ChainsawAsh

I know, I just threw that under the blanket term "technical problems."

Damn, I keep forgetting to get to work on that cover ...

When it's re-released.  The first release had technical problems and some Director's Edition effects that didn't belong.  I don't recall if FF has announced when it will be back out or not.

Damn, That's an old list ...

skyjedi2005 said:

WTF?

Those Look like Prequel posters but with the original characters. 

Uh ... that was the point.

Oooh, good one - I hadn't thought of that before.

Janskeet said:

Sorry but I think Lawrence of Arabia is extremely boring. It has good cinematography though. I popped the DVD in one night and watched it for like an hour and a half because I couldn't really care less where the story was going and itg was boring me to death. ATown8814, your list it pretty much the same moviesI had in mind except I don't desire to see the Godfather, again, too boring. 

By the way, since the only time I've ever seen Lawrence is in a theater in 70mm, I have no idea how anyone could ever watch it on a small screen - I just feel it would lose all its spectacle.  At least watch it on Blu-Ray (when it comes out) on the biggest screen/projector you can possibly find.

And how can you think The Godfather is boring?  Ghuh ...

- Lawrence of Arabia in 70mm - done, saw it at the Music Box Theatre in Chicago and it blew my fucking mind
- 2001: A Space Odyssey in 70mm
- Star Wars - the 1977 version, pre-ANH, with the mono mix
- Alien
- Blade Runner - also done, saw the Final Cut at the Music Box Theatre as well
- The Godfather and The Godfather Part II - double-bill is optional (sadly missed my chance for this one last year)
- Back to the Future
- Seven Samurai
- The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly on the biggest fucking screen possible
- How the West was Won in Cinerama (just because it's Cinerama - I don't even really like the movie all that much)

There's my ten.  Not in any particular order.  I also reserve the right to replace any of these with something else if I think of a better one later on.

That would be for theaters.  DTS, Dolby Digital and SDDS are digital sound formats and (while I'm not sure if this is how they still do it) at the time of the SE's they were delivered to the theater with the prints on CD's.  The Dolby Digital mix was used for the laserdiscs.

That would actually be a very interesting thing to pick up - I don't have the money at the moment, but if someone else would be willing to get these, we might be able to figure out a way to get the files off of them and sync them to the SE, which would provide much higher fidelity (I believe) than the laserdisc audio could.

That's an old image, and those were placeholders - it's fucking hard to find TMP pictures online.  But thanks to several members of this thread, I've got plenty of TMP images.

When I get back from work later, I'll post an updated version of the cover.

Alright, I've hit a bit of a roadblock.

The scene with the stormtroopers and dewbacks searching the desert ... well ... I hate it.  I've always hated the added SE shots of the scene, so I'm trying to cut them out.  I don't mind the added dewback in the shot that was always there since 1977, but I hate the two new shots.

The problem is, the shot that's been there since 1977 is shortened a lot in the SE.  So I'm stuck with either using at least one of the new SE shots, or (gasp!) switching to GOUT video for that shot.  And as many here know, that shot is one of the worst on the GOUT (four-eyed stormptrooper, anyone?) ... so I really don't want to do that.

If anyone has any suggestions regarding this shot, that would be great :-)

God, I hope not ... is the awful edge enhancement at least not present in the HD broadcast?  I can live with for the color correction and theatrical cut, but it'd be real nice to be able to watch TPM without it for once.

More than ten, and in no particular order:

There Will Be Blood
The Dark Knight
WALL-E
City of God (Brazil)
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
The Wrestler
Pan's Labyrinth (Spain)
Kingdom of Heaven (Director's Cut; the theatrical version is a hunk of shit)
Downfall (Germany)
Children of Men
Untitled (the Director's Cut of Almost Famous)
Into the Wild
The Lives of Others (Germany)
Let the Right One In (Sweden)

--edit--

Added one:

Kiss Kiss Bang Bang

Well, now I feel like an idiot.  I did exactly what you suggested, and I'm now converting (via HandBrake) the AVCHD to a 10GB (at 11,424 kbps bitrate, no audio) h.264 mp4 file, size 720x480 with no cropping - I figure that's probably the best way to get it to the resolution I need without losing any quality (since HandBrake can't output lossless), though I may lose *some* quality simply due to the downconversion to SD.  At any rate, I'll see how it looks when it gets done encoding.  I have to go to work in a half hour (3-hour shift ... I'd better make damn good tips for such a short time on the clock), and it says it'll take about 3 hours, so I should know by the time I get back from work.

--edit--

Damn, first I get sent home from work an hour early, then I get home and HandBrake says it's got another hour and 35 minutes to go.  Lame.

Bingowings said:

By slug tummies I direct you compare the upper curve of the small Ss with the lower curve. The upper curves are perfectly rounded but the lower curves have more of a point to them (all be it smoothed but still more angular than rounded). The P in Empire has a very strange droop to the curve to (compare it to the R and you will see what I mean).

These will stay the same, as they are present in the original logo for The Empire Strikes Back from 1979/1980, which I'm trying to replicate exactly.  For the logo on the first page, I used the Astro font (Lucasfilm's official Star Wars font) and based the logo around the 1997 SE logo.  For this one, I used an EPS of the original '79/'80 logo, and I've compared the two extensively (even overlaid the EPS on top of the actual logo on the poster) and they're 100% identical.

Bingowings said:

Look at the curve of the C in Back, can you see how the diagonal of the A makes the already off curve seem to bend up?

Also present in the original logo and will not be changed.

Bingowings said:

Kerning adjustments will help tweak the spacing between some of the letter forms too and help you avoid the crunching together thats very obvious in the ESB title it will also help prevent the clashing of close fitting uprights (like the vertical lines where the T in Strikes almost collide into the S and the R creating the illusion of a double width)

This I can do - I'll do my best to tweak the kerning so there aren't any "double-width" lines without compromising the look of the original logo.

Bingowings said:

Be warned it's really labour intensive work which is why some of the faults do (as you point out) turn up on official materials like posters because designers often can not arsed to do it right or don't think their audience will notice. Part of the problem is that the SE title designs were created to be seen with outlines filled in so the spaces between the letters were given more definition. Bear that in mind when you making outline only versions. In effect you are creating a totally new design because removing the coloured in sections you can no longer rely on them to iron out any clashes in the positoning of the letters.

Oh, I've discovered how labor intensive it can be.  It's not fun stuff.

However, while some of these peculiarities in the ESB logo that you've pointed out may be due to laziness on the part of the original designer, they've been that way since 1979 and (to me, anyway) are as much a part of the "look" of the logo as anything else.  "Fixing" the strange slope on the "P" in "Empire" and the weird "C" in "Back" would be just as bad, to me, as disconnecting the "ST" and "RS" in the Star Wars logo.

And the only one that's based on an SE design is Jedi, and I think that one turned out fairly successfully - one change I did make was to extend it vertically so the distance between the top and bottom of the logo (not counting the bottom of the "J") is the same as that of the SW and ESB logos.  There is something funky about the bottom of the "J," but I've got a very long time to work out the kinks in that one.

Bingowings said:

Best of luck because this sort of work looks so easy until you actually try doing it and you have already done a much better job than many I've seen.

Thank you, that means a lot coming from someone who very clearly knows quite a bit about this stuff!  I think these new ones are a huge improvement over the ones I did back in February.

Sumguy21 said:

I'd remove the curved edges.

Also, take a look at places where two stroked edges almost meet, such as the "H" and "E" in the word "THE" for the RotJ and STR in "STRIKES." They look a bit awkward, I'd consider moving them apart just a bit so they don't look like they flow into eachother so much. This also goes for the "A" and the "C" in "BACK." 

Also take a look at the "E" in "THE" for ESB. I would remove the indentations for the "E" where the stroke tries to fill in the gaps in the letter.

The curved edges will be removed - I decided that last night after attempting (unsuccessfully) to animate the opening crawl for Star Wars and was quite unhappy with the way the rounded edges looked.

As I said above, I'll be working on the kerning to get rid of the "double" lines where letters are too close together.

Now as for the "E" in the ESB logo ... I can try making the "forks" of the E a little thinner so the outlines don't touch, but I'm not making any promises with that one.  I'll see what I can do.  I'm hoping it doesn't result in the need to make the "THE" (and thus the top bar of the "E" in Empire) bigger, but I'll see if I can improve it.

Now, one last thing - how's the yellow color on the logos?  While animating the crawl (attempting to, anyway), I noticed that my yellow was a lot more yellow than the GOUT's logo (which is actually kind of greenish-yellow).  And then I noticed while editing later that Adywan's ANH:R crawl was a lot less yellow than the GOUT's crawl - his was a bit more orange.

So any opinions on the color of the crawl/logo?  (I'm still toying with the idea of blue for ESB and red for ROTJ, but as I'm working on SW for the moment I'm just asking about the yellow/orange style)

Oh, and a quick update, I'm now about 14 minutes into the film.  So far I've had to speed up 4 Revisited shots by a few frames to match the GOUT - the first can be seen in the 7.5-minute WIP clip on YouTube, it's where Ady removed the jump cut when the door Threepio and Artoo walk through explodes (six frames missing due to jump cut removal), the second and third were the first two wipes in the movie (around ten frames or so missing from each during the wipes - not sure if this is a Revisited thing or an SE thing), and the third was a shot of Threepio in the desert that was missing one frame.  None of these are noticeable - the audio sync of the mono mix during the jump-cut-door-explosion fix is a little off, but no one's said anything about it in regards to the YouTube video, so unless there are major objections to this method, I'll probably be keeping these sped-up shots.

And I've also decided that I'm replacing Ady's new canyon establishing shot with the SE version, as the only reason to keep the Revisited version would be for continuity with Episode II, which is completely useless with these edits as the prequels don't exist for their purposes.

I have to (more or less) agree with Bingowings here.  The book is absolutely fantastic, and could easily be adapted into a 2 and a half hour film with almost nothing cut out.  And the love story in the film is complete and utter bullshit.

But I can respect the film for what it is - it's bizarre and convoluted, but that's part of its charm.  It's an entertaining flick, and Gary Oldman is amazing as always, but to me it will never be "Bram Stoker's" Dracula ... just another sub-par adaptation of a far superior book.

Janskeet said:

No don't forgive Lucas, I will only forgive him if in the DVDs he says he appoligizes to us fans for the way he has treated us over the past 13 years and takes a gun and shoots himself in the foot to pay for what he has done. Only then will I forgive him.  

Jesus, dude ... a little much, maybe?

The problem isn't that it's "considered sub-standard now," it's that, compared to 35mm film, it was sub-standard then, too.

But it doesn't really matter since the vast majority of ROTS was CG anyway - the maximum resolution of that film, even if it were shot on 35mm, would have been limited by the resolution of the CG shots - and I don't think there's a shot in that film that doesn't have at least some CG in it.

No, when I try to open the ISO in Handbrake it says "No valid source found."  Do I need to go into the folders?  If so, what folders do I use?  I don't know BD file structure at all.

Ady, I sent you a PM - I figured I'd let you know here since I'm sure you get a shit-ton of PM's every day, and you might not look through them all.  It's about the opening crawls for my "Trilogy" set.

The "Jedi" logo was the only one that I created from scratch (using the Astro font, based on the logo on the SE poster).  Empire is an EPS file I downloaded a while ago that's 100% identical to the vintage poster (I perspective-corrected it and removed the "Star Wars" and surrounding circle-thing).  "Star Wars" is another EPS I downloaded, but haven't checked to see if there's anything specifically wrong with it.

What do you mean by "slug tummies" exactly?

The reason I'm asking is that I don't want someone to download this, watch the beginning, and then notice something wrong about the opening logo.  To me, something like that can ruin the viewing experience of any fanedit.  I don't want to have an "Eh, it's good enough" attitude for this project - I want it to be as perfect as I can make it.

If you (or anyone else) have any suggestions for how to improve the logos, please let me know!

Oh, and I did notice a problem with the first "S" in Star Wars that will be fixed.

Octorox said:

I think your going to have to work from the AVCHD rather than the GOUT for those extra frames. The GOUT frames stick out too much. You could use the AVCHD for everything you want to put back that's in the SE but not Revisited and the GOUT for everything that's only in the OOT

That's exactly what I was planning to do, but the problem is that I can't do anything with the AVCHD disc - it's sitting on my hard drive taking up space.  If you know of a way to convert it to a usable format on a Mac, please let me know!

And yeah, I know the GOUT video stands out way too much - at the moment it's just a placeholder.  I'll most likely end up replacing the entire shot if a few frames are missing from Revisited, since even adding the individual frames back in will cause issues (I'm mainly thinking of the repainted Revisited lasers versus the non-repainted AVCHD ones).

I take it you didn't notice the sped-up shot?  Excellent ... *insert Mr. Burns hand gesture*

And DJ, I don't need any specific shots at the moment - honestly, I won't know what portions of your cleaned-up GOUT I'm going to need until I've finished the rough assembly.  At the moment, I think the main things I'll need are Mos Eisley, the establishing shot of Ben's hut, the establishing shot of Artoo in the valley (I may keep the Revisited version, though), the Alderaan explosion ...

If you want to just PM me your address, I'll send you the three dual-layer discs so you can send me the full versions of all three, since I really won't know what I'll need until I get to the point when I need it.

The education version is $300, and I'm a student.  I took advantage of that as soon as I found out about it.

Only problem is, now 3.5 is out, and I'm stuck with 3.0 (actually 3.1.3 now, since they *do* still give you software updates) since you can't upgrade the education version no matter what.  The "real" version, you have to pay a couple hundred to upgrade, but at least you *can* upgrade it.

Anyway, I'm getting to work on the crawl now.  I figured out a way to do the opening logo that works much better than the one I was using before - here are the new ones:

There's just one problem.

As I'm sure many of you noticed, the edges of these logos are rounded.  It's subtle (much more subtle than using the contract selection tool, let me tell you), but it's there, and it shouldn't be.  Part of why I'm re-doing Star Wars' crawl is for consistency in this regard.

Now, it's possible to remove the rounded edges, but it would be so incredibly time consuming that I don't think it's worth it.  So I put it to everyone here - do you think the rounded edges are distracting, or am I making an unnecessarily big deal out of this?

pupil said:

I made an x264 of each of the OT films using g-force's script with the GOUT, and this discussion of different pre-synced audio mixes made me think I would love to mux these into the my OT mkvs so I could choose between the different audio mixes available. We have the Laserdisc PCMs, someone's upconverted 5.1 mix and also M0th3r's mono mix of ANH. Is that all of the alternate mixes available/worth getting hold of which sync with the GOUT?

Would anyone like to upload all of these mixes (and/or any others worth getting) to a torrent site somewhere? I'd love to have them to sync to my x264 video encodes.

Thanks

These are all the mixes for ANH:

- 1977 Theatrical Mono (available through the Restored Mono Mix Project, my personal preferred mix)
- 1977 Theatrical Stereo (floating around; I have it)
- 1977 Six-Track Surround (4.2 mix shown at 70mm screenings; in-theater bootleg is available, but the mix itself is not, sadly)
- 1985 Stereo Remix (laserdisc/home video mix based on theatrical stereo.  It's floating around; I have it, but my copy is taken from the laserdiscs and isn't synchronized to the GOUT)
- 1993 Stereo Remix (laserdisc/home video mix based on 4.2 surround mix; available in heavily-compressed form on the GOUT, but uncompressed PCM copies are available from the LD's)

ESB:

- 1980 Theatrical Stereo (apparently available on laserdisc; I think Darth Mallwalker's working on making this available)
- 1980 Six-Track Surround (4.2 mix shown at 70mm screenings; sadly not available at all)
- 1985 Stereo Remix (laserdisc/home video mix based on theatrical stereo; I have no idea if anyone has this mix or not)
- 1993 Stereo Remix (laserdisc/home video mix supposedly based on 4.2 surround mix; missing a snowspeeder crash sound effect; available in heavily-compressed form on the GOUT, but uncompressed PCM copies are available from the LD's)

ROTJ:

- 1983 Theatrical Stereo (no idea if/where this is available)
- 1983 Six-Track Surround (4.2 mix shown at 70mm screenings; sadly not available at all)
- 1985 Stereo Remix (no idea if this even exists for ROTJ)
- 1993 Stereo Remix (laserdisc/home video mix that may actually just be the theatrical stereo mix; available in heavily-compressed form on the GOUT, but uncompressed PCM copies are available from the LD's)

That's what I know about the audio mixes.  I really wish more of them were available (especially the surround mixes).

I've just posted a new clip - it's the first 7 and a half minutes of the film as it exists now.

It's not done - there are sections where Ady's Revisited is missing frames or shots because of his re-edit of the Tantive battle.  For now, these have been replaced with GOUT video.  The audio is the 1977 mono mix.

There's also one shot that's been sped up just slightly - I mention this because I wanted to keep something Ady did to the shot, but there were a few frames missing at the end of the shot, and there's no way for me to rebuild the audio without jumping from the mono mix to Ady's mix very abruptly.  I think the speed-up is tasteful and not noticeable, but I want to know if any of you can spot it.  If anyone sees a shot they think is sped up in this clip, please tell me - you'll get a prize!

Oh, and the opening crawl is a GOUT placeholder - you can easily see where I switch from GOUT to Revisited just after the crawl.

--CLIP REMOVED - TO BE REPOSTED--

Possessed said:

Damn marijuana... 

I've made my fair share of mistakes on this forum for that very reason.  No worries.  :-)