Darth Editous

Thankfully, they can be easily re-'flipped' for 'consistency' and the 'flow of action' and the look of things won't be adversely affected in any way.  :)

Obviously it depends on the shot you're talking about, but the probable reason they've been flipped in the first place is that someone back in 1980 felt there was good reason to do so. It would have to be a big goof to persuade me to flip a shot (I think I did it once for ANH, and I wish I hadn't), and then only after I'd exhausted other avenues.

DE

Artistic/dramatic licence is an excuse if and only if it doesn't "work" without it. I see no problem with making the arrangement of SDs make physical sense; it doesn't detract from the film.

Would you tell Brian de Palma he shouldn't use split focus because it's not realistic and his shots would work without it? Or (spoiler alert) that the whole of Schlinder's List should have been B&W? ;)

DE

Can you have artistic license in an edit that fixes most of the errors? :D

I'm not sure what you're asking, or whether you think artistic licence is good or bad...

But as an example of artistic licence, there's a bit in The World Is Not Enough where Bond fires at the bad guy, who's standing behind bullet proof glass. There's a huge (relatively speaking) delay between the firing of the shot and impact of the bullet, during which there is a cut so we see the bullet hit, but I find the sequence very effective, and wouldn't remove that delay no matter how glaring an "error" it is.

DE

Can I just say:

"Correct" does not always (or even often, in movies) equate with "good".

This is why, for example, so many shots get flipped in editing, and - in my opinion - should usually stay that way.

DE

Very impressive! Very nice colors. Love it.

I'll have to double check, but apart from the sky the only colour adjustment was an RGB gamma adjustment to/from (I can never remember how it works) 0.71.

I've only skimmed this thread briefly, but I caught sight of some stuff on scaling. FWIW, I would only do any resizing/interpolating to reduce aliasing, then let the TV scale it from there. The upscaled images I saw from either this or g-force's thread looked okay, but I think TVs these days are capable of better (Samsung LEDs are the best upscalers I've seen up close).

If you encode to 1080p, you're stuck with that upscaling, even if you get a better TV.

DE

I've been doing some playing around with AviSynth and the GOUT, and thought I'd post this here in case anyone was interested in the results:

Left: DVD          Middle: filtered GOUT          Right: unaltered GOUT

The geometry of the image and the colour of the sky are down to my own little programs, written specifically for this scene.

DE

I should point out, I stole that joke from somewhere else.

DE

there arnt any holograms in ANH.

Well, apart from that one of Leia, but that only kicks off the events of the rest of the movie ;)

DE

rpvee said:

^There's also when Luke pours the blue milk: He takes a sip, then slowly lowers the cup away from his mouth.  In the next shot, he lowers it again.

I just found the biggest goof in the whole of Star Wars. When Ben and Luke are stopped by the Stormtroopers, Ben says "these aren't the droids you're looking for." But if you look closely, you'll see that they ARE the droids they're looking for! I can't believe no-one spotted this...

DE

(^it's a joke!)

bkev said:

I never thought those images were high-res enough to use as covers! Glad I was wrong.

Huh? Those are just thumbnails though, right? I'd be looking for at least 4x that resolution before printing them out as covers.

DE

According to someone I talked to, the 501st has been asked not to formally support Ady.  Not sure how high up that order came from

Wow. I'm all for quirky hobbies, but some people take these things too seriously...

DE

it's nice to have the snow no longer purple or blue

Here's my beef - daylight is blue. Without direct sunlight, snow/ice (and anything else that is otherwise white) looks blue (so shadows on snow should be blue). Unless Ady's taking the GOUT colours as gospel, that bottom shot just looks too much like a set. Mix the top two shots together and you have something approaching nice, IMO.

DE

Looks great. However you need to watch out for blues turning into purples.

Yes, even the hologram looks purple.  Overall, those are very well done.

Technically, the filter is incapable of turning blues into purples. In can turn cyans into blues, though.

The death star exterior and SDs shouldnt be dead gray?

They're not :) The filter is only capable of turning the purest cyan (equal blue and green) into grey, and even then it's only at 75% in those shots.

I see some Ben's saber color bug ;)

You say bug - and I did put that shot in there as an example of it getting it wrong - but I'm not sure I don't prefer the new colour anyway (maybe at a slightly lower power though).

What will be radical changes in this edit DE? Enhanced mattes only?

Just the one enhanced matte is planned so far (other than the ones that were already fixed in previous versions). Other changes will include more SE removal/GOUT restoration, and some more subtle FX fixes.

DE

New colour correction filter:

Again, it doesn't always produce the nicest result, but it's a lot quicker than my last filter and it turns the Death Star walls to a more realistic blue-grey.

DE

Anyone know exactly how Selective Color in Photoshop works? As in, the mathematics behind it?

Edit: Never mind, I think I figured it out - new and improved colour correction filter coming tomorrow.

And to keep you amused in the meantime: http://xkcd.com/469/

DE

Logicaly if the guns can turn the lasers will hit the trench's walls ;)

Well, by the same logic, WWI gunplanes would have shot their props off, but the boffins thought of that, too...

DE

Angel, that outside shot does look very cool - the only trouble is, if I did it for that shot I'd have to do it for every other damn Death Star exterior shot in the whole movie - and there are a lot of fast moving ones at the end. But I am keeping an eye on the other threads ;)

I think that color correction is absolutely necesarry from the 2004 DVD edition, especially... (blue Yoda does not work. lol) But at the same time, just make sure you don't take out TOO much color. There should be a slight natural tint there, very slight. You know what I mean?

In no case would I ever remove 100% of the saturation - probably never more than 75%, and then only in special circumstances (such as the horribly blue walls when the Stormtroopers break into the hanging bay control room). I find the Pleasantville effect in ANH:R very distracting - somehow there is something very UN-neutral about perfectly neutral grey.

When it comes to ESB and Hoth, I'll probably go for a halfway position between the deep blue DVD and the slightly stark and lifeless GOUT.

DE

I don't have a big problem with the red in those shots per se, but I might mute it just a little - that canister in the corner, for example, and those things in the back of 3PO's cupboard, are a bit garish. It's certainly not something I'll spend any time doing manually, which is what is really needed to completely remove the red from the panels without affecting any lights.

Here's the ESB shot I was talking about:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1TQ11frJ0A

So a certain shot in ANH will hopefully get a similar treatment.

DE

Do you consider to alter,enhance the mattes of this episode as well?

If by "alter" you mean improve, then yes, where I can - there's the tractor beam matte for example. But in most cases it'll be a case of fixing rather than replacing.

I'm going to try adding a 3D effect to one particular shot, as I did for the shot of the "vane" inside the Cloud City shaft.

DE

Another example of a filter which, in my opinion, improves almost every shot it's applied to. This one mutes certain hues (in this case cyan), but hopefully avoids the "Pleasantville" effect which ANH:R suffers from. It was intended to be used only on Death Star interior shots, where the walls fairly glow in some scenes, but I also like the way it tones down Tattooine's sky, making it look a little less idyllic. It doesn't always work (it tones down Ben's lightsabre, for example), and I may yet reduce it's effect (these shots are at 75%), because to be honest it's too simplistic to say that "white" objects should have equal RGB values on screen.

DE

No, he types in pixel values with Notepad!

Seriously though, Angel, those images look great - I'm tempted to do something along those lines when I get around to ESB. It really turns it from a set into a world.

DE

Oh absolutely, this filter is just a first start - while it does seem to improve every shot it's applied to, there are still plenty which show great variation in saturation within a scene. The desert scenes could probably take a little more overall reduction. I also made an error in an early version of the filter which seemed to improve skin tones in some shots, so that needs investigating.

I did try a more complicated process that involved masking out the already bright areas of the picture, but that removed detail.

DE

A simple levels adjustment which also lowers saturation - Artoo goes from green to grey!

DE

It wasn't the crawl I (and ADM, and Adywan) slowed down, but the receding Star/Wars logo before it. I don't know about any changes to crawl speed.

DE

Out of interest, what would you say is the worst part of the 2004 mix? Not the missing fanfare though, because I will be fixing that. I need to compare the best and worst of the mixes before I can decide which to use.

DE