Broom Kid

The 2019 BDs seem to be much more uniform in presentation than the UHDs no matter what. The biggest problem seems to be that Reliance went HAM on the transfer with noise reduction since they were primarily remastering for 3D conversion to be applied after the fact. Reliance is pretty heavy handed with the DNR even when they weren’t protecting for 3D gimmickry, so in scenes where the 3D probably wasn’t going to be very prominent, you end up with a nice transfer that makes the movie look better than it ever has on home video. And then in the same transfer you end up with SUPER-processed shots and sequences that are just smeared and artifacted to hell.

The color grade seems to be the first time since 1997 that we’re getting somewhat CLOSE to what the DP and director’s intended for their films to look like, and the 2019 Blu-Rays seem to be the best way of seeing what that looks like, for now, since the UHDs seem to mandate users do some tinkering on their side to figure out how to get it to “look right.”

It’s the same as the cap from earlier in the thread that prompted the comparison. I just grabbed that one, and then grabbed all the others from what I had here.

I’m not 100% whether that cap was made from the 4k, or the 2019 blu-ray. I sorta feel like anyone trying to cap anything from the 4k disc is entering into a crapshoot since UHD is, frankly, kind of a mess so far as actually seeing what anyone who shot the damn thing meant for you to see. Even good UHD transfers seem to be kind of “up in the air” as to whether they look like the movie was supposed to look.

It really does seem to me like the primary instinct behind UHD’s creation was to match TV makers’ notions of what makes TVs look good, and not to capture what filmmaker’s notions of what they want their films to look like.

The mo-cap for both fighters was great, although as amazing as it looked, there were a couple times where I was sort of jarred out of the moment because of just how different this fight looked compared to every other fight they’ve done on this show. The choreography itself is stellar. This is maybe the best lightsaber fight of the prequel era.

I do want to see the behind-the-scenes filming of the fight between Park and Lauren May Kim (who did Ahsoka’s moves).

I also understand why everyone is all “PRAISE FILONI” in response to these two episodes, but I do think it’s worth pointing out Dave didn’t direct these episodes. He wrote them, and he’s the showrunner, so I absolutely understand giving him credit, and he deserves a ton of it. But the way this episode looks, moves, and is cut together? That’s not Dave. I feel sort of bad for the animators and the ACTUAL directors (Saul Ruiz, Nathaniel Villanueva) that the greatness of these last two episodes is being 100% credited to Filoni and Park.

This is already doing what Revenge of the Sith wanted to do so much better than Revenge of the Sith did it.

Also, was that Kevin Kiner trying to quote Close Encounters of the Third Kind in the opening?

Isn’t that shot a notorious problem spot on ROTJ? I think there’s permanent film-damage baked into the negative that makes any cleaning/fixing near impossible.

Not to say the frozen grain and DNR problems aren’t real problems - they absolutely are, and one of the worst side-effects of the 3D fad reaching out from the past to mess up this set.

pat man said:

Link to US 18-disc Blu-ray only.

I don’t think there is a US 18-disc blu-ray set. That link seems to go to a third-party seller that’s importing the UK set.

It looks like if you want a blu-ray only set, you have to get the UK one. But it’s apparently region-free so it shouldn’t be a problem.

NICE! Thank you for the links!

I think the blu-ray only set is not just blu-ray only, but UK only? There were those wal-mart and Amazon UK links to it from when the Best Buy set first started making news, and that seems to be the only way to get a blu-ray only set of the '19 masters.

There hasn’t been a lot of (or any) discussion of it that I’ve been able to find anywhere.

Dek Rollins said:

CG Yoda lacks any expression in TPM.

Did you mean the puppet? I’m confused.

The TPM puppet literally has only one possible facial expression. The way they constructed the puppet made it impossible to do any thing other than basic lip flap. It has the same face in every scene. The ears and the eyes have some movement, and that kinda/sorta makes up for the lack of expression on the puppet, but it’s never utilized very well.

Again, if I was just working off memory, I could be convinced that I’m misremebering how stiff and ugly the puppet was, and how that stiffness inhibited what performance the puppet could give. But that video is right there! And the CG looks more like Yoda, acts more like Yoda, and is a better replacement in basically every way.

ALL THAT SAID: I’d love to finally get my hands on a theatrical restoration of TPM, and any reconstruction claiming to be “theatrical” needs to have that ugly, stiff mistake of a puppet in there in all its pop-eyed, ack-ack glory.

Been reading the conversation here and was thinking maybe my memory, which is long and increasingly filling with holes as I age and more gaps appear in it, was playing tricks on me. So I went to YouTube and typed in “Yoda comparison,” which brought up this video. So I put it on fullscreen and watched it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxaZxpNTm8A

The CGI model is a massive improvement in basically every way. It looks better, it interacts better, the performance (paired with the vocal work) is better… I certainly can’t agree with the idea that CG work for the blu-ray is “pulled out of a not-very-impressive cutscene.”

That puppet was a big, well-intentioned misstep, but a misstep nonetheless. The CG correction is just so observably, obviously better that I’m wondering if you guys are just trying to trick people into rewatching The Phantom Menace, haha.

DominicCobb said:

When this was going around the first time a few months ago, I saw a few people mention it was the TV version. Movie Censorship confirms that it’s the same as the one IMDb has listed for a while: https://www.movie-censorship.com/report.php?ID=765444

That link looks like it’s attributing that digital-fur-tech change to Disney+, though. I also don’t believe Splash had any other TV edits made to it other than the ones initially made when it first got sold to network/syndication way back in the day.

This is the sort of change that would have/could have only been made on the cheap, and made very recently, and it’s just a lot more likely Disney applied the change themselves. Normally that edit is either a zoom in so you can’t see her buttcrack when she jumps into the water, or they cut back to Tom Hanks before she jumps.

I believe the proper 4x3 masters are going to start populating the platform in May. I don’t know if they’ll all go up at once or if it’ll sort of gradually roll out but they should be there soon.

It’s not just the cropping that sucks, though, it’s the STRETCHING of the image that happens every now and then, as well.

But this is all sort of off-topic, apologies.

Pretty sure the Splash edit was done specifically for Disney+

I know why Simpsons is chopped and uglified the way it is, but that’s separate from Disney being very weird about protecting for “family friendliness” above and beyond what they initially seemed to be planning with the streaming platform. They’re being very precious about the content in a pretty weird and counterproductive way.

It just doesn’t make sense to be this overboard about “the children!” when they launched (and still have) a ton of content that is honestly not at all aimed at, or really intended for, children. In fact you could argue the most financially successful stuff ON that platform is all PG-13 and isn’t really for kids at all.

Either a bunch of that stuff should be shunted off to Hulu, or they need to stop being so precious. Right now they’re riding fences for no good reason and people are getting frustrated.

Disney is being so WEIRD about Disney Plus, and it doesn’t make any sense.

none of their content decisions regarding “protecting the children” make any sense as long as they’ve got The Simpsons there. (Most of the Simpsons is incorrectly framed anyway)

If they want Disney plus to be THAT squeaky clean, they basically have to pull the Marvel and Star Wars channels, as well as the Simpsons, and put all that on Hulu.

It’s just ridiculous that they went out of their way to create this platform, make sure it has something for everyone in the family, and then once it’s up and rolling start aggressively neutering everything as much as possible. That’s not why anyone signed up.

So Daryl Hannah has bad digital fur technology applied, but Anakin is burning alive with no issues, and The Simpsons are making porn jokes.

I think the best way to incorporate the force ghosts is to reduce the opacity and have them only blink into and out of existence with every lightning strike in the room. They can probably recede back into nothingness for half a second after the lightning is gone (replicating a sort of after-image effect) but I think relying on an audience’s ability to resolve visual information very quickly will help out a lot.

You can also probably get away with using stills of jedi - thus increasing the ability to exponentially increase with each lightning strike the number of jedi showing up in the background (probably in the far background, too) to support Rey in ghost form.

I can think of a solution, but it would take someone providing VFX work again, and some good old fashioned “something out of nothing” editing work in keeping with Star Wars history.

“I am all the sith.”
“And I…”
(helicopter noises, music rising)
Rey’s hand, waiting for the lightsaber, catches it.

At this point, I’m suggesting either looping forward/reverse that shot of her holding the saber JUST long enough to give a tiny beat before you layer in “I’m Nobody” or “I’m no one” OVER the shot of the saber in the hand. To punctuate it, she ignites the saber BACK THERE, and then IMMEDIATELY swings the saber up out of frame from that shot rapidly, and you cut just as rapidly to the camera pulling back as the saber comes up into frame.

But you’d need to

1. extend her holding it just a tad through tricky
2. animate a saber igniting
3. animate the saber coming up and out of frame (or at least starting to move in that direction)

In order to create enough continuity to cut straight from the saber moving up and to the left to match with the reverse shot as the saber is coming up and from the right while the camera pulls back.

I guess the only other way to get it to work exactly the way you want is to establish at some point earlier that these two can and will communicate telepathically in their final duel (add reverb and weird effects not unlike the Force Skyping) and then you have to creatively edit so that their dialog is playing over scenes where their mouths are decidedly not moving - and then you can basically rearrange their words wherever you want, cut to close-ups of their eyes or hands whenever you need it, etc…

Looking at the cap from above, thought I’d put together a comparison of “Here to Rescue Yous”

http://www.framecompare.com/image-compare/screenshotcomparison/7DKY7NNX

I think I got those all labeled correctly.

The Verge is a very well-read website, arguably the most read tech-focused site currently. It looks like this post is taken from a very similar article at Slate, which is also a very widely read site, albeit one more focused on politics and culture than tech and entertainment.

It might seem like it’s not getting a lot of attention because there are no comments underneath it, but many writers on that site decline to allow comments on their articles, partially because comment sections don’t really provide any usable/monetizable traffic, but mostly because comment sections are terrible and some writers and editors just don’t want to deal with the mean-spirited mess they usually become.

But I would imagine a million or so people have seen both those articles by now. The egregious way Disney is curating Disney+ is definitely a mainstream story by now.

LOL! But honestly, that would have probably invoked a negative response, if I think about it. Fox doesn’t have anything to do with making any of this new stuff, so sticking their logo on the front of a movie nobody working there had anything to do with would have felt like the wrong kind of hat-tip. Or pandering, really.

Not that the green logo wasn’t its own form of that, I guess. But the difference is that it was gone for way longer, and I honestly never thought I’d see that logo in front of a new production again, and then… there it was. And it fit just right.

I just about shit when that came up.

And then… then! The open!

If the rumors are true and this is going to be re-released once the arc finishes as a legitimate stand-alone movie (and the animation is more than good enough to do that) I hope they go with an actual crawl instead of Yularen’s voiceover.

Anyway, yeah, this is in a whole lot of ways probably the biggest thing they’ve tried to do on that show? The scope, the quality of animation, the storytelling… I’m honestly very excited.

There’s a lot of very, very good Clone Wars arcs in the show’s history already, but this seems like it could be THE ONE.

“I… I’m no one” is so much better and in keeping with what the last two movies were pointing towards. I’m glad to hear that’s what the kiss-off line is now. It’s what it always should have been.

pleasehello said:

I can’t imagine having this reaction to what is the cinematic equivalent of vanilla ice-cream.

Vanilla can be a pretty subtle and interesting flavor profile if used with care in a pint of good gourmet stuff.

Or it can be half a bottle of imitation extract dumped into cereal milk and left in the freezer for 15 minutes.

And even then - okay, you don’t think Hux can be a real bad guy. That’s dumb on the part of the creative team to buy into that, but alright, I’ll roll with it.

Why do you then go and get RICHARD E. GRANT to play such a NOTHING of a character?

When Captain Canady made more impact in 2 minutes of screentime than RICHARD E. GRANT did? Come on.

DominicCobb said:

Without a scene of that sort, sorry to say, Chewie getting the medal will never be in my edit. Probably the single scene that annoyed me the most, outside of Rey Palpatine stuff.

No doubt. They really did cut into the bone way too many times on this movie. So many necessary shots and sequences jettisoned for the sake of going faster, at the expense of any sense being made. Why would you keep these medal shots in if you’re not going to set up OR follow through on any of them properly? Why keep the blender-spun version of Mustafar if that version of the sequence is now completely unneccessary to understanding or even enjoying the scenes that follow? Why would you remove the shots that make the geography of the desert sequences make ANY sort of sense, and then render your Chewie fake death utterly comical because not only is everything happening so fast, now it’s happening in such a non-sequitur manner it might as well be a Looney Tunes cartoon. WHY DOES CHARLIE FROM LOST KEEP TALKING?

So many ideas, and they tried to put all of them in all at the same time and just broke a bunch of them off and shoved the jagged shards into the narrative wherever they could when they didn’t fit right.

My suspicion that the original version of the shot where her hand flops over had the medal in it.

Honestly sort of surprised they didn’t go full sentimentality and have the medal falling out of her hand and clattering to the floor, with the sound ringing over into the next cut of Kylo stopping short and turning around.