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Thought on de-SE'ing the DVD — Page 8

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If I can figure out how to do the multiple-angle thing, then I may try that. That's probably the safest approach, as it's exactly how they handle the crawl in multiple languages.

Damn, why didn't GL just do a friggin seamless branching of the O-OT and the SE? It's not like Fox couldn't do it. The Alien Quadrilogy has to be the best-produced boxed set (albiet with the worst name) I've seen in terms of features. Alternate cuts on all four films, handled perfectly with seamless branching, and even the SE features on each of them comes with an optional subtitle to indicate a change. Educational AND entertaining. What more could one ask for?
I am fluent in over six million forms of procrastination.
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Damn, why didn't GL just do a friggin seamless branching of the O-OT and the SE?


Because it's pretty much damn near impossible on the authoring level. The amount of small changes to almost every frame would make swapping back and forth along the line ridiculous. You couldn't author it. The alternate cuts of the Alien films are a LOT less intensive in that manner. Even with the Alien 3 Special Edition. But with the Special Editions of Star Wars? Couldn't do it. Too much is altered for anyone to be able to author a seamlessly branched DVD of the two versions. It'd simply be more cost and time effective to release a separate version.
The Best Show You've Never Heard
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my 2 cents (and they're worth about that)...

ADM, a most excellent edit of the SE RoTJ! kudos.

Now then, I'm a big Jabba fan. For whatever reason he's my favorite character in the OT. That's pretty profound when you consider that I only actually like about half of RoTJ.

warning...mad tirade coming...
(ewoks? come on...you take the concept of the wookies, switch the syllables from wook-E to E-wook...then you dress up the lollipop kids in funfur...it's so sad.)
mad tirade complete

Anyways...I love Jabba, but only the RoTJ version. Maybe it's the fact that he actually looks like he's based in reality. You'd figure that ILM could get a slug correct in CG, but the simple fact is that they haven't. They just can't seem to re-create the visceral repulsiveness that Jabba so embodied in Jedi with a computer. The dim light shining off his slime, that disgusting tongue licking Leia, the way that his eyes moved when he reacted...

My vote (for what its worth) is that he stays solely in Jedi.

Wipe them out...all of them.

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Got Neil's fixed audio in today and I'm already mucking around.

I've done decent attempt at de-SEing ANH now and think I may release this as a precursor to my ultimate project. Sadly, the precursor might end up being more popular as it lops out more SE stuff than I want to for my version. Not every element can be excised, but a lot can just by lopping out extensions here and there. Here's what I've taken out/fixed:

1) An attempt at fixing the title card. Using the Spanish angle, I grabbed that version of the title card, then did a video crossfade when the crawl begins (early) to help mask the frame jump as best as possible with my limited resources and experience. On the whole I think it looks decent. Not perfect, but an improvement to be certain.

2) The extended dewback sequence. Hard cut from the sand crawler to the shot with the dewback(s) in the background. I don't have the ability to do soft wipes, and the hard wipes look worse than a hard cut. So be it. I intend to keep this shot in the long run, but I wanted to really take a stab at DE-SE'ing the DVD as much as possible tonight.

3) Mos Eisley. Hard cut from the drive into the city to the scene where they get "pulled over." Technically, losing the Ronto does lose some of the OT footage, as the Ronto was superimposed into the existing shot. To get rid of this, the entire thing needed to be killed. There are still other CG additions to the mind trick scene and cantina exterior, but this still removes most of the mos eisley sequence that's so offensive to so many.

4) Greedo's shot. It's gone. No explanation necessary.

5) Jabba. Though I intend to keep him in my ultimate version (with an automatic skip feature built in), I know a lot of people hate this sequence, so this one's being done for you guys on this particular version. I did a video fade between the surrounding edit points to try to mimic the original fade at this point. Hopefully it will suffice.

6) Biggs. I intend to keep him in the long run as well, but if this was an attempt to de-SE the DVD as much as possible, he had to go too in all fairness.

That's it, really. Battle of Yavin is untouched as I don't have any appropriate way to restore shots there. I still haven't the ability to fix Luke's green saber, which has bothered me more than anything other than Greedo shooting first from the day this DVD was put on sale. Hell or high water, I intend to fix it or bribe one of you to help get that fixed, but am in a holding pattern right now.

Stay tuned.
I am fluent in over six million forms of procrastination.
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ADM, what editor are you on?

Pixelan SpiceMASTER can do soft wipes.

I've been looking for a way to do soft wipes for a while as well.

Catapultam habeo. Nisi pecuniam omnem mihi dabris, ad caput tuum saxum immane mittam.

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Womble MPEG Video Editor is what I've been using, as it edits the M2V without recompression and is frame accurate. I'll check out your suggestion promptly though.
I am fluent in over six million forms of procrastination.
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Well, I for one want the "Ultimate Edit" (basically only cutting the Greedo shooting first).

So PLEASE don't give that up.

Except for Greedo shooting first, the Luke's green lightsaber and the messed up scene in Mos Eisley were the walking beast and the droid walk in front of Luke's speeder before being questioned, I've got no other problems w/ the SE Edition.

Also...

What software can you use to create your own sweeping soft scene transition like they do in you typical SW movie??? Eventually I would like to put back some deleted scenes into TPM and AOTC.

Thanks in advance :
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I don't currently have the capacity to do soft wipes, so I'm more than a little handicapped with my scene tranitions vis a vis Star Wars. Still, I'm doing what I can with scant tools. I did check the aforementioned program a couple of posts up, but I think they'll only work with Vegas or Premiere (or similar such editors). I don't think Womble supports plug ins. *sigh*
I am fluent in over six million forms of procrastination.
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Yeah, if you are simply editing the DVD MPEG video, then any kind of wipe must be added to the video, which means re-encoding. Even if you took a short segment, added a wipe in Vegas, and created an MPEG to splice back in, I think Womble requires all joined MPEGs to have the same video/auio bitrate, and that would take quite a bit or experimentation. If it only required the same resolution of all MPEGs, then you might be able to get away with it.

<span class=“Italics”>MeBeJedi: Sadly, I believe the prequels are beyond repair.
<span class=“Bold”>JediRandy: They’re certainly beyond any repair you’re capable of making.</span></span>

<span class=“Italics”>MeBeJedi: You aren’t one of us.
<span class=“Bold”>Go-Mer-Tonic: I can’t say I find that very disappointing.</span></span>

<span class=“Italics”>JediRandy: I won’t suck as much as a fan edit.</span>

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Womble is interesting with its effects. Remedial though they are, they are effective for basic projects. The wipes and transitions are nice, but don't have soft edges. If they add that, I'll be the first to sing its praises as an affordable tool for rank amateurs like myself. What I've noticed is that it only re-encodes the portion of the video that has been affected (I could say "effected" and not be using the wrong word) when it creates the new stream. It's really interesting that way.

Its audio tools are worse though. You definitely have to have the same audio bitrate and you cannot do any crossfading, else it will downmix to stereo and force output to PCM or Layer I or II. But if you're only splicing as I have, then it manages to just splice the audio without changing type or, from what I can tell, recompressing. If the audio splice doesn't sound good where the video splice is, I've found that sometimes the audio splice point can be moved one direction or the other. It's a creative change, but if it makes a better transition, so be it. I ended up needing to do this both at the Dewback removal and the Jabba removal specifically. On the latter, Kenobi's dialogue would have been trimmed, which would not be good.

This isn't a great edit in the end, but it isn't bad either. Feedback on the finished product from you all is what I'm looking forward to most of all. (At least I'm not claiming I've made the best version of Star Wars ever! )
I am fluent in over six million forms of procrastination.
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It doesn't surprise me, then, that Womble only does a hard wipe. A "soft" wipe would be altering the actual video, whereas the hard wipe is simply trading spaces with the existing video. It still sounds like a great product. I look forward to using it myself for some projects.

<span class=“Italics”>MeBeJedi: Sadly, I believe the prequels are beyond repair.
<span class=“Bold”>JediRandy: They’re certainly beyond any repair you’re capable of making.</span></span>

<span class=“Italics”>MeBeJedi: You aren’t one of us.
<span class=“Bold”>Go-Mer-Tonic: I can’t say I find that very disappointing.</span></span>

<span class=“Italics”>JediRandy: I won’t suck as much as a fan edit.</span>

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I should clarify. It does re-encode even these hard-wiped sections, because the information on the frame is still changing. Hence, I wish they would add soft wipe controls to their different wipes. They have TON of transitions, just no control to make the edges softer.

But, man, you can do wipes like Kevin Smith did in Dogma with NO problem.

In short, the product needs two enhancements:

1) soft edge controls on its transitions
2) not downmixing multi-channel audio when they're mixed.

That said, it does have the ability to handle two audio sources with some decent control on volume and fading. The intent is to let you place an original audio source (say, the direct audio from a handheld camera's mic) and then place and control background music in the second layer. The two layers get mixed together in the export process. On the whole, this is a great feature and allows for better crossfading when manipulating stereo sources. But if any crossfading or volume changes happen in a 5.1 file, it downmixes it. That's is main audio drawback. Oh, and I think if you downmix to PCM it actually converts it to Mono. I found that out after messing with a different film.

If you're editing together home movies, this program is a dream. For some of the more professional touches we're trying to accomplish on these (or other) "real" films, the product needs some more development.
I am fluent in over six million forms of procrastination.
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I'm wondering if you can do a hard sweep directly infront of the original soft sweep???
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I've wondered that myself. But it would only work if the b-roll is the same as the source anyway, which would make the edit moot. The soft edge shows both the a-roll and b-roll by nature, so if the scene looks different then it would be noticible if the b-roll didn't match what was visible-but-obscured by the soft edge.
I am fluent in over six million forms of procrastination.
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Of course if you are stuck on a budget, just use your favourite photo editing package (gimp is free) and create a sequence of images of white mattes with a soft edge and use that as your alpha comp base.

You could pull in the stills of the original video to use as a template for your matte creation.
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Not sure if anyone's interested...but I'll be posting the GKAR SE trilogy on a.b.starwars in a bit more than a week. If you're looking for an 97 SE set to work on de-se'ing...this is the one. The quality is almost up there with the Reivax ANH and it's the entire trilogy.

btw...if anyone has the entire Reivax trilogy...PM me!

Anyways, I'll be posting 2 versions of "When Star Wars Ruled The World" (PAL and angrysun) and then I'm posting the gonzo OT...unless I get calls in here to do GKAR first.

Here's the specs (thx to Blaksvn):

The 1997 Special Edition Trilogy - The “GKar” Edition
- 3 DVDr’s
- Source - German DBS transfer
- Anamorphic Transfer

Tech Specs
- 3.71gigs, 3.68gigs, 4.29gigs
- Interactive Menus
- Video - 4-8 Mbps (average bitrate)
- Anamorphic Widescreen Enhanced for 16x9 Monitors
- Audio 1: German - Dolby Digital 5.1 (448 Kbps)
- Audio 2: English - Dolby Digital 5.0 (448 Kbps)
- Audio 3: English - Dolby Digital 2.0 (256 Kbps)



D.O.


¤ The Dark One In Costume ¤

...at last we shall have revenge...
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Anyways, I'll be posting 2 versions of "When Star Wars Ruled The World" (PAL and angrysun) and then I'm posting the gonzo OT...unless I get calls in here to do GKAR first.



I say give us the GKAR edition first......
Most of us have the Dr. Gonzo edition....... I think.....
Do, or do not. There is no try.
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Originally posted by: The Dark One
I'm going with you on this one eDroj...the GKar will be posted after the 2 WSWRTW.




D.O.


Niceness!

I have craved this set....... I know that craving is not good..... but I am a Star Wars craver!
Do, or do not. There is no try.
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My frustration level with Combustion has completely disheartened me at this point. Such a good product, but the demo leaves the final product useless, and the $$$ is too much for me to bear to fix one shot on one film (the green saber shot) -- so if you are adept with Combustion and have the time to help (I know many of you don't have the time and I understand) here's what I need help with

1) The source video is here and is in M2V format with a .mpg extension. That's the format it needs to come back in.

2) As we determined earlier in the thread, the saber needs to have a travelling matte that follows it, and all that needs to be done is to have the color re-wired to this config:

R <- R
G <- Y
B <- G

The only potential problem is in the couple of frames where the training remote crosses in front of the saber. No idea if the rewiring will noticibly change the remote. Otherwise, it should be a fairly straightforward fix.

Anyway, I know many of you are knee-deep in other project, but any help from you video geniuses would be great.
I am fluent in over six million forms of procrastination.
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Just matte around the training remote.
If you have an ftp site I can fix your other problems.
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I am fluent in over six million forms of procrastination.
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I don't know if anyone realized this, but apparently the Game Cube SW game "Rebel Strike" has the original ewok celebration from the end of Jedi in full-on DVD quality. I've never seen it for myself, but just today, I remembered reading this article on Ain't It Cool News over a year and a half ago. Funny how the brain works that way, eh? Anyway, I don't know if there's a way to rip this video off the little Game Cube disc or anything, but I thought it was worth a mention.

I used to be very active on this forum. I’m not really anymore. Sometimes, people still want to get in touch with me about something, and that is great! If that describes you, please email me at [my username]ATgmailDOTcom.

Hi everybody. You’re all awesome. Keep up the good work.

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WOW! Bitchin' find! I'll let ADM now right away!

[EDIT] Soooooo, anybody out there who's got this game?

<span class=“Italics”>MeBeJedi: Sadly, I believe the prequels are beyond repair.
<span class=“Bold”>JediRandy: They’re certainly beyond any repair you’re capable of making.</span></span>

<span class=“Italics”>MeBeJedi: You aren’t one of us.
<span class=“Bold”>Go-Mer-Tonic: I can’t say I find that very disappointing.</span></span>

<span class=“Italics”>JediRandy: I won’t suck as much as a fan edit.</span>

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Details? Anybody???
I am fluent in over six million forms of procrastination.