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ADigitalMan

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Join date
26-Sep-2004
Last activity
14-Jun-2025
Posts
2,944

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Post
#101091
Topic
Episode II: Shroud of the Dark Side (the TM edit) (Released)
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/101091/action/topic#101091
Time
Darth Editous has been helping me with a similar issue on panning down vs the original pan-up on Ep II. We've almost gotten something for everybody's review. His work looks fan-damn-tastic!

I'll invite him to comment on the specifics, but as I understand it, he gradually flipped the starfield during the length of the crawl so that at the beginning, it matched the background behind the title card and by the pan down, it was flipped vertically. It's almost perfect. I'm having some recompression issues in Womble that's making it look less than perfect, but once we resolve those, it'll be well-worth posting.

I re-wrote the crawl for my own edit. I'll reveal that when it's ready for posting.
Post
#98248
Topic
BIG BIG question - Episode I; what was the trailer shown before the film at the cinema?
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/98248/action/topic#98248
Time
I remember it well. We had trailers for three movies in front of Episode I:
Titan A.E.
Fight Club
The Beach

The friggin Beach came out, like, a year later. It was awful marketing. The trailers sucked and I remember everybody looking at each other when we saw that bar of soap at the end of Fight Club and murmuring WTF?!?!?! I guess it made sense in the context of the film, but what a dumb marketing strategy.
Post
#98246
Topic
Thought on de-SE'ing the DVD
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/98246/action/topic#98246
Time
Darth Editous, this edit sounds WAY cool. I'm glad to see new forum members come in and take the bull by the horns as well. I joined six months ago and knew practically nothing, and six months later I now know next-to-nothing instead. But I get to chat with and learn from all you brilliant types. I hope this edit will get out there and I hope it'll find its way to my front door.

One question: what is your audio source? The source that came to me via Neil S. Bulk a few pages back is an awesome source for addressing so many of the sonic screw-ups on the official DVD and will be my primary audio track when/if I ever get my project out the door. It's sittin' on my HD waiting for the damn saber fix. Let me know if you need to be hooked up with that AC3 file.

In other news, I've clearly been absent for a few days. I've been working on my own re-edit of Ep I and it is complete. At least, as complete as I'm going to take it now. I've been doing a marathon re-edit and am burned out, but I just watched most of it and am comfortable with 95% of what's there. I'd still like to do my own crawl, but need the help of others to accomplish it. There is one hard-edit that I couldn't soften up with my remedial tools (can't do audio crossfades and soft wipes), but the others are pretty straightforward. I've never seen any of the other Phantom Edits beyond MF's BOTF, so I have no idea if I've duplicated effort. Not likely. In any case, the quality is certainly the greatest so far, as it's sourced from the DVD and a MPEG-2 GOP editor was used, so none of the audio or video has been recoded. Except in the few frames where fade outs or fade ins or crossfades were put in place, the frames are exactly the same as the source, and THAT makes for good watching.

Anyway boyos, here's a general list of what's different:
  • I started with the film and added in all of the deleted scenes in context. This gave me the full palette to work with. From there, I started trimming back the things that bothered me most. About fifteen minutes' worth of nips and tucks, with a few large excises, but mostly just the nonsensical little crap.
  • Jar Jar's goofiness is trimmed WAY back, but without sacrifice to the story. In some different ways from BOTF too, given that I wasn't changing dialogue.
  • Same thing with Boss Nass. He still does the "slobbery jowls" thing on his last line, just because I couldn't figure how to edit around it for the background music. But otherwise, he's not riddled with all of these tics.
  • Anakin's childishness is likewise trimmed WAY back. Everything he does is intentional. The scene with him learning the ships controls from Ric Olie is back in, because it shows his intuition with foreign machinery. Then, when he is in the Naboo fighter, he is not randomly pressing buttons and lucking out, he takes the gun and starts shooting battle droids. The ship is not on autopilot, he flys that ship straight out to the droid control ship and fights with the Naboo as best as he can. Most of the silliness is lopped out.
  • Queens are born, not elected. This also explains why a planet would have a 14-year-old leader. Stupid plot point and wasted opportunity on GL's point turned to our advantage by just removing references to an election.
  • Jar Jar is not a General. He's fighting with his fellow Gungans, but not leading them. (sadly, cutting the scene where he is made general is the source of the most abrupt and awful edit in my mix. I tried all kinds of different things, but ultimately, we got what we got.) But he fights to the best of his ability and he does NOT surrender.
  • No fart and poop jokes.
  • Nute Gunray does not recognize Padme as the queen when he captures her, similar to what I did in my BOTF subtitles. It always bothered me that they had this elaborate system of having a decoy, with the Queen's face remaining hidden behind makeup, yet Nute immediately recognized this handmaiden as the Queen. The "fake out" on Nute becomes more of a proper diversion by the decoy.
  • No friggin' midichlorians. Bye Bye. See ya.


As with any Phantom Edit, it's not without it's flaws, but on the whole, it's just another perspective from a jaded fan. In the end, this is a version of the film that abuses none of Lucas' vision, but rather "proofreads" his final submission. While BOTF may remain more fun to watch because of its wholesale improvement on the plot and "how-did-he-do-that" technical wizardry, this will hopefully be a watchable and enjoyable version of Lucas' film. Not to mention, you have to do a lot less reading of subtitles on this movie. The original ones are still there of course, rewritten in some places. But Gungans and Neimoidians do speak English in this version.

I hope the GOP editors (that's tech-speak, not anything to do with Republicans) will only advance (and I'm sure they will) in the next few years, so that when I get to re-edit this in HD, I'll be able to do the much-needed soft wipes and crossfades without totally having to recompress everything.

Have a great Easter weekend, folks. I'll be off the boards for a few days, hiding eggs and watching The Passion. Whoever put those two concepts together?
Post
#98002
Topic
Why doesn't Lucas do this?
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/98002/action/topic#98002
Time
Quote
Originally posted by: oojason
If we get to see Bea Arthur in The Holiday Special, then I DEMAND to see Shirley Temple inserted into the next incarnation of A New Hope


I think that if GL intends to revise his older works to match his vision of later works, then it is imperative that he drop in Bea Arthur as the bartender of the Cantina. She even get's to utter the line "We don't serve their kind ... your droids. They'll have to wait outside."

Wait a minute ... maybe that WAS Bea Arthur in ANH.
Post
#97735
Topic
Thought on de-SE'ing the DVD
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/97735/action/topic#97735
Time
If any of you have the ability to create a crawl, I'm interested in creating a new Episode name and crawl for each of my planned re-edits of Ep I and II. They're not as drastic as the cool stuff MF did, but basically I'm restoring all of the deleted scenes, then pulling back all of the stuff I find gut-wrenchingly bad, without resorting to creating new dialog. I'm going to try, if possible, to preserve the notion that Queens aren't elected and rule for life, like they do in our understanding of the English language. Thus, a rewrite of the crawls is a little necessary too.

I've completed the extended cut of TPM, reinserting all of the deleted scenes but deleting nothing. Straightforward extended cut. I'm planning to make that available too.
Post
#97522
Topic
Thought on de-SE'ing the DVD
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/97522/action/topic#97522
Time
If it's not one thing, its another ... so I'm preparing to start on Ep I and SubRip refuses to rip the alien-only track, claiming on each of the subtitle images that each one is skipped because it's too small / too short. I set the program to skip only those below 0 ms, so the durations shouldn't be too short.

Anybody have an idea about this? Or does anybody have a direct subtitle rip of this stream in .srt or .txt format?
Post
#96738
Topic
Thought on de-SE'ing the DVD
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/96738/action/topic#96738
Time
I'll be using the playlist feature to accomplish this. I agree, it'll be much easier than seamless branching.

Spent the past few days re-editing AOTC, using a number of MF's edits in TCW as well. My result was a mess though. It looks like it has something to do with 2:3 pulldown, as frames are either being dropped or repeated (I'm not sure which, but I think it's the latter). Gonna take a break for a few days and maybe regroup from scratch. Ugh!
Post
#96247
Topic
New ROTS Trailer
Link
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/96247/action/topic#96247
Time
That's when Jack usually eats or goes to the bathroom I think. Even if he's driving along, I think he whips out a granola bar during commercial. Because we've never seen him eat or drink anything. Only this season has he ever gone to the john.

Back on topic, the trailer looks great. But then again so did the trailers for I and II. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me thrice, you must be in marketing or politics.

I like the digital heartbeat at the end. I hope that doesn't become something GL goes back and adds to the OT though to make Vader consistent throughout the trilogy. I won't put it past him.