Originally posted by: tellan crhist, that was close. the 250gb drive the entire project is stored on died last night.
thank god for disc recovery software.
I nearly cried last night, I was this close to just packing it all in.
This is exactly why I'm saving up for a RAID5 Array. If one drive fails, all is not lost. I have 650GB+ of data stored on my computer (mostly from video projects) and most of it isn't backed up.
“Back when we made Star Wars, we just couldn’t make Palpatine as evil as we intended. Now, thanks to the miracles of technology, it is finally possible. Finally, I’ve created the movies that I originally imagined.” -George Lucas on the 2007 Extra Extra Special HD-DVD Edition
Originally posted by: tellan oh I'll be releasing it, but I'm waiting for the release in september to see if I can get any better footage for a few scenes.
tellan,
This is an impressive edit, one I really look forward to seeing! I've scanned through the entire thread and seen some of the in progress work, and it looks great! I'm tempted to do my own edit, but I'm holding off for the moment in the hope that Lucasfilm will eventually provide us with better digital source material, so that fewer changes would be necessary to end up with a satisfactory result. (Hopefully we get a better DVD release in 2007.)
Looking at the "opening crawl" sample you provided though, it seems to me that the Tatooine atmosphere has become a bit too saturated. Not saying that it doesn't reflect the original look (I don't know about that), but the effect of an atmosphere isn't really convincing to me anymore, The transition between atmosphere and space is a tad too sharp as well. It is the saturation that really stands out in my eyes though. Here are some similar stills of our own planet:
Some of these are pretty saturated as well, and I'm not saying the color balance is correct, but the atmospheres still come across to me as more convincing. Just a suggestion though, this is all about artistic preferences and personal taste. And again, keep up the good work, I look forward to seeing the finished result!
the problem is ineherent to the DVD I'm afraid. the tatooine atmosphere on the opening shot is totally porked and is basically a flat colour with no transparency to it at all.
even mike verta's fixed shot has this issue to some degree. I've lowered the saturation on the atmosphere blue to match mike's but that's a bout as good as it's going to get.
okay, I had a new way to come up with the atmosphere. find all the shots of tatooine with atmosphere haze added. the problem here is that the existing blue atmosphere haze is basically solid, not transparent so I've had to balance new haze, against blending with the blue already present.
I've tried chroma keying out just the blue and that looked horrendously bad.
I've added the haze to all the tatooine shots so that they are all consistent.
note, some people may find it is too dark or too blue or whatever on your screen. all I can say is, you need to calibrate your screens. mine is and this is being done based off that calibration.
oooh go on. I'm using vegas 5 for this. I would imagine doing it in photoshop using a premier filmstrip would be much easier to control but I don't have the program.
actually, something else also springs to mind.
on the main establishing overhead shot of the tantive and star destroyer as they go over our heads.
as the planets come up into shot. the main big moon is all blue and then becomes grey. if you could supply an in all other respects untouched version of this shot with the black bars cropped off I'd be quite happy, I can't track the moon properly in vegas.
Originally posted by: tellan okay, I had a new way to come up with the atmosphere. find all the shots of tatooine with atmosphere haze added. the problem here is that the existing blue atmosphere haze is basically solid, not transparent so I've had to balance new haze, against blending with the blue already present.
It looks better, although I still think it stands out and catches the eye of the viewer a little too much (well, my eyes anyway). I don't think this is what you want, as you probably prefer the viewer to focus on what's going on with the spaceships in the foreground for the most part, while the background planetscape panoramas serve as a little extra eye candy to spice the scenes up.
I think adywan's dark, soft and faint haze works quite well though. It doesn't look like the atmosphere of the Earth, but that's OK since this is Tatooine, and the atmosphere still does have a stronger sense of realism to it I think. It complements the reddish brown colors in the rest of the image well, as a thicker blue atmosphere would also have left the planet surface closest to the viewer with a very slight, though visible, blue tint (and I, personally, don't think you should go that route -- too big a change).
I sincerely hope I haven't come across as pedantic by bringing this issue up, but after all, we are talking about the opening shot of Star Wars! In the end it can be a tough call, since this is where impressions of artistic vision and knowledge of physical reality have to blend with each other. For example, independent of your editing, the planet surface in these shots has never looked quite realistic to me, but in my opinion it still looks good! Also, the background stars wouldn't be visible with your regular camera if you were shooting these scenes in space, and as we all know there's no sound in space either, but I'm not going to ask you to modify or remove any of those! In the end it's a compromise and there are a lot of factors to weigh up against each other, and it's all up to you and how you want to see Star Wars. Again, I would like to say that I really enjoy seeing the results of your work, and besides, if I hadn't cared at all, I wouldn't have bothered to make these suggestions.
oh no, you're quite right to point it out. the thing with working on projects like this for so long is sometimes obvious things like that slip under the radar because we spend so long looking at it.
I just thoughT I would point out something I noticed in the canyon clip. The establishing shot of R2 has a very orange/sunset sky over head, but in the following shots the rocks. jawas, ans R2 all look like it is dawn. I know this is an issue with official DVD, but I was hoping you might address in your project. All it would need is a little red/orange splashed over the footage. Also, in the last shot of that sequence, you can see a patch of blue sky over top of one of the mountain peaks. This is a dead give away that the time of day is wrong.
Originally posted by: tellan oooh go on. I'm using vegas 5 for this. I would imagine doing it in photoshop using a premier filmstrip would be much easier to control but I don't have the program.
actually, something else also springs to mind.
on the main establishing overhead shot of the tantive and star destroyer as they go over our heads.
as the planets come up into shot. the main big moon is all blue and then becomes grey. if you could supply an in all other respects untouched version of this shot with the black bars cropped off I'd be quite happy, I can't track the moon properly in vegas.
I'm not sure how you would do this in vegas because i used filmstrips for a few overlays. I use to use Vegas 6 so i'll see if it can be done in that. It should be simple enough to do pretty acurate motion tracking in vegas by using the "event pan/crop" tool. I used that for my new death Star approaching Yavin shot before i figured out how to do it in premier.
unfortunately i haven't got an untouched version on my system anymore because, apart from the ne lasers, the shot has been completed and rendered and i have deleted the files