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Post #1431471

Author
DominicCobb
Parent topic
The Rise of Skywalker: Ascendant (Released)
Link to post in topic
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/1431471/action/topic#1431471
Date created
23-May-2021, 12:42 PM

RogueLeader said:

CaptainFaraday said:

It’s so weird and wild seeing my puppet designs actually fabricated, put into motion, and put into the movie. I feel like I got to do the fun bit and RL did the hard work. I’m absolutely floored by the result, and I’m very proud to be part of it all.

I’m glad you’re happy with how it turned out! Honestly, your enthusiastic message offering to help with the puppets is what really gave me the push to do this. I would’ve been stuck on the puppet designs forever if wasn’t for you!

DominicCobb said:

A one shot alternative might be slowing down the plate as much as possible before it looks weird, they laying the puppet show in. If we could see it for even just a few more frames it could help registering what’s going on more.

Not a bad idea, and this could potentially be applied to both a one or two shot version. I wonder what the limit would be before the slow motion became noticeable? I’m not really familiar with the best methods of extending shots. That was something you did with a few moments in TROS, right?

sade1212 said:

Topaz Video Enhance AI would be your best bet for getting 4K footage out of a 1080p source. You’d only need to upscale the puppets and the cleaned background, right, because the rest is the same as the theatrical and could just be matted back in from the 4K source.

Sade, you clever bastard. And I actually filmed the puppets at 4K, so all that has to be upscaled is the cleaned background.

I’ll see about trying to upscale the plate later today/tomorrow, but if anyone else wanted to have a go at it, here is the Google drive link Poppa provided awhile back for the clean plate.

I just use optical flow in Premiere (although I’d assume After Effects has it too?). Results vary wildly, sometimes you can really stretch it without it looking slowed down at all. The more movement the trickier it becomes. In this shot I think the smoke could really fuck it up. But worth giving it a try, should be able to gain at least a few frames I’d hope.

JEDIT: Well unfortunately I tried it out and I was right about the smoke. So optical flow is out of the question. In that case you just gotta go with the default frame sampling. Some quick test suggest to me that you can probably only buy about 4 or 5 frames before it starts looking obvious. Which I suppose is better than nothing. If someone really wanted to waste their time I can see ways to use VFX to make things more seamless (selectively picking parts of the frame to use optical flow, trying to remove the smoke altogether, adding new smoke that doesn’t look slowed down, etc.) but those might all be overkill. An extra couple frames might be fine. Or hopefully we can see if we can do the punch-in shot.