STAR WARS: EP IV 2004 REVISITED ADYWAN *1080p HD VERSION NOW IN PRODUCTION — Page 296

How many other people have recolored the entire movie, re-rotoscoped every lightsaber blade and blaster bolt, added backgrounds to every cockpit shot, updated control panels, and fixed 98% of the continuity errors?  Even ignoring the editorial changes, its a damn fine piece of work.

It's not so much the editing for me as the SCOPE and the attention to the Blessed Continuity.  This is THE LEAST Lucas should have done for us.

Mr Ghostface said:

 

Oh, I wasn't offering suggestions for ANH:R, I was just pointing out that it's not all that special and some of the praise Adywan gets for it seems to be borne of an ignorance of how much simpler this is to do than a lot of people realise. And didn't he say that the new CG stuff isn't even his, that another guy did it. I'm not saying this to pull him down; it's more that I feel other editors don't get the same praise when their editing skills are just as good, and some of them are definitely more seamless than Adywan's.

Simple to do? Do you even realise how much work actually went into this? The only way i could get any of the things done was to reuse elements from the rest of the OT saga. If its so simple to just take elements from the movies and add them into new footage then please lets see what you can do, without the use of any CG. please, create a new full motion FX shot, not just static ships, and create a whole new scene, having to trace the outlines of each elements, frame by frame, matching the motion to your new elements &  then tell me how easy it is As has been pointed out to you many shots and elements were re-used throughout the OT and anyone who knows the films would know that. Many FX elements were taken from previous movies. Very evident in the space battle in ROTJ. Cat and pasted ships, a reused X-wing explosion from the trench run in ANH during the core run, many Stardestroyers in ESb were reused from earlier on in the movie, and the list could go on and on. An this is with a multi million dollar FX house doing it. I am just one man working on a home PC in a 1 bedroom flat. How the hell was i supposed to do new elements for the shots i needed? And please don't say CG because that was something i wanted to avoid and only 1 shot in ANH:R was ever done by using CG ships (the TIE approach)

And you are so wrong about the stardestroyer from ESB being noticeable because it has a more blue tint than the ones used in ANH. I guess you've taken that assumption from the 2004 DVds. ESB has more of a blue tint than ANH and actually the stardestroyers in ESB originally had more of a brownish tint to them, whereas the ones originally in ANH were more pure white. The slight blue tint to the ships in the the new opening Death Star sequence was because the scene was taking place over a blue planet, but was changed to a grey planet later in production, but removing the very slight blue tint was kept. And again you are wrong about the planet below being "badly drawn" because it was actually a hi-res photo of earth taken by nasa and desaturated to take away the earth look.

I also never took any credit for the CG TIEs and made it perfectly clear that they were done by someone else and that i only did the background elements for that shot.

You also made the same comment about the added music over at fanedit.org ages ago and someone told you that there was a purist edition out that has none of the added music, but you still come in here and again go on about the same thing.The purist was made for people who discount the PT so no need to tie anything in with the PT while the other version was to be watched as part of a 6 film saga

This edit was only ever originally for me and would never have seen the light of day if i hadn't come in here. i had never done anything like this or had any knowledge of how to do Fx work and never did this to get any form of praise. I did what i was able to do with what i had to work with and i am proud of it.

I'd also like to ask you if you work in the film industry, a film school student/ graduate or have no connections whatsoever

adywan said:

Mr Ghostface said:

 

Oh, I wasn't offering suggestions for ANH:R, I was just pointing out that it's not all that special and some of the praise Adywan gets for it seems to be borne of an ignorance of how much simpler this is to do than a lot of people realise. And didn't he say that the new CG stuff isn't even his, that another guy did it. I'm not saying this to pull him down; it's more that I feel other editors don't get the same praise when their editing skills are just as good, and some of them are definitely more seamless than Adywan's.

Simple to do? Do you even realise how much work actually went into this? The only way i could get any of the things done was to reuse elements from the rest of the OT saga. If its so simple to just take elements from the movies and add them into new footage then please lets see what you can do, without the use of any CG. please, create a new full motion FX shot, not just static ships, and create a whole new scene, having to trace the outlines of each elements, frame by frame, matching the motion to your new elements &  then tell me how easy it is As has been pointed out to you many shots and elements were re-used throughout the OT and anyone who knows the films would know that. Many FX elements were taken from previous movies. Very evident in the space battle in ROTJ. Cat and pasted ships, a reused X-wing explosion from the trench run in ANH during the core run, many Stardestroyers in ESb were reused from earlier on in the movie, and the list could go on and on. An this is with a multi million dollar FX house doing it. I am just one man working on a home PC in a 1 bedroom flat. How the hell was i supposed to do new elements for the shots i needed? And please don't say CG because that was something i wanted to avoid and only 1 shot in ANH:R was ever done by using CG ships (the TIE approach)

And you are so wrong about the stardestroyer from ESB being noticeable because it has a more blue tint than the ones used in ANH. I guess you've taken that assumption from the 2004 DVds. ESB has more of a blue tint than ANH and actually the stardestroyers in ESB originally had more of a brownish tint to them, whereas the ones originally in ANH were more pure white. The slight blue tint to the ships in the the new opening Death Star sequence was because the scene was taking place over a blue planet, but was changed to a grey planet later in production, but removing the very slight blue tint was kept. And again you are wrong about the planet below being "badly drawn" because it was actually a hi-res photo of earth taken by nasa and desaturated to take away the earth look.

I also never took any credit for the CG TIEs and made it perfectly clear that they were done by someone else and that i only did the background elements for that shot.

You also made the same comment about the added music over at fanedit.org ages ago and someone told you that there was a purist edition out that has none of the added music, but you still come in here and again go on about the same thing.The purist was made for people who discount the PT so no need to tie anything in with the PT while the other version was to be watched as part of a 6 film saga

This edit was only ever originally for me and would never have seen the light of day if i hadn't come in here. i had never done anything like this or had any knowledge of how to do Fx work and never did this to get any form of praise. I did what i was able to do with what i had to work with and i am proud of it.

I'd also like to ask you if you work in the film industry, a film school student/ graduate or have no connections whatsoever

 

Damn straight!

adywan said:

I'd also like to ask you if you work in the film industry, a film school student/ graduate or have no connections whatsoever

He asks this in sincerity, because one of the first "negative" reviews was from Mojo_LA who is a Hollywood VFX artist that worked on BSG and Star Trek (among other things).  His only real FX problem was the TIE scene which is explained here (before Ady did some tweaks to the shot, I believe).

As he explained:

Ady and his small team have done incredible, very professional work. It's 95% to the same standards we work towards on prime-time TV shows. I was very serious when I said that Ady could use his edit as a resume and get a job at probably any effects studio in Hollywood. I know I would hire him!

And this is a guy with real experience and a job in the industry, who actually offered to use his render farm to help fix what he thought could be better!

Editing wise, he didn't care for some of the changes:

I like most of what Ady did, but my friends and I were horrified at the music added to the saber fight in ANH. It doesn't belong there and is a far worse change than anything Lucas ever did. I'll take a 100 Greedos firing first over THAT.

Hamfistedly laying music behind it doesn't appreciably change it or make it better, so why not just leave it be?

Most of what Ady has done to his cut DOES help it, but I think in a few spots he suffers from "kid with a new toy" syndrome and is finding every last change he can make just for the sake of it.

But that was his opinion.  Of course, comparing adding music to Greedo shooting first instantly changed the tone on the board and he ended up leaving.  We lost a good possible resource that day.

Not sure why I reenacted "The Tragedy of Darth Mojo", except to point out that we've been through this before with someone who knew what they were talking about.

Mr Ghostface said:

 

Oh, I wasn't offering suggestions for ANH:R, I was just pointing out that it's not all that special and some of the praise Adywan gets for it seems to be borne of an ignorance of how much simpler this is to do than a lot of people realise. And didn't he say that the new CG stuff isn't even his, that another guy did it. I'm not saying this to pull him down; it's more that I feel other editors don't get the same praise when their editing skills are just as good, and some of them are definitely more seamless than' Ady'wan's.

Which editors would those be? In order for your snipe to actually make any sense at all, they'd have to have done an edit of the same magnitude and scope as Adywan's, and - to my knowledge - no such fanedit has actually been attempted, let alone accomplished (mostly due to the fact that it takes an unbelievable amount of time and effort). Would you mind directing us to something concrete to back up your venomous hot air? Or are you just talk?

I love Adywan (and not in a gay way btw)   :)

You rock dude :D

Mr Ghostface said:

 

Oh, I wasn't offering suggestions for ANH:R, I was just pointing out that it's not all that special and some of the praise Adywan gets for it seems to be borne of an ignorance of how much simpler this is to do than a lot of people realise. And didn't he say that the new CG stuff isn't even his, that another guy did it. I'm not saying this to pull him down; it's more that I feel other editors don't get the same praise when their editing skills are just as good, and some of them are definitely more seamless than Adywan's.

My feelings on this is that fanedits pretty much suck. I have yet to really see any that I really liked, or felt actually improved the film in some way. Fan editing is also incredibly easy to do, not sure how much praise it really deserves.

Throughout the whole editing process, I never had much interest in Ady's project, but when I saw the final project, I was quite impressed. It is obvious the man sunk a lot of time into his project, and the result is a really well polished modernization of Star Wars. Personally, I'll take the old 1977 version any day of the week, I still feel about Ady's edit as I feel about other DCs and SEs. But I still cannot deny what impressive work this man has done, and how dedicated he was to it with all the time and effort he spent.

Maybe you are right, maybe he does receive far too much praise and that there are other editors out there who have done equally impressive work and deserve more attention. If this is the case, I have not had the fortune of seeing their fine works. That sucks for me, because I have spend a good deal of time acquiring edits I thought would be cool after hearing others praise them, only to go sit down and watch how awful they are, and what a fine job of butchering the film they do.

All I can say, is out of all the many fan edits I have watched over the years, Ady's is, by a MASSIVE leap, by far the finest craftsmanship I have seen.

Chewtobacca said:

I might be told off for saying this...

Sad the internet has become such a hostile place, that people feel the need to apologize for asking simple questions. For the most part, OT.com is a bit more mature than that.

For news groups you need two things:

1). News group access (some ISPs include this, you can probably check online to see if yours does. If not, then you have to pay for a premium service. There are plenty of free ones out there, but they will not work for downloading files). Files posted on news groups don't stay up forever, and have to be reposted eventually. So just because something was on newsgroups a year ago, doesn't mean it is still there now. If you have poor retention, then something posted just a month or so ago may be unattainable to you. Retention and download limits are something to keep in mind when signing up for a service. For example, a 90 day retention means you can only download files that are no more than 90 days old, and obviously download limit means you can only download that much data in a specified period of time. For example, 10GB per month would mean once you download 10GB you cannot pull down any more until the next month.

2). A program for reading the new groups, or for managing the download of the files. NZB-O-Matic is a pretty good one for a beginner.

I have no doubt a quick google search will find you some pretty easy to read step-by-step guides for setting up newgroup access on a program like NZB-o-Matic.

If anyone is thinking of signing up with astraweb then follow this link and you can have unlimited access for just $11 per month for as long as you want it.

http://www.news.astraweb.com/specials/kleverig-11.html

It doesn't seem to be showing up on the home page so i thought i would post a direct link to it.

Chewtobacca said:

Okay.  Thank you for helping me.  I've downloaded NZB O-matic and I'm looking at Astraweb's site, because Adywan seems to like them.  There's unlimited access or unlimited DSL.  Do I need the DSL? 

Also, when I look at binsearch it seems to say that only some parts are unavailable, or am I reading this wrong?

I apologise to the moderator for this being off topic, but I'm only doing this to try to get ANHR.  It took ages for me to work out how to use jdownloader when I first started using rapidshare, as I'm useless at this sort of thing...   :-(

Once you have your newsreader configured correctly, either NZB O-matic has a search function to find the DVD or go back to binsearch and click the box to download the entire collection of files as a NZB file. Then use NZB O matic to open the NZB and select all files including the par2 files. The par files will be needed to repair any broken or incomplete files once you downloaded them all.

Ah, you've got to love those pars! Even if no repairs or needed, they always give you that reassurance everything came down the pipe okay.

Maybe I can give some sense of scale to the amount of work that goes into something like this for those questioning it? :)

As you can see in my sig, I'm the mysterious "guy" who did the from-scratch CG on this project (who was amusingly referred to as a whole "team" it seems by MojoLA! :)) For just the small handful of shots for Ep IV Revsted I put work into, I spent about 500 man hours plus about 1500 rendering hours, work done on and off over ten months. Obviously, Ady did not do just a few shots of Episode IV but the entire freaking movie and all the sound and DVD work by himself too!... worked on it almost every day (and many hours of those days) for over two years! :O So, I can tell you for sure that my household put in about 2000 hours in, and it can surely be surmised that this number must be absolutely completely dwarfed by the time Ady put in, probably to an exponential degree! :O Just to back up what some others have said. :)

WXM, good to see you around here again. how have you been? fancy doing any work on ESB:R? lol. Sorry i haven't been in touch but i lost your email in the last PC crash.

I guess that mr ghostface doesn't want to take me up on my challenge then? i guess its too much of a simple task for him. lol

Ady I didn't realize how much work you had done until I started messing with ROTJ. I thought it would be neat to show how much I had learned in rotoscoping lightsabers to tweak the duel in ROTJ. I spent days removing luke's saber from the film and covering up vaders constantly changing saber. I have yet to finish it. I am thinking about just puting my after effects project on rapidshare so somebody can have fun with it. Why didn't GL have them re-rotoscope the sabers in 97 or even 04. God this man is weird. He releases these official dvds and all they look like to me is progress work prints. Finish the damn things man LOL.

EyeShotFirst said:

He releases these official dvds and all they look like to me is progress work prints.

It feels to me like a lack of patience to get to the cash grab. I can see him walking around, fretting, 'oh dear, hurry up, guys! Only three months 'til Christmas! It would take you how long to rotoscope the sabers and lasers? Oh... Well, nevermind that, then. But it's still only going to take you until lunch to add the blue tint, right? Phew!'

It wasn't the negative criticism we have a problem with, so much as the patently false claims that projects like Revisited are simple, easy endeavours. If you don't like the whole idea behind it, nobody's asking you to (but then why are you here in the first place?).

Mr. Ghostface,

I see your points and, I myself, am enjoying hearing them. :) But I guess I'll say in response to seeing things getting possibly (more?) heated that the point of this edit was to "correct" all of the little things that people deemed inconsistent, a mistake, etc. (plus to add a couple of flourishes that the editor himself really wanted to add). To rag on Ady's fixing little things is like ragging on the "grindhouse feel" Jaws edit at fanedit.org for looking too unclean. It's the point of that edit to look unclean, as it was the point of "Revisited" to gather and listen any little thing that anyone has noticed and take a stab at correcting them. (And this whole idea was general seeded in the minds of fans by George Lucas himself, was it not? So you can't even "blame" Ady for the general idea of such "fixing.")

Note that I'm not jumping down your throat; just tossing this out there that it's east to forget that fanedits are something where you need to consider the intent behind them (and the human resources behind them). Ady has done exactly what he set out to do, and put a huge amount of time doing it. And if an element didn't work out, it's not because of lack of really trying, and generally people who come here know and really respect that. As roundaboutly stated in the last couple of pages (and you probably know this), if you have a DVD of a movie, a computer with a DVD drive, and Womble installed, you can do a professionally clean looking fan edit. That's all the resources you need in this day and age to get a clean/nice edit! Ady (and me to a tiny degree to fill in one gap in Ady's huge arrays of talent) utilized much, much more, put in huge amounts of effort, and the community here really likes that, hence they want to stick up for him. As far as I know, Ady is not a pro. I hear bits and pieces that say that he absolutely has the skills to be a pro, but pros usually also have a support team behind them. As far as I know Ady has pretty much done everything (except the smidgens of custom CG) on these edits by himself. And people know that, respect that, and cut his edit slack if 100% perfection hasn't been achieved.

Again, personally, I like hearing much of what you have to say. :) I see it as different point of view, but in the interest of wanting to see things kept "nice" on all sides, I felt like saying all that. Hope that's okay to you and everyone else. :) What do you work on by the way? Can you tell us? That would be cool to hear a little about! :)


Ady, hey! I think I might be too busy to do more. :( I did build a new computer though, a (cheap!) Core i7, that I'm going to OC (if I don't get cold feet!). It should render in one-freaking-sixth the time of my dual core! :D I'll chat with ya soon for kicks via PM. :)