Broom Kid

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.

pat man said:

They did as well for the individual PT and R1. They are releasing daily reviews.

Nice!

Unfortunately I just tried to see the differences between their two Phantom Menace caps but none of them really match up from 2011 to 2020.

Looks like they’re definitely from the included blu-ray, and not the 4K UHD, according to this italicized note in the review proper.

The included screenshots are sourced from the included 1080p Blu-ray disc, which has itself received a fairly drastic makeover compared to the 2011 20th Century Fox release.

So if I’m reading that right, EVERY screencap on that site for that review of Star Wars: A New Hope is taken from the '19 transfer that’s on the blu-ray, and not the UHD.

Hopefully they do that for the rest of the OT and PT, too!

here’s a quick side-by-side using their own screencaps
http://www.framecompare.com/image-compare/screenshotcomparison/9JBBCNNU

Looks like the buy 2 get 1 free deals on the 4K discs started… this weekend. At Target.

I have my moments.

not many of them

Y-Wing.

I’m a Cadillac man.

DominicCobb said:

Writers rooms aren’t committees, arguably movies could stand to implement the practice as well.

Leia Organa isn’t a committee

A writers room can be called a committee to some degree, although I don’t think a “committee” is even necessarily a bad thing. What’s important is who you put on it

To that end, I don’t know that this guy is a good guy to put on it, much less at the head of it, but then again a lot of people probably would have side-eyed the appointing of “The Eyes of Laura Mars” director to the Star Wars sequel back in 1978, too. The Jurassic World guy was seen as a bad pick to head up the 9th Star Wars movie and then it turned out he had a better feel for what it could have been than the guy who made the 7th installment. Committes aren’t inherently bad, but staffing them poorly is.

I do think the last 20 years of television includes some of the best filmmaking period in that that time, and some of the biggest and most substantial achievements in filmed storytelling have happened in that medium, so I agree with Dom that the film industry (in whatever form it eventually assumes once we get through this upcoming recession/depression) could stand to crib heavily from how TV is doing things. It’s hard to argue with results on both a cultural and a storytelling scale like we’ve seen in the past 2 decades.

I don’t want Lucas involved primarily because Lucas’ creative spark essentially died decades ago.

Committee process works just fine for like 90% of TV created in the last 20 years.

I honestly don’t think there’s anything Lucas could add to this story that a bunch of other people couldn’t also. Star Wars isn’t that unique.

That all said: This new hire isn’t sparking any confidence at all. But I’m also not sure this current pandemic isn’t going to radically change a lot of what Disney’s studios have planned for the next couple of years anyway. When this is all over it’s not like anything is going to be the way it was before, economically OR societally.

Your comparison says it’s of the '19 4k UHD disc and the '11 blu-ray, not the '19 blu-ray disc and the '11 blu-ray.

I went through a couple threads at blu-ray.com and there’s more than a few people asking for direct comparisons between the '19 blu-rays to the '11 blu-rays, but the actual comparisons don’t seem to have been posted anywhere as of yet. That’s what I’m looking for.

https://forum.blu-ray.com/showpost.php?p=17497680&postcount=7181

Do you mean this one?

https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/1332909/action/topic#1332909

I saw that, but it’s not comparing the '19 blu-rays and the '11 blu-rays, which is what I’m specifically looking for. I know they’re not the same transfers, so I’m curious to see what (if any) improvements in PQ there are on that format from release-to-release.

Are there any comparisons out there (been looking, can’t find any) that side-by-side these '19 blu-ray tranfers with the '11 transfers. I know most people are primarily interested in dissecting the 4K presentation, but these new 4K discs/set do appear to be the only way to get the new transfers on blu, and I’m very curious to see how these new transfers look on that format, especially compared to 2011’s entry.

DominicCobb said:

Based on those screenshots the prequels look absolutely normal to me. Maybe TPM’s a little waxy but that’s nothing new. Hate me all you want but the OT looks like dirt.

I’m extra curious as to how the blu-ray transfers of the '19 versions looks now, since that’s probably going to be a lot more consistent (and probably a lot more accurate) to how the colors and contrast are supposed to look per-film.

DominicCobb said:

That’s why I’d say an establishing shot of some sort might help.

I agree! I just don’t think there is one available. You’d have to make one up, and that’s a ton of work.

Unless the shot being added to the sequence is an establishing shot, the sequence will never not be broken. The thing that would fix it is an establishing shot, and there isn’t one you can just pull and drop in from somewhere else because of how they edited the final product. You’d have to kitbash one together.

That still looks pretty sunburnt to me.

DominicCobb said:

I think there’s probably a middle ground between that and what the film gave us, where you’re still dropping into the battle with some build up (but not making it a whole sequence).

I don’t know, the primary problem with the Mustafar sequence isn’t so much how frenetic it is, it’s the geography. There’s no shot that shows where you are and where he’s going. Whether that shot comes after he’s bodyslammed someone, or before he starts his rampage - the biggest problem with the sequence is that missing shot showing you where he is and what direction he’s trying to go. Abrams & Co. just cut into the bone trying to save this sequence and I think they fundamentally broke it in the process.

If I had any other film to compare it to, I’d say it’s sort of like how the open of Alien 3 became a disconnected montage that also fundamentally breaks itself as it goes. This is probably worse than that, in that almost none of the Mustafar information being imparted is as necessary as Alien 3’s opening is to its movie.