Broom Kid

idir_hh said:

So they used two takes of the same scene back to back.
I’m amazed
…and insulted.

Lucas/Chew/Hirsch did the same thing more than a few times in 1977, IIRC.

I don’t think it’s insulting really. It’s just editing. The whole thing is a trick. Some tricks are better than others.

That there’s a big Zapruder-like YouTube video “exposing” it seems odd, to me. “They’re trying to fool you, but we see through their attempts!” Of course they’re trying to fool you. They’re filmmakers.

That said, I don’t really like the sequence. But re-using shots isn’t why I dislike it.

One of the main reasons DVD took off had a lot to do with the easily observable visual leap from VHS. When the prices started dropping from “Laserdisc” enthusiast level down to the $200 range, electronics stores (hah, remember those!) were basically shoveling the things out the door by simply connecting a VCR and a DVD player to the same TV and pushing a button on a switcher.

DVD killed Laserdisc and VHS because it looked better than both formats, was cheap, and didn’t have any of the handling problems (getting up to flip the disc over, having to pay for an expensive disc-flipping player, worrying about rewinding and tape-eating).

That’s exactly what they are. The 4K remasters all got finished in 2012, because they’d anticipated the Phantom Menace 3D re-release to do way better than it did, and these remasters were basically done SPECIFICALLY to be 3D converted later to build on the success of TPM.

And then Phantom Menace disappointed (again) and that was basically it. Lucas sold the company a little over six months later.

DominicCobb said:

From where I’m standing, there’s only one film in this trilogy that consciously undoes anything in TFA or otherwise, and it’s not TLJ.

Right? And what’s even more bizarre to me is how everyone who has spoken along these similar lines on the TROS production, whether it’s negative OR positive, seems to have this weird tone where they honestly believe there was a roadmap or a plan that probably should have been adhered to, when everyone absolutely knows there wasn’t, and further, if there was, why would anyone have cause to believe ANYONE ELSE KNEW ABOUT IT?

Because the people who made the first movie, made it literally never believing they’d come back to have a second bite at this apple. NOBODY making The Force Awakens had any illusions that they’d be back for part two or three. So for this creative team to come back and act like they had to “set things right” in any way just doesn’t make any sense at all. All the decisions you made on the first movie, you made under the full knowledge you’d have zero control over what came next. So why are you acting like you’re now burdened with getting things “back on track to how it should be” when there was never a “how it should be” back in 2015 when you finished your leg of the race?

And of course, the ultimate comedy is that their “well, we had to fix what was originally supposed to be” solutions basically UNDID EVERYTHING they did in the first movie. TLJ never contradicted TFA. But TROS sure as hell did. All over the place.

To add to Captain Solo’s thorough post: My personal memory of the time was that DVD had been around for awhile, but was considered a weird niche that had it’s own problems compared to Laserdisc, and the price of DVD players/discs, combined with those a/v problems made people wary of pushing all in on it. I distinctly remember, at the time, the DVD of Blade Runner: Director’s Cut, failing out in a head-to-head comparison with the Laserdisc version, so people early in the format’s life figured it was maybe a way to get people to pay more for lesser-quality home video product.

IIRC, it was basically The Matrix that unlocked DVD’s potential. That disc sold a LOT of players at the time, and it was only around 2000-2002 where DVD producers started really applying everything they learned from Criterion and other studio Special Edition sets. Stuff like the “Five Star” series from Fox and anamorphic encoding to make full use of the resolution available (plus gimmicks like animated menus and super-fluff “bonus features”) is what finally pushed DVD into the mainstream. That and the very low sell-through price for the tech - I remember DVD prices basically being at, or in many cases LESSER than VHS.

NeverarGreat said:

Rey’s vision feels absolutely perfect, better than the original for sure.

I agree with Hal that if there’s a way to use Luke for haunting purposes, perhaps the closeup of his face in his duel with Kylo, that would be ideal.

You could probably flash cut from Luke in close-up smirking at him, straight to the “Evil Luke” false-vision (since it’s the version Kylo legit believes in) to replace some of the Rey shots, and further you could shorten up the “touching hands” shot to jump cut to Luke screaming “NO” (edit: he screams STOP actually)

Heck, you could probably go straight from

Touching hands - Luke “NO” - Kylo (after Luke disappears) “NO”

bang-bang-bang quick cuts. Just long enough for viewers to recognize what the shots are, but not long enough for them to play out. I think that’s why the Rey vision works as well as it does, is the cuts are timed PERFECTLY to let viewers recognize what’s being referenced but they stop the second that synapse fires. That’s tough to do, and you nailed it Dom.

DominicCobb said:

Vision of the future:
https://vimeo.com/406327520

Visions of the past:
https://vimeo.com/406328685

Please keep in my these are still rough.

Big thanks to snooker for the shot of the Falcon.

GOODNESS!

ATMachine said:

Genuine question: does the FOV of the shot indicate that Yavin IV would be visible from the Death Star? An observer watching from a third point in space (like the camera here) might be able to look on either side of the Yavin gas giant to see both objects, but they might not be able able to see each other nonetheless.

This is probably correct, especially considering how objects in space (especially in Star Wars) can be hard to judge w/r/t/ distance.

Looking at the tweet that .gif came from, apparently someone made the case in the responses, too

https://twitter.com/Nexahs/status/1247571888462848002

Eh. I don’t know. For me the most questionable thing in the shot is how the gas giant behind the X-Wings looks like it’s made of play-doh.

That is definitely a much more impressive demo than the Rogue One attempt from 2018. There were a couple times I actually said “oh wow” out loud 😃

But I think the difference is that the facial de-aging in The Irishman is (correct me if I’m wrong) begun with filmed capture of their actual on-set performances. So this video shows the VFX artist deepfaking faces on top of camera-captured real faces (albeit CGI-enhanced/de-aged ones), not full blown cgi-created facial movements. That could be why the mouths appear to move much more naturally in these deepfakes, because the mouths are actually moving naturally. If they were trying to layer a deepfake head over the top of a computer animated person, I’d bet the mouth movements would still look unnnatural because they’re trying to map legitimate human expressions captured by a camera to a fundamentally unnatural animated movement.

But I do think you’re right that what’s really preventing it from looking the way it was obviously intended to look by ILM is just time. In the space of a year deepfakes have gotten scary good, even moreso than they were when people first started getting scared by how good they were. Maybe in another year or two someone will know exactly how to deepfake Carrie Fisher into that footage flawlessly. Right now, I don’t think anyone’s there just yet. But it’ll probably happen, given enough time.

(although, considering how poorly her posthumous footage was used in Rise of Skywalker, and how not-good this Rogue One footage was, maybe everyone should take a whole lot of that time off from digitally de-aging and/or resurrecting Carrie Fisher, just on general principle)

agreed!

I like it just because it’s so weird and it makes Forest Whitaker’s weirdness even MORE over the top, but I don’t think it at all worked the way it was intended to.

But I do like it, despite that. Just saying “BOR GULLET!” is pretty fun.

whoops, I see what I did there. I don’t have a preference is what I meant. I misread your question. But I explained why I had no preference for either version later in the post anyway (and again up there).

Either way, at least I provided some distraction from your boredom, so there’s that! 😃

LOL, we don’t agree. You telling me we do is kind of weird. I know I don’t agree with you. And it’s fine that we don’t agree! I don’t have a preference between the two. I think they’re just broken in different ways. I don’t think the deepfake helps at all in any significant way.

This is normally where I’d say “let’s agree to disagree” but you obviously don’t want to do that, haha 😃

I don’t. It’s broken in a different way, but it’s still broken. The part that’s broken isn’t addressed by that guy’s fix from 2018, so everything around the part that’s broken is beside the point, for me.

Until someone can come up with a fix that makes her mouth move like a human being’s, it will remain a mistake that mars the final seconds of the film.

There are only two fixes to that scene that I would prefer

1. a re-edit that never goes into that bridge and leaves the camera outside the doors as they open and shut
2. completely re-doing the animation of the digital Leia so that she no longer lives in the uncanny valley.

Deepfaking new faces over bad animation is lipstick on a pig, to me.

I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re starting to be choosy about letting people in. There’s been a lot more chippy and annoyed posts from some of their admins, and I can’t imagine that the big influx of people, most of whom are just kind of barging into threads and asking for stuff without having read (or donated) anything, is helping at all.

LOL, I’m not upset with you, or upset in general. Just trying to be as clear as possible so as not to confuse things. I disagreed with you, and you kept telling me “no, we agree” and I wanted to make sure you understood that we don’t, and why we don’t.

There’s no anger here 😃 It’s fine that we disagree.

why are you rewriting what I’m telling you and then trying to run that past me like I didn’t say what I said in the first place LOL? It’s all right there. I’m saying putting a deepfake over bad animation is pointless because it doesn’t fix the animation underneath it. Which is bad. That 2018 youtube video of a fan-made deepfake doesn’t make the animation better, and the fact he got Leia’s face closer to “correct” around the mouth doesn’t make the mouth move any better, and the mouth is why that shot doesn’t work.

If you’re arguing for “it’s still busted but it looks better” then you’re basically using the same rationale that allowed for the bad effect in the first place, because I guarantee “it’s still busted but that’s as good as we have for right now” is what allowed that shot to make the show.

I disagree that the deepfake helps. I don’t agree with you. We disagree.

If I’m using the word “ruined” to describe an effect, we’re probably not in much agreement, haha 😃

The mouth is ruined. Honestly, the shot shouldn’t even BE there, because again, showing Leia (much less this shiny-eyed optimistic digital Leia) breaks continuity between Rogue One and Star Wars. Edwards only hints at her in the movie up until that point, and Lucas hides her for as long as he can in his movie. Interrupting all that with a big digital Leia smack in the middle of the handoff between the two is also, in its own way, sort of ruinous.

I think the only real way to fix that shot is to completely re-do it. Someone would have to re-animate the mouth.

I disagree, and that video is exactly what I was thinking of when I made my post - the face itself is better, but the second the mouth moves, it’s ruined, because it’s the same animation from the original, and that animation is bad.

Whatever you lay over the top of that animation is going to look wrong because the animation itself is wrong.

Thank you for those caps!

That’s a good comparison between what I’m seeing in the test renders and what’s on that print. That grain is much more fine, but also more tightly packed in the frame. There’s an even-ness to its dispersal across the image (which is backwards, I guess, the image is being dispersed across it, right?) Whereas the artificial grain being applied seems to be rougher (and larger) and is less dense, so maybe that’s why I’m reading it as digital/color noise instead of grain?

I don’t know that a deepfake would actually help because the problem with that scene is the way the mouth moves. Anything you deepfake over the underlying motion is going to have the same motion, isn’t it?

You’d have to basically just head-replace their head replacement.

Honestly, a fan-edit of Rogue One that really wanted to treat Leia properly and in the context of A New Hope following right after would KEEP HER HIDDEN entirely, and never show her beyond that one glimpse from the back. There was a reason Lucas waited to reveal who she was until so far into Star Wars. Having the Leia of that movie, the angry, rebellious, “lets get the mission finished first, whatever it takes” Leia, be revealed at the very end of Rogue One as a not-great special effect, all wet-eyed and smiling while talking about “hope” just doesn’t mesh at all, really.

TAN-ti-vee FOUR.

Respect to the the Radio Dramas and Brian Daley.

That side-by-side is striking.

That comparison is eye-popping. Wow.

I do wonder if the artifical grain can be dialed back maybe 15-20%. As it stands right now in both test renders it reads more like digital noise than actual film grain, to me. The distinction is pretty subtle, I know, but I think the artificial grain is a touch too heavy as it is right now, and just barely on the wrong side of the grained/noisy line.

It seems more than a couple online critics simply haven’t even LOOKED at the 2020 blu-rays, and are just assuming they’re the same as the 2011 ones.

Doesn’t speak much to their utility as critics, unfortunately.