Originally posted by: Weezer12
So is there any chance that we'll be getting this thing any earlier than Jan/Feb, Trooperman?

By next month? Unfortunately not, because I had hoped I would have it ready by THIS month. Christmastime always slows things down for me in terms of time I have to work.

I'm not saying that it won't be done to a certain extent in December. I'm just saying that I would love to do more tweaking and remixing of the voices before I'd feel comfortable releasing it. The neat thing is that I'll have the video encoded and locked this year, and the rest of the time can be devoted to tweaking the sound mix.

I'm really sorry, guys! But I'm confident that when this thing actually goes public, you'll forgive the wait and realize that it was worth it. If I had more time to work on this, it would've been done months ago, but I have a very big life outside of this that makes it very difficult, especially with a task so huge. And to be honest, I didn't actually start physically start editing the film in the form it is now until Summer/Autumn 2005. I started a rough cut before that, but had to drop it. Also, as this was a learning process, I later threw out much of the work I did in those first few learning months.

And another thing that slows down the process is that I'm actually doing the editing using a five year old machine. It was very good back then, but now it's quite slow, especially for film editing using multiple hard drives. Occasionally Vegas shuts down because I'm giving it too many commands too quickly. Add to this the fact that I didn't have enough hard drive space to convert all the footage to AVI, which means that I'm editing off of the DVD MPEG files directly (which slows down the process further). Also, when I'm editing and I play through any given section, I'm looking at a very small image, because blowing it up to full resolution means it slows down to about 5-10 fps. So I have to render the whole section to see how it'll play in full resolution. I haven't been rendering the whole film until the last couple of months, so naturally there are some encoding glitches and lip synch issues that have arisen that I'll need to go back and fix before I release the film.

I think you guys get the picture- my working conditions and equipment are not ideal- you have to have a really calm temperament and lots of time to deal with it. This might shed a little light on the reason this is being delayed until next year.

-------------

One neat thing I just rediscovered is the documentary on the Ep. II- "Films are not Released- They Escape". I realized that some of the audio mixing problems I was having are solveable using the isolated chunks of sound effects Mr. Burtt has provided. For instance: The assassin bugs at the beginning of the film. I replaced the music in that scene and recut the scene, but the wriggling/crawling sound effects couldn't be isolated. I couldn't find a solution.

Then, I remembered that the documentary had footage of the recording of the foaley for that particular section (with the plastic tube and the grapefruits), and I was able to recreate the FX track for the bugs.

Another interesting find I made was a very long article about the audio mixing and production of "Attack of the Clones". I don't have the exact quote right now, but at one point, the fellow said that the ADR dialogue for that film (not the on-set recordings) were "worldized" a bit to make it "grittier". Which is exactly what I'm trying to do. Unfortunately they don't go into any details so that I could copy that effect.

-------

All right- enough talking. Here are basically the same clips of video I posted previously, but containing differently processed voices. How do these compare? Does it sound more like the OT did?

1 (Garage)

I don't usually do this, but here's a couple seconds of Hayden Christiansen for comparison/reference: garage (Hayden)

For those of you with large monitors, notice the too-perfect framing here and the colorful frame (compared to the garage scene in "Star Wars")

And here's the argument clip: 2 (dusk)