Help: looking for... Alderaan Explosion (ideally no Praxis shockwave effect)

Does anyone know of any fan-made alternatives to the shot of Alderaan being destroyed? Ideally, I’d be able to find one with no praxis shockwave effect.

Adywan’s explosion is pretty good, but still contains a shockwave effect. Perhaps someone has removed the shockwave effect from the SE version of the shot. I’m hoping to find one with no praxis effect for my custom SE I’m cobbling together.

I can't think of any good examples, but I bet it would be a great challenge to create for an experienced After Effects artist.

I always wanted to see the Death Star laser melt through the surface, then explode only when it hits the core.

kane1138 said:

What exactly are you working on, Hal?  I'm a fan of your PT edits, so I'd be interested to see your take on the OT.

 I'll make one thing clear: I do not have VFX skills. So, my OT project (which may or may not be worth releasing) is merely a cobble-job of other projects. My goal is to merely pick and choose from the official versions of the films to put together a more modest 'Special Edition' of only the changes that I assess as positive. These will be meant to be companion pieces to a properly preserved "original version," like Harmy's Despecialized Editions or Team Blu's GOUT preservation. This goal frames the project as an alternative version of the film rather than a preservation of the original, so I can feel free to use the SE changes I actually like.

This will not be a fan edit, insofar as all I'm doing is alternating between official versions of the film. However, I do plan on doing some creative editing in some places to arrive at a middle ground between OOT and SE. For example, I plan to only show some of the new Wampa scene, making the SE addition more subtle. I'll be doing similar things for Mos Eisley. I hope to be able to use Adywan's Emperor hologram scene from ESB, because he uses the new footage but wrangles it into a form more similar to the original in the sense of dialogue. So if there is any "fan editing" stuff going on, it will be limited to mediating OOT versus SE changes. 

Plus, at least for ANH and ESB, there are a lot of audio differences that will be fun to pick and choose from for a custom blend. I grew up with the '97 SE as my earliest exposure to Star Wars, so I've grown accustomed to some of its sound choices. It doesn't feel right to me when the Falcon blasts off from the Death Star without those additional noises from the mono mix that were reiterated in the SE going forward. 

So that's what I'm planning. It'll just be ANH for now, with ESB and ROTJ to follow once the sources become available. I was delighted to see Harmy had done a '97SE hybrid version, which will give me more options and make everything much easier for me. I intend on using this as my base, alongside the Despecialized Edition and kk650's color corrected 2011 footage. 

I posted this thread because ideally I would be able to remove the praxis shockwave effect added to the SE. It seems best to me to either remove all three of them or leave all three of them. (If they have to stay, I'll use the '97SE version of the first Death Star's explosion.)

That's pretty cool, but strays too far from the original for my taste.

Ideally, the '97 (and beyond) version of the shot without the shockwave. Or something like Adywan's version, sans shockwave. My goal (for this shot, and the project as a whole) is to mediate the OOT and SE versions, and not to do anything further to it like Adywan or Darth Editous have. 

That's why what you suggested wouldn't work for me. It'd be cool in a fan edit, but that's not really what I'm trying to do here.

Have you looked at Harmy's DeEd 2.5?

Also: in the Empire of Dreams documentary, there's the original bluescreen footage of the explosion used for the scene. You might be able to do something with that.

Yeah, the original explosion has a weird jump cut that would make it seem out of place in a Special Edition. And I don't have the VFX skills to do anything with that footage, though I have seen it. I wonder why someone wrote on the film and made it unusable. Perhaps they had no time to do another explosion. 

I don't cringe when I see the shockwaves, and wouldn't mind them at all if they were part of the film originally. They are unnecessary incursions added for the SE, which I'd prefer weren't there.

But for this project, I want to consider every detail, and have fun in the process. At the end of the day, it's not a big deal if I have to go with the shockwaves. But I'd hate to have missed out on a good source for an alternative because I didn't ask. 

After taking a look at Adywan's version again, I may elect to go with it. It appears to invoke the momentum of the jump cut of the original, though still has a shockwave. Though the scope of my project is limited to variations across the films' various official releases, this is okay by my logic that it's only a tweak on something that was changed in a way that mediates the different versions. 

Ultimately, it comes down to my own preference. But that's my reasoning.

Basketball is a peaceful planet.