Dat_SW_Guy

Vladius said:

I get that you’re not going to change it and I understand your reasoning, but I have to wonder if we even watched the same movies, if you think that there aren’t parts that are creepy or at the very least mysterious in Star Wars. Obviously the overall tone of all the movies put together is heroic and adventurous, but there are lots of parts that stand out as weird or eerie. The jawas themselves aren’t that freaky, but the inside of the sandcrawler with all the strange droids and the music weirded me out as a kid.

Well I guess you’re right, because I kind-of generalized the statement. But yeah I think I might have a go at it again as I’m still going through the backlog of shots needed for V1 to release by the end of this year hopefully (unless Adywan releases ANH:RHD out of nowhere) and V2 will just be revisions or adding more things to the film.

Vladius said:

I think it should be kind of creepy and mysterious given they’re about to get ambushed by jawas and put in the dark room with all the weird droids.

I get the point that it’s meant to be mysterious, however Jawas aren’t all that creepy in the way they’re portrayed in the film and I found the clouds to be inconsistent with the rest of the shots, with the other two mattes being starry.

It’s a bit unnecessarily creepy for my tastes, as Star Wars isn’t creepy, and I’m mimicking Adywan’s approach to this scene, except he added the binary suns in the background which I try to avoid to save the reveal for later during the Binary Sunset scene.

Another day another shot: I replaced the sky of the R2 canyon shot as I found the original SE version to be too creepy and mysterious especially with the black clouds. Instead, I decided on a more awe-inspiring look, to make it look more bright orange and blue, reflecting the other two matte shots I did, so they are chronologically consistent, with each matte showing how the suns are quickly setting over time and making the sky bluer and bluer.

It’s meant to be a little bit blurry as it’s in the background and out of focus in comparison to the foreground element.

This is a shot that I’ve always hated, which is the Sandcrawler at night panning shot, because this shot has been messed with in the SE and we don’t really have any high quality sources for this because in 4K77, this is a heavily optically printed shot, along with Look Sir Droids, and the even worse Sandcrawler cresting over Tatooine at day static shot. The SE version featured a more consistent starry sky, but decided to add a horrendous power window in the upper portions of the image and on the shadow side of the sandcrawler, essentially crushing all of the blacks to make it look less like a “day-for-night” shot which was how it was filmed in the first place.

I basically overlaid D+77 over the SE shot using a Lighten blend mode with 50 opacity, then I had to camera track and add in a new sky because I didn’t like both the theatrical and SE versions of the sky, as they both are terrible quality. I then preceeded to match the OOT timing of the Look Sir Droids scene.

https://streamable.com/bewxwh

Here’s an update: I updated the Jawa sandcrawler matte to have a more realistic, yet arguably more expansive shot of the sky that somehow looks more 70s/90s than the SE version.

Yeah, they duplicated Luke’s X-Wing throughout all the CGI Yavin sequences which are sort of obvious but would be incredibly hard to composite unless I had to go in and manually 3D camera track and put 3D models of the correct X-Wing patterns and droids.

It’ll be 1080p only.

Another one of the sneak peeks; with the help of Adywan sending me some of the raw files a few years ago, I finally was able to remove Yavin 4 in this shot, fixing the continuity error of the planet being in the line of range of the Death Star, and even added some OOT X-Wings in the distance as a neat homage to the original shot! I’ve been going pretty quick totalling atleast one shot every 2-3 days so this is a crazy pace for me.

True, but having slightly glowing red rectangles looks a bit inconsistent next to the already glowing lightsabers if they’re both intended to be glowing plasma in different use cases, so I had to make the cores white to match what they would’ve looked like.

You can’t really remove the flash frames because they were actual light flashes that happen into the shot and into the subjects, and I find them to be more lively anyway if done well. The detention shootout scene I believe was meant to feel disorienting and chaotic by design so I hope that was conveyed well enough.

I’m currently working on an experiment to add in accurate light flashes and recompositing the laser blasts during the Detention Shootout scene using AI-powered depth maps to relight the scene. For the laser blasts, I tried to add some realistic glow and motion blur so they looked a bit more physically accurate and less stylized. For the light flashes I added it’s subtle in motion because you only see them for a frame or two.

Here’s an example image:

Here’s a clip in motion:
https://streamable.com/qhyzl8

Thoughts and opinions are very needed and encouraged.

That’s an interesting idea, and I think it would be cool to have no CG anything except for the miniature sets, however it now makes the most CG part of the whole sequence the Speeder itself, which kind-of gives it away as a bad CG model, so there has to be a balance between what to keep and to remove.

I always found the Mos Eisley sequence so difficult to balance because the original 1977 footage is so underwhelming and the 1997 SE footage so in-your-face that I find it hard to strike the perfect medium between the two that still incorporates some of the elements of both to make Mos Eisley both being a backwater port and also expansive like in the wide shots.

I don’t really find alot of them intrusive unless it’s very in your face since it somewhat conditions you to help with the CGI later in the film during the Battle of Yavin.

Octorox said:

Nice! I always wondered if it would be possible to just remove the rats completely from that shot, but the way they overlap with the speeder probably makes it too difficult.

I only kept two womprats in, as in the following sequence (the SE shot of the Speeder in the narrow street before they get stopped) there are womprats and I decided it would be kept for continuity and consistency to still see the Womprats in the first shot, but greatly reduced to only 2 so that there still would be life in that scene but not too many Womprats that it would overload the sequence.

Here’s another sneak peek shot: an improved version of the Mos Eisley entrance shot. The 2019 version is so low quality because of the DNR that I didn’t use it at all aside from the Speeder itself and the womprats. The 2011 BD version wasn’t much better because of the messed up color space, so I had to spend days rotoscoping the speeder, adding motion blur and smoke and creating a completely new matte which is a composite of all the sources in order to make things look more realistic and cohesive.

BedeHistory731 said:

You kind of created a second continuity error by not having the black droid in the shot. It’s good work, but it just looks kind of “off” now.

Here is a screencap of the fixed shot with the black domed droid in the background!

The black droid isnt really seen in any of the shots after R5-D4 explodes. But I’ll try to add him I guess.

Heres a new update: fixing the R2-D2 continuity error where R5-D4 pops up behind him after he explodes. Let me know what you guys think!

(The rotoscoping isnt 100% perfect yet, I’ll fix it but heres the shot as a whole)

SomethingStarWarsRelated said:

Those look fantastic. I’m digging the Mos Eisley shot…which makes me wonder: are you keeping the CGI “crane” shot as the speeder moves into the city? I love the idea of that shot but there’s so much I can’t stand about the execution of it. The main complaint is it’s too fast and too polished of a camera move. One should see some imperfections in the movement of the image (slight camera shake, focus pull, etc).

But the reworking you did of Mos Eisley and Bens hut does look really nice. I would love to see more things like this done to the movie. It’s too bad the CGI can’t be redone in the end battle to blend in and look more model like. To me, some of Howard Day’s stuff looks like a really nice blend (even though it’s all done in the computer).
http://www.youtube.com/@HowieDay82

The crane shot of Mos Eisley greatly overexaggerated the size of the location in my opinion, and its so ridiculed with outdated VFX elements meant to fill every frame of the sequence with life that it comes off as quite overstimulating, so while initially I included it, I later decided to cut it out since it looked too much like a 3D render demo reel and doesn’t serve much function to the story aside from helping extend the score a bit.

Even if AI gets to a point that it could retexture all the bad stuff in the shot, it kind-of defeats the cinematography established in 1976 which had a more documentary-style look to it anyway that the miniature SE shots still retained. I just cleaned it up to match the on-set location a bit more since they literally shot it in a fishing port.

Also, I’m hoping for Dr.Dre’s new incredibly powerful algorithm to recolor some shots of the Yavin battle to make the colors and materials feel a bit more like miniatures and less like demo reels, but even then I still find them appropriate for the time anyway. I’m treading a fine line of CGI and 70s elements to ensure they all line up pretty well.

Tobar said:

I’m really fascinated by that last one. Could you go into how you accomplished it and why?

You mean the Ben Hut matte? To be fair I did use a little bit of AI to assist me in recompositing the matte, as I found the original matte while serviceable, the rocks in the foreground look wayy too sharpened and had a painterly feel which may work since Star Wars is quite a painterly movie, I wanted it to lean a bit more towards realism to match continuity with the shots before and after it.

G&G-Fan said:

Have you considered adding the original hyperspace effect briefly seen when the Falcon arrives on Alderaan to the Falcon interior after the DS escape rather then a modern one?

Hmm, I’ll see what I can do.

Anyway I’d like to announce that I’m back and I might a hell of alot of progress within the past 2 weeks than the past year which equates this edit to be around 50% complete more or less, with the goal of finishing the V1 this year! Which is crazy since this has been 6 years in the making, well actually 3 years of actual editing (and big setbacks), while the first 3 years was me growing up and learning how to use compositing and tracking tools.

I’ll try to finish V1 as much as possible within the deadline, and some stuff will be borrowed from the Devastator Edition V2 and ANH:RHD for one shot. Once ANH:RHD releases, I’ll implement more of Adywan’s subtle fixes in the V2 of the project if that ever comes to fruition.

I have basically went through and re-downloaded all my sources again, and went through and adding a whole lot of new, subtle changes that hopefully will make the movie way more cohesive with the right amount of CGI elements that doesn’t detract from the story being told. These changes include the Mos Eisley sequence, Ben’s Hut matte painting, Greedo’s flash frame among other things and fixes that lean this towards Revisited/Devastator territory.

Lastly, I’m thinking of renaming this project so it would roll off the tongue better than DSG Special Edition, a bit of a mouthful, isn’t it? I’d like to hear some suggestions below.

Here’s a sneak peek of what I’ve been working on for the past 2 weeks or so:

Yeah unfortunately this was only rendered in 768p using Hailuo 2, I could render it in 1080p for 10 seconds, but that is for premium users only. However, I’d like to note that it is the best video AI generator aside from the recent news surrounding Google’s Veo 3 video generator that you may have seen floating across the internet.

Also, I don’t know what soundtrack could help in extending that scene, and if I added in those metallic footsteps, it could help to “ground” the scene with the rest of the shots.

Lastly, I would like to ask if there are any alternate versions of scenes in the OT, PT and ST we could use to further push this technology? Im thinking of the extended version of Luke falling into the Millennium Falcon during ESB where Lando had to basically grab him and slide him into the docking pod of the Falcon.

Hello all again! I apologize for not being active as much on the forums, and as of the state of my ANH edit, it’s still in the air as I am still pre-occupied with academic responsibilities, but I will try to get it done this year if I can clear out storage for this laptop.

In the meantime, I have been deeply delving into the uses of AI video generation (such as Kling, Hailuo Minimax, Veo 3) and it’s use for extending or animating deleted or alternate cuts from the OT, such as specifically utilizing AI-image-to-video generations, which as the name suggests, takes an input of an image, then extrapolates from that singular frame to create a cohesive video generation output. I waited until the technology would somewhat mature enough to be mostly consistent, as AI videos do have a tendency to be a bit “janky” for lack of a better term.

I chose a production(?) photo of Luke and Vader walking across the Death Star hangar entering into the throne room from ROTJ, which I presume was cut due to time constraints during the “Black Friday” overhaul of the film in late 1982, as I always wondered how this scene might’ve looked like in motion.

Using a combination of Adobe’s Firefly to extend the edges of the frame to fit a 2:35:1 aspect ratio, and grading it and adding some rough sound FX and score, I’d wager that the output fits right in to the subsequent shot and could, in theory (as this is a proof-of-concept), extend the film to have some breathing room in between shots. I’d love to know some thoughts and inputs to this.

Also, as an addendum, I believe a beta version of Premiere Pro has a feature that does use AI to extend clips so you could theoretically “stretch” them out for as much as 5 seconds. Again, this could be a pretty cool solution to pad out moments in films, such as TROS.

https://vimeo.com/1094729110/b2cfdee0f8?share=copy

Hello guys, thanks for the concern to the update of this project! This has unfortunately been in standstill yet again, as although I now have a very very powerful gaming/editing laptop that I can throw absolutely anything at and can render shots quickly, all of my assets and files from the fan-edit is in my old laptop, which I have yet to extract the data out of and transfer to the new laptop, which will take time and money that I have already depleted buying said new laptop.

I really want to finish this project as it’s been on standstill for about 6 years now (as I started this when I was in the 8th grade!) and atleast not make it a cancelled project and have something out. I know Adywan has gone alot longer with his, but the effort of his work shows as he really took his time with his edits, whereas mine has just been technical limitations and me growing up. This is still a hobby after all!

I hope to release this next year if time and money permits this (I’m currently in college), and if I don’t have to re-do all my edited shots again.

Hopefully I get to do way crazier projects than this, possibly doing film restoration, or doing another fan-edit from SW, who knows honestly lol!

To answer your questions:

@TGWNN: Yeah, I was not sure what I was saying when I wrote that as that was many months ago, and I will just consider using Hal9000’s edit anyway, as most of the SE changes are still jarring whether we like it or not, so atleast we can strike a balance (or walk the line) in the middle where it still doesnt stick out TOO much for it to be a problem, while still making it a cohesive experience to watch.

@G&G-Fan: I dont know where the original files for the preview videos went, and Streamable seems to have taken down the videos, and as I have mentioned earlier, I don’t really have access to the original files yet, so I’m awaiting that before I can make any tangible process of directly finishing this project.

As convenient as this is, just as I left this site and went on to YouTube, a new video by the Corridor Crew tackled this exact technology and used it to basically make movie characters explain their sequels.

The workflow was mainly using ComfyUI, with ElevenLabs AI for the voice cloning, and the results look pretty good if I say so myself.

https://youtu.be/PrPY_USgngg

I can genuinely see this as a potential to swap lines out from a character, like in TROS, to probably make Leia have more speaking roles, or something like that.