Darth Venal said:Well, 10% was a rather rounded up, I didn't want to sound really nerdish by quoting the speeds we use at work (oh, we have sodding guidelines even for this!). But actually, you'd be surprised how much time compression does go on. And believe me, it's more than 4%. Producer/director Sean Cunningham is a big believer in it (not that many of his movies are particularly good) and he actually speeds up his footage by 8-10%. Seriously, he does. You can hear that from the horses mouth, and also from the poor directors whose footage he's speeding up who don't want it done!
10% sounds a lot, and obviously not all footage will handle it, but I have no reason to believe just enhancing the speed of Ben's twirl a bit isn't feasible.
I just don't think the MOVEMENT of the spin is convincing enough. Sure, speed it up, but it still would look like an old man tip toeing in a circle, but faster, rather than an aged Jedi spinning around for no reason, as Jedi seem to like to do in duels (just kidding of course, but really.)
Since the PT came out, the Obi Wan duel has bothered me even more, not because of the choreography, but because we are to believe that Obi Wan as a character is in his late 50's when he is killed on the Death Star, yet Qui Gon Jinn is supposed to be around 60 years old in TPM, making them close to being the same age when they died, yet Qui Gon's dueling looks much more convincing. To make it even worse (for me anyway), Count Dooku is supposed to be in his 80's during AOTC and ROTS! I won't bother with Yoda, since he's an alien and his species is mysterious.
This isn't the fault of Lucas, Alec Guinness, Liam Neeson, or Christopher Lee. Just the way things turned out in making these movies, since Liam Neeson was obviously younger than his character during filming, and Dooku in the duels is mostly just Lee's head pasted on a stunt actor. Still, it bothers me to see Obi Wan as a character be so unlike Qui Gon and Dooku in how he appears while dueling. It just doesn't match. Though ANH:R did fix this up a lot.
BUT... the weak spin still pulls me out of it. If I ever get to do my own edit of ANH, I would be removing that spin!