Anyhow Zion, your menus are looking great. If you are going to generate the pre-ANH crawl, have you begun working on it? I don't actually mind the idea of THAT so much anymore, but my position on modifying the rest of the elements of the movie has not changed. So, as for your "video enhancements" you probably wouldn't need to use branching at all. Because the "enhanced" version will be exactly the same length as the normal version all you'd need to do is put them into an alternate angle (you would need a total of 4 angles for all your options).
I mean you've probably already thought about that, but to me it makes more sense to use angles than branching, I mean it should be much easier to do. The best thing to do would be to have an initial menu that comes up which makes you choose the version of the film, like on the Alien Quad discs. As opposed to that other "Pre-ANH" disc that has the option available in a menu, but when you start you don't really know which version's going to play since you haven't chosen anything.
Oooh... this could be useful Zion:
http://www.starwars.com/episode-iii/bts/production/f20050126/index.html
For the prequel trilogy, the opening roll-up has become a personal tradition for Visual Effects Supervisor John Knoll, who has executed the crawls for Episodes I, II and now III on his home computer.
"I type the text in Illustrator," describes Knoll. "I then get a layout approval from George [Lucas], regarding where the line breaks are -- he really cares about the typography." At this stage, the text is a rectangular block -- just flat art. Knoll then imports the Illustrator eps file into a program called form·Z, which turns it into a piece of geometry that can be used in a 3-D program.
"Then I import that into Electric Image and render it. I'm not rendering it with lighting or anything; it's only going through the 3-D program to get the correct perspective." As documented in this article, Knoll researched the original trilogy roll-ups extensively before tackling the opening text for The Phantom Menace. "George was very concerned that we match the one from Episode IV very closely, that the focal length be the same and where the lines converge be the same," he says. Asking sources at Skywalker Ranch for information about the fonts used, he was dismayed to find out accurate records were not kept.
"It turned out that there were all kinds of different versions of the first crawl: the original, the Episode IV release, and all the foreign language versions." Faced with contradictory information, Knoll took a film still of the crawl and reverse-engineered it. He scanned the perspective-titled text into Electric Image, and projected it out as a flattened block of text seen from above. He then took that image to the Art Department, whose typography experts were able to identify the different fonts used within the crawl: news gothic bold for the main body of the crawl and Episode number, and univers light ultra condensed for the title of the film.
Here's the font... too bad it isn't free, I'll see what I can do about downloading it though. "I type the text in Illustrator," describes Knoll. "I then get a layout approval from George [Lucas], regarding where the line breaks are -- he really cares about the typography." At this stage, the text is a rectangular block -- just flat art. Knoll then imports the Illustrator eps file into a program called form·Z, which turns it into a piece of geometry that can be used in a 3-D program.
"Then I import that into Electric Image and render it. I'm not rendering it with lighting or anything; it's only going through the 3-D program to get the correct perspective." As documented in this article, Knoll researched the original trilogy roll-ups extensively before tackling the opening text for The Phantom Menace. "George was very concerned that we match the one from Episode IV very closely, that the focal length be the same and where the lines converge be the same," he says. Asking sources at Skywalker Ranch for information about the fonts used, he was dismayed to find out accurate records were not kept.
"It turned out that there were all kinds of different versions of the first crawl: the original, the Episode IV release, and all the foreign language versions." Faced with contradictory information, Knoll took a film still of the crawl and reverse-engineered it. He scanned the perspective-titled text into Electric Image, and projected it out as a flattened block of text seen from above. He then took that image to the Art Department, whose typography experts were able to identify the different fonts used within the crawl: news gothic bold for the main body of the crawl and Episode number, and univers light ultra condensed for the title of the film.