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.-The Matrix Hacked-..:Completed:. — Page 2

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What's though is most of the games scences only work if you have scene some of the plot of the video game, like the whole keymaker scence. To those who haven't played through the game, you don't understand that Niobe and Ghost have just been cornored in a no chance to win battle in a sewer. However, I draw the line at putting poorly rendered scenes of actual game play in my movie.

I am just looking if people like the idea of trying to use the giant smith as an ending, or is just to dang campy?

Dr. M, the first works, if you could some how set up her being in the room in the first place. Maybe put a shot of her from M1 right before neo enters, and then start with the smiths. I dunno?

Random question, what's the best way to rip dvd's in to AVI's?


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Actually where I'm eventually locating the scene shouldn't require a setup. Smiths walking in and saying the Great and Terrible Oracle pretty much sets the stage. Anything more would kill the pace at the location in question... you'll see.
At least that's one vote for version 1.

Dr. M

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Just to clairfy my point:

In film making it is usually important to start with an establishing shot before the one person cut aways, so we can see who's on the scene before any action or dioulge takes place.

I.E. seeing the oracle by herself in the kitchen helps the viewer understand whats going on. It would really help it seem less like a fan edit.

But, I'll let you try it your way, if you think it flows better go for it, your the boss. One sugjestion, is if your editing software allows you to do some color correction, try to darken the scenes with gloria foster, and if it's advanced, try to match the green lighting in the kitchen from M1 to M3.

Just my two cents, keep up the hard work. I can't wait to see the end product.
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Cool, thanks for the comment. You know I just noticed womble does have some filtering tools. I'll have to play with it.
I mean even try running one of the clips backwards and seeing if it looks natural, and yet different from the original.

Btw, as far as an establishing shot: I would have liked one, but the problem is most footage is immediately recognizable from M1 and there is little footage more than a couple frames of the Oracle not talking.

Dr. M

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I just watched the first shot (now have to wait 80 mins for the next). It sure is a great idea, but looks and sounds not good yet. The colours don't fit and especially the sound breaks are noticably disturbing. The scene requires a lot of work still. But nevertheless I like it. Gloria Foster is the oracle, yeah.

Nothing about fanediting is easy.

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Hmm, can anyone point me to a good place to put screenshots. The my website has been down for the last few days. I have a provisional color correction I'd like to show off. I reduced all saturation by 25% and then boosted green (and cyan) 50%.
Edit: Which really translate roughly to just lowering the saturation of all colors except green/cyan by 25%.
Surprisingly the lighting's dynamic range and brightness are almost completely identical to start with.
To my lousy color eye it looks damn close.

Ok in the meantime here is a zip file of the shots: M3's Oracle, M1 Original, and M1 filtered.
Apologies for the method, I'll try to get the pictures posted asap.

http://rapidshare.de/files/15625596/Oracle.zip.html

Dr. M

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If you could rent or borrow the Matrix disc from the boxset, it might save you the trouble of color correcting the Oracle's scenes. They apparently went back and tweaked the colors in the Matrix scenes to match the sequels.
Some screenshots here.
Forum Moderator

Where were you in '77?

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Everyone wants to be George Lucas.
Maybe I should recode M2 & M3 lowering the blues in the real world and greens in the Matrix so they match the original film better.

Come to think of it that's really not such a bad idea, just a LOT of work.

Btw, they mentioned gold to represent the "spiritual". What the heck is considered the spiritual in the matrix?

Dr. M

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That should help a ton. The clothes match pretty well. The wall seems a little bit too yellow, you'll have to choose which is more important the wall or the clothes. Personally I'd go wall. Maybe it's just in m3 the wall has green splashes it doesn't in m1. Lol, I hope no one is like, who is this guy telling everyone what to do? I use to supervise building sets in high school, so little things stick out to me. I developed a critical eye and it's natural tendency to try and fix little things. However, when I hit spring break and take a crack at my version, you can strike back 10 fold! I am hoping for a fan edit that doesn't feel like a fan edit, which from what I have seen, it's pretty dang hard to pull off!
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Anyone with the Ultimate Matrix set able to provide me with that Oracle clip in NTSC? Be a lot better final product. PM me if you can.

Dr. M

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Anyone? I'm still accepting offers on that Oracle clip...

And just so we're clear. We think it's a good idea for Neo to not be able to zap squids?
Ay yi yi, a couple of hours to fix that scene so far with lots of luck and talent... ok all luck.
I never thought about it: they're stranded, being chased by squids... and then they're rescued. But the in between bit?
It doesn't look bad now, but some audio tweaking is needed. There's lots of sfx and music to account for.

Btw, to all concerned, the audio of the Oracle clip has been clean up. I used a noise gate to get the hiss out and a normalize so it sounds like they're speaking at about the same level. Now the video.
If no one can hook me up by tomorrow I'll either have to settle for a PAL clip or a recode with virtualdub (that posted screenshot is going to be pretty close to how that'll look.)

Dr. M

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Yeah, I think that no real world powers would be beneficial. Consequently your cutting the first part of the third movie? I think that will help with pacing. How much of the Zion battle are you planning on cutting.

I'd help you out, but all I have is M2 and Annamatrix from the Big Box, (yeah I know it's werid, but life gets complicated)

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It's really hard to explain without giving huge detail and I want you all to have surprises. The plot is reworked, threads are pulled, rewoven and rewritten.
I'm not removing the beginning of the third movie, so much as being REALLY REALLY creative with it.
My goal is to preserve as much that's useful as possible. Too much gutting can really make a movie feel rushed/jerky. So I'm trying to leave all steps that make sense in the progression of the plot.
That means I needed to edit together a plausable explaination on how the crew got from the Neb to the Hammer and survived. I was going to have the Neb blow up and then the Hammer rescues them. But I realized it wouldn't be believable that the squids would toss a bomb, yet leave survivors going it on foot. It may not be the most professional editing job, but it doesn't suck either.

Edit: Oh yeah. The Zion battle. Honestly a lot of that edit is going to be on the fly. I hated most of it. It felt more like a dirty gritty war film, not at all what I wanted to see. I'm going to cut A LOT of it. I do want to keep enough to show that there is a battle, and I want to keep a bunch of the fighting robot things because they are so damn cool.

Dr. M

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Man this project was more ambitious than anticipated.

M2 for all intents and purpose is done now (I still need to QC it). I MAY change the beginning to use Last Flight of the Osiris, but I'm not in love with using a CG opener (and it's almost 10 minutes). You could almost explain the 'cartoon like quality' away since it would end with Neo waking. But then it almost looks like a vision, which is one of the things I'm trying to cut.

Then there's M3. The harder edits (in my mind) have turned out to be cake. The ones I thought would be a throw together are not only tedious, but at the moment looking so bad I may scrap my script and start over.
I really want the big Smith fight near the beginning since it explains some stuff later and allows me to move an action scene from the hyperkinetic ending to the plodding beginning (or what would be a plodding beginning in my edit). It's all there, but it's not smooth. There's a plan B but it's much less interesting.

Just thinking out loud, okay back to work.
Edit: Did I mention I started converting tracks from the soundtrack to DD so I can smooth things out? Yup, M3 is MUCH harder to tinker with.

Dr. M

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"Honestly a lot of that edit is going to be on the fly. I hated most of it. It felt more like a dirty gritty war film, not at all what I wanted to see."

Agreed. It got really old super fast.

<span class=“Italics”>MeBeJedi: Sadly, I believe the prequels are beyond repair.
<span class=“Bold”>JediRandy: They’re certainly beyond any repair you’re capable of making.</span></span>

<span class=“Italics”>MeBeJedi: You aren’t one of us.
<span class=“Bold”>Go-Mer-Tonic: I can’t say I find that very disappointing.</span></span>

<span class=“Italics”>JediRandy: I won’t suck as much as a fan edit.</span>

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(Removed complaining about soundtrack.) Removed a short shot and the soundtrack lined up fine. Whew.

Dr. M

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Doctor M:
Your edit shouldn't be abandoned just because you've hit a tough spot. I recommend you borrow someone's "Ultimate Collection" DVDs and scan for any useful EtM footage. More than that I recommend you track down the CD-Rs of the complete 2-CD scores for Matrix 2 & 3.

To contact me outside the forum, for trades and such my email address is my OT.com username @gmail.com

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I used like 2 bits of soundtrack so far and would rather have less smooth edits than try it again. There's sfx in the surrounds along with the music, the old music can't be stripped. Which means I only used it to help transition a few cuts where there was no music before so it sounds less abrupt. The problem is I need to be note for note perfect in the transition for soundtrack audio to movie audio. WAY TOO PAINFUL.

I guess a disclaimer should come now. Revolutions will be a little more rough looking/sounding than Reloaded only because of the extreme nature of the cuts (and my lack of talent). It should still be a fun movie.

So cutting the attack on the dock together, I removed all infantry and reload boys. This had the effect of making the battle more intense than before. I was trying to thin some action because I found it overwhelming in theaters.

Now this scene is several minutes of mech vs squid action and non-stop machine gun fire. I don't know if that's good or bad.

Dr. M

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Discovered something intersting. Womble has an option enable by default to only re-encode ac3 at crossfades/fade-in/fade-outs. With that anything not altered is direct stream copied.
Sounds cool right? I mean otherwise you re-encode 100% of all audio which can have a negative effect. Someone with really good ears and good headphones can tell the difference.
The problem is it causes artifacts that sound like drop outs between the reencoded and stream copied clips. Someone with a $2.00 headphones and a tin ear can hear that. I wondered why it was doing that.
Looks like 100% audio re-encode for us.
Expect 1 more announcement today.

Dr. M

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First post updated.
Except for deciding between two alternate endings I've built for the final film, it's all over but the QCing.

The problem is this: I'd like to cut Sati out of the end and finish with the Architect's "What do you think I am, human?" line. It's nice and strong.
But then there is no explanation for why there's clean blues in that scene. I've already learned that color tweaking to match Matrix green is damn hard.

If I add Sati back, and get her to fit in with my new plot, the question then is: if she isn't a program, just a gifted kid ala spoon bending baldie, would she be able to color tweak the sunrise?

Trust me this is probably the easiest part. I spent 2 days on 1 1/2 minutes of film at one point. I'm not kidding. Eliminating "zombies" has been the toughest thing. Hopefully you won't find any characters around that shouldn't be now.

Feel free to talk amongst yourselves.

Dr. M

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For all one of you still reading me post to myself:

Matrix Reloaded has been fully QC'd with all bugs I could find squashed.

And then I started editing again

New opening sequence; I'm no longer ripping off the DeZionized intro. It's not LFotF.
It's actually more pertinent to the film than the original I was using. In fact it's referred to twice during the movie. It was so obvious once I had sat through the whole film again that it couldn't open any other way.

I've also decided NOT to distribute this via disc. For now there doesn't seem to be enough people to make PIF a reasonable system.

I'll QC Matrix Revolutions tonight. If all goes well, expect info on an Xvid torrent by this weekend of M2. I considered a DD5.1 audio track, but there were too many complaints on just the single scene for that to be well received. Besides if I keep it with mp3 (abr 128kbps) I can set the video bitrate high enough to be a reasonably good looking 700mb film.

Dr. M

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Any chance of a DVD torrent? I like XVID for some things but I much prefer my growing DVD disc collection of fan edits.

I've been following this thread with great interest and am really looking forward to comparing it with CBB's excellent Dezionized edit. If you do need someone to start a PIF, let me know. I'll gladly get a chain going. You may find there'll be more interest in it than you think once the completed project is available.
where have i been all this time ?
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As it stands I think only 2 or 3 people have posted here that seem interested. If more come out of the woodwork (e.g., PM me that they are able/willing to pay forward) I'd consider something else, but I don't have the bandwidth to upload full DVDs.

Dr. M