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2006 OT DVD: Are my eyes deceiving me?

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 (Edited)

I noticed that in ANH even on the 2004 transfers R2 while is space is still black? Are my eyes deceiving me or has anyone else noticed that. Why go to all of the trouble of fixing him in Empire but not doing the same on ANH? Who was supervising this effort anyway?

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I have never seen that before but I never really paid attention either. I knew they went back and made R2 blue in many scenes. I thought they had for ANH too. At least on the website it shows some comparison shots and he was changed to blue.
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I think you are right, although I'd have to go back and check, but that means that I'd have to watch the SE again.
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Originally posted by: bommaWho was supervising this effort anyway?

I am starting to think nobody and it is a total free for all in LFL.

With how shoddy the SEs are and how many mistakes people catch (and then the crappy excuses we get from LFL), the fact that the OUT is not anamorphic in the year 2006 is not that shocking to me anymore LOL
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I think you are right, although I'd have to go back and check, but that means that I'd have to watch the SE again.


Well I was watching The "Darth Editous" version, but I turned down the color a little bit because I had the over saturated look of the 2004 release, so maybe that was it.
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Actually, R2 changes colors in this scene.

After examining the ep 5 shot by shot changes on Star Wars.com I had expected to see a blue R2 in Star Wars too. (but he's only sometimes blue.)

R2 is blue when shown though the rear window of the cockpit of Luke's X-wing.
(for instance after Luke hears Ben's voice telling him to trust his feelings.)

When shown sideways he is black.
(After Luke says: "Red five standing by", or later when R2 is repairing the x-wing.)
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The question is, what colour should R2 actually be? Blue or black? He really is blue, however in the blackness of space, is there enough light to show his true colour?
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When R2 is blue on the ground he should be blue in space too.

Check out this hi-res pic of a space shuttle in orbit from the NASA-website.

http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/gallery/images/shuttle/sts-114/hires/iss011e11337.jpg

The blue Nasa emblem on the wing of the shuttle is clearly blue - not black.
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Alright ... so the shuttle, orbiting a measly 17,500 miles above the daylit surface of the Earth gets enough light to render the color blue. What about an X-wing passing under a red gas giant, or dogfighting over a gray metal sphere? I think we've usually seen starships within the well-lit band where habitable planets lie, but I do wonder to what extent nearby celestial objects would influence their coloring.

(Special Edition answer: It makes them blue!)
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Well, I long thought Artoo's panels changed color in space because they are temperature sensitive material. Heck, the little guy could be absorbing solar energy with them so he doesn't freeze up! If Lucasfilm would go the Star Trek route of logically explaining away seeming bloopers and technical goofs, they wouldn't have to be fixing them later.
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Originally posted by: SilverWook
Well, I long thought Artoo's panels changed color in space because they are temperature sensitive material. Heck, the little guy could be absorbing solar energy with them so he doesn't freeze up! If Lucasfilm would go the Star Trek route of logically explaining away seeming bloopers and technical goofs, they wouldn't have to be fixing them later.


Didn't they try that with Jango banging his head on Slave 1 in AOTC? They used that to explain why the trooper bumped his head on the Death Star in ANH. Because as we all know, low vision in a helmet is genetic Just like how accents are genetic and not learned. I wonder how all the other troopers get around without bumping into things all the time if it's genetic
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Yeah, for some reason, R2 isn't "fixed" in Star Wars as he is in the sequels.

But am I the only person who never noticed any of this until it was pointed out to me? I mean, I never noticed that he had been colored, and I never noticed it being black beforehand. It just never... really mattered all that much. They were in space.

There is no lingerie in space…

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Originally posted by: Scruffy
Alright ... so the shuttle, orbiting a measly 17,500 miles above the daylit surface of the Earth gets enough light to render the color blue. What about an X-wing passing under a red gas giant, or dogfighting over a gray metal sphere? I think we've usually seen starships within the well-lit band where habitable planets lie, but I do wonder to what extent nearby celestial objects would influence their coloring.


First of all, the surrounding sources of radiation help determine the color. If there are no surrounding events emitting light of the blue wavelength, then R2's head would not have that blue wavelength to reflect (it would appear black). In terms of the planet or the death star, they probably wouldn't reflect enough light compared with the solar system's star(s) to help alter a normally blue surface's color. Even if they somehow did, R2 would not be black in that instance though. Now, if they were on the dark side of one of the objects, and it effectively blocked all visible light equally, then the remaining ambient light would leave R2 blue, but dimly blue. If either object were to block the blue wavelength more than other wavelengths, then R2's headpiece would look black compared to the light reflecting off of other objects. None of that is happening in any of the movies as far as I can see though.

"Now all Lucas has to do is make a cgi version of himself.  It will be better than the original and fit his original vision." - skyjedi2005

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First of all, the surrounding sources of radiation help determine the color. If there are no surrounding events emitting light of the blue wavelength, then R2's head would not have that blue wavelength to reflect (it would appear black). In terms of the planet or the death star, they probably wouldn't reflect enough light compared with the solar system's star(s) to help alter a normally blue surface's color. Even if they somehow did, R2 would not be black in that instance though. Now, if they were on the dark side of one of the objects, and it effectively blocked all visible light equally, then the remaining ambient light would leave R2 blue, but dimly blue. If either object were to block the blue wavelength more than other wavelengths, then R2's headpiece would look black compared to the light reflecting off of other objects. None of that is happening in any of the movies as far as I can see though.


So what you are saying is...
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Sruffy wrote :

Alright ... so the shuttle, orbiting a measly 17,500 miles above the daylit surface of the Earth gets enough light to render the color blue. What about an X-wing passing under a red gas giant, or dogfighting over a gray metal sphere? I think we've usually seen starships within the well-lit band where habitable planets lie, but I do wonder to what extent nearby celestial objects would influence their coloring.
(Special Edition answer: It makes them blue!)

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Outer space scenes in Star Wars were filmed in the studio using blue-screen at (an über-measly) 0 miles above the surface of the earth (NASA 1 - Lucas 0) (insert smiley)
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The use of blue screen explains R2's blue to black color change. (Note that markings in other colors are not affected by the use of blue screen.) For instance the red markings on the X-wings or the yellow markings on the Y-wings don't fade to reddish brown, black or grey.
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Theoretically speaking, if red screen would have been used instead of blue screen back in 1977, R2 would never have changed color but the markings on the X-wings would have.

In the special editions the "shortcomings" of an old technology are corrected (*), although not in a consistent way as ep. 4 shows us.
(* I'm not implying this was nessesarily a good thing to do , just stating a fact.)
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Now the Death Star battle in Star Wars takes place next to a big red planet (Yavin). Both this planet and the Death Star itself are well-lit so there is no reason to assume that small X or Y-wing fighters would not receive an equal amount of light.

Also when light conditions are low , all colors across the spectrum will start to fade, not just one. (There will only be marginal differences between colors - mostly red will fade first - yellow last.)

In other words if a low-light space ambience was desired all colors and brightness (Yavin, Death Star, X-wing, Y-wing, etc...) would have been toned down considerably, not just poor R2's blue dome.


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Originally posted by: 20th Century Mark
So what you are saying is...


He should be blue.

"Now all Lucas has to do is make a cgi version of himself.  It will be better than the original and fit his original vision." - skyjedi2005

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I posted this earlier on this thread after examining my 2004 dvd:

Actually, R2 changes colors in this scene.

R2 is blue when shown though the rear window of the cockpit of Luke's X-wing.
(for instance after Luke hears Ben's voice telling him to trust his feelings.)
When shown sideways he is black.
(After Luke says: "Red five standing by", or later when R2 is repairing the x-wing.)
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Now I've taken a quick look on my old pan & scan 4:3 O-OT copy of Star Wars (taped from television a long time ago) and all I can say is R2 used to change color in this scene all along. No changes were made to his color for the 2004 dvd-edition.
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Originally posted by: bomma
I noticed that in ANH even on the 2004 transfers R2 while is space is still black? Are my eyes deceiving me or has anyone else noticed that. Why go to all of the trouble of fixing him in Empire but not doing the same on ANH? Who was supervising this effort anyway?
Starwars.com confirmed they used a black R2 for bluescreenshots. The mystery is solved!
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You are passing up on a great opportunity to makes lots of money,
make Lucas lose a lot of his money
and make him look bad to the entire world
and you could be well known and liked

None of us here like Lucas or Lucasfilm.
I have death wishes on Lucas and Macullum.
we could all probably get 10s of thousands of dollars!
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The need for a black R2 was a byproduct of issues with primitive bluescreen techniques of the time. Because of the nature of the automotive paint used on him (at the time, a dry, pearl application of candy blue topcoat over purple basecoat, which is extremely dark in the flash (all but dead-on angles)) it isn't possible to simply color him in those shots. You would have to digitally replicate the complex paint and track an R2 head to the original to derive new photographically accurate dome panels which could then be transferred onto the original. During my work creating renders of R2 for the Star Wars Complete Visual Dictionary, I was sent to the Ranch to study a few of the original R2's and was able to perfect my CG R2 - including a physically-accurate digital simulation of the paint, rendered in a next-generation software engine which correctly reproduces the electromagnetic wave propogation of light.

The long short of this, of course, is that the Legacy Edition was able to benefit, and features as accurate a coloring of the dome panels in ANH as you could possibly hope for, shy of refilming the sequence. At some point, I'll post screenshots...

_Mike

View the Restoration and join the discussion at StarWarsLegacy.com!

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Originally posted by: mverta
rendered in a next-generation software engine which correctly reproduces the electromagnetic wave propogation of light.


Quick question:

They didn't use that kind of light rendering in the big-scale effects shots of Episodes 1-3, did they? To me the lighting in all of those CG scenes looked to be on the level of crap video game quality.

"Now all Lucas has to do is make a cgi version of himself.  It will be better than the original and fit his original vision." - skyjedi2005

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No, they utilized a more (currently) traditional multiple-render-pass process to have individual control over key lights, ambient lights, fill, reflection, highlights, occlusion, etc. This gives the compositors more control over the final look. The other side of the issue is that it also makes knowing what it would "really" look like a bit more complex to get to, since you have almost limitless control to push things easily past what would be physically plausible, given that the environments - digital or not - give off and bounce light of varying quality. That's why you need talented compositors, who have an eye for that sort of thing. The next generation of rendering software basically gives you a real-world result, which of course you can alter, but at least you have a baseline that you can trust, and the brain instantly recognizes all the myriad subtle physical properties of light as being "correct". It's sort of complicated, but the bottom line is that it works.

_Mike

View the Restoration and join the discussion at StarWarsLegacy.com!