.
I think I’ll try an alternate version of the no-conveyor scene as detailed above, where Obi-Wan doesn’t realise he’s drawing Satine into danger. I won’t have them randomly say “The boss will love his lightsaber” - we’ll infer that (since we already know the mine has multiple entrances), he forgot it in the chaos, and then Viszla picked it up and exited another way in time to face him.
The reason that I really want to remove the conveyor sequence if possible though is that it’s such a Bond villain idea. If you want to kill him, he’s unconscious, shoot him in the head (like Viszla does to one of his own guys later). It’s a plot driven by a silly decision, and I don’t want our first sight of Mandalorians in this show to be one that cheapens them.
Amazed that you spotted the elevator cut - that’s a very good eye. I’ve just had a play with that and actually it feels so much smoother without the SFX of the door opening that I’d put in. The SFX made it feel like one continuous scene chronologically, taking out that SFX allows it to simply be ‘shortly after’. Plus, you have fewer ‘events’ hitting your mind at the same time. One thing I’ve noticed from producing these first couple of edits is that I can strategise well and make decent cuts and transitions, but I don’t have a strong subjective feel for the results - my mind can do the ‘overall’ view and the ‘detail’ view, but is less good at the ‘natural flow’ view. All the more reason to iterate using feedback, and it makes those of you that’re actively giving notes all the more valuable, so thanks for your efforts.
The plan for Duchess of Mandalore is to play it (in its entirety I think?) a few episodes later. It feels like time passes by then, Satine’s a little settled on Coruscant.
I think I’ve cracked the Mandalore no-conveyor sequence! Take a look at the clip at the link for that episode in my tracker. It’s now the version of this scene which I mentioned above.
(As before, please excuse the frame issues and crushed blacks - I’ll try to fix these now.)
He calls her after seeing the armour but before getting jumped - so now he’s not deliberately putting her in danger. I changed his audio so instead of saying he’s in trouble or it’s urgent, he says “It’s the Death Watch”, which makes her get up from dinner. Then he gets jumped, and he’s fighting as she drives to him. Just as she arrives, she sprints down the corridor asking “Where are you?”, as he gets accosted by the second guy - which prompts him to reply with “Satine! Look out!” since he’s realised he’s brought her to danger. But since we’re following Satine on screen, we can then cut to Obi-Wan’s finishing blows on the Mandalorians, just as she appears.
It’s a quick version of that scene - but it essentially works as a prelude to the following scene rather than as a scene itself. It basically gets them quickly to the point of discovering the full encampment, which is a slower paced scene.
Can I have a link to the tracker please.
Sent.
It works really well, great job! It makes a lot more sense than Obi-Wan calls her before he gets beaten up, and I love how you even used it as a way to fix the weird wipe when she’s on her speeder. Satine’s arrival, the fight and the elevator sequence feel close to seamless to me, even though I know you’ve actually trimmed them much shorter than they originally were.
My only minor, minor quibbles would be:
Thanks sade. I’ve tweaked that second of your points to have his dialogue start after we see his mouth not moving.
On the first, I can’t make the shot longer, because it cuts immediately to Obi-Wan looking at a helmet directly then getting jumped. I had to keep those two shots together otherwise the jump comes too quickly interrupting Satine and Viszla. I’ve shifted the musical cue a little later though, so that the peak of interest from the audio comes as the helmet becomes obvious to the viewer, to draw our minds to it more. I think that’s about as far as I can take it, so I think that’s this episode as good as it can get. So long as there’s nothing in the existing content that people think absolutely does not work, I think this is the v1 version.
I now need to fix these bastard framerate and black issues, before moving on and finalising the opening and closing credits.
I appreciate the rework on the scene EddieDean, I love the pacing of it and adds some suspense to the conflict at hand. If others would like to take a dab at the changed scene, by all means tackle it! Unless EddieDean deems it complete.
Hooray! Fixed my crushed black levels. Turns out that since I’m outputting using an AVC codec, it assumed studio levels, so automatically applies a studio to computer levels filter. So I just had to undo the manual application of the filter. I’m uploading that clip to replace the other one, it’ll be in my tracker about 15 mins after posting this message.
On to the framerates. If anyone has the slightest idea why the following might happen, please point me in the right direction:
I also hate the PT droids, and have cut their voices as much as possible. You might have spotted a couple of ‘roger rogers’ removed from that clip already, and there’re more in the full episode. You do need to put up with their voices when they’re carrying important dialogue, but I’m getting rid of as much trash as possible.
There are audio editors, like Audacity, that can change the pitch of a sound without affecting the speed and vice versa (often used by guitar players for practice). Perhaps lowering the pitch by a few percent will make the battle droids sound less ‘cartooney’?
It’s possible, but their canon voice has that pitch, and it appears that way in other media. I don’t want to have to edit their appearances in the prequel trilogy and rebels, and any possible future media which includes them. I think taking a holistic view to the Star Wars franchise as a whole, it’s best to accept all of the fabric as canon, but then to just minimise the annoyance on a case-by-case basis.
Hey @EddieDean – would mind PMing me a link to that spreadsheet. I could have sword I had it from weeks ago, but I don’t have a record of it in my history.
Thanks!
Sent.
I’ve updated the tracker with a better review cut of the first Mandalore episode. This one still has framerate issues (though they’re not bad at all to my eyes), but importantly has fixed black levels, so its colours are correct. This is an end-to-end version of my cut of the episode, just needing the framerate fix and the intros and outros.
Same deal with the Christophsis episode is on its way too.
Right, there’s a rough cut of my S01E01 Christophsis episode on the tracker now too. Again, it’s not the release version, but it’s all of the cuts for the full episode. It has the right colour, but some framerate issues - I’m posting it in case people want an early opportunity to review and feedback. There’s one bit that doesn’t quite work, and a couple of bits that need more polish, I think, but I’ll see what you guys say.