DrDre

sade1212 said:

Re: Rey’s ‘power level’: I think a lot of the disagreement comes from a difference in understanding of how the Force is supposed to work. A lot of Yoda’s teaching in ESB - ‘size matters not’/‘only different in your mind’, ‘do or do not, there is no try’, telling Luke ‘that is why you fail’ in response to his disbelief over the X-wing being lifted out of the water - suggests to me at least it’s more of a binary thing than a linear power scale. Yoda wasn’t entirely just screwing with Luke, right, he really did think it could’ve been possible for him to lift the X-wing himself after what is, in the most generous interpretation of ESB, absolutely no more than a month of training, so long as he truly believed he could do it. After all, that’s how Luke wins in the first movie: he’s had less than an hour or so of training by Yavin, but the whole idea of the climax is that just by truly letting go and putting absolute faith in the Force, he lands the shot. Not because he’s spent six years training in the specific technique of Force-Enhanced Torpedo Accuracy.

Yes, but this argumentation ignores the fact there is some four years between ANH and ROTJ. In ANH Obi-Wan teaches Luke some basic stuff about the Force. By TESB Luke appears to have continued honing his skills over the years between the first two films, but it is unclear if Obi-Wan continued guiding Luke as he did in the final act of ANH. In any case three years have passed and Luke is able to grab his lightsaber with the Force with some difficulty under duress. Luke goes to train with Yoda for some undefined period of time, and subsequently gets his *** handed to him by Vader. Another year of honing his skills sees Luke reaching his potential in ROTJ.

Now let’s look at Rey’s journey, which sees her being pretty much on par with Kylo Ren by the end of TLJ, lifting tons of boulders, over a time frame that seems to be just a few days. There’s no guidance or training apart from a few lessons from Luke, who was intent on teaching Rey about the failings of the Jedi. When I see Rey’s development I’m reminded of a scene in My Cousin Vinny:

"Vinny: [Walks over to Jury, as he prepares his next question] So, Mr. Tipton. How could it take you five minutes to cook your grits, when it takes the entire grit-eating world twenty minutes?

Tipton: [nervously] I dunno. I’m a fast cook, I guess.

Vinny: I’m sorry, I was all the way over here. I couldn’t hear you. Did you just say you’re a fast cook? That’s it!? Are we to believe that boiling water soaks into a grit… faster in your kitchen… than on any place on the face of the Earth?
Tipton: [faltering] I don’t know.
Vinny: Well, perhaps the laws of physics cease to exist on your stove! Were these magic grits? I mean, did you buy them from the same guy who sold Jack his beanstalk beans!?"

The ST treated the Force like super powers. Once Rey realized she was Force sensitive, poof! she was an instant Jedi and able to pretty much effortlessly access powers others struggled with for years.

Try making a collage of test frames and reference frames.

framemaster said:

Thanks to Dr Dre for this great tool.
I have several questions:

• In your projects, do you apply only one LUT on the film? Or do you use a LUT for each scene ?
  If you do it for each scene, it must take you a long time (crop a reference image, and start the process for each scene)

Sometimes the results are not accurate on small areas, if I want to fix that I figured I had to do this:
-Relaunch the process, with in test image, the LUT applied (to generate a second LUT on top).
Is this the correct method?

Whether you apply a LUT for the whole film or on a scene by scene or even shot by shot basis is up to your taste and the goal of the project. Some films can be improved with one single LUT, while others will need further adjustment for specific scenes and/or shots.

You can only use a LUT on top if the previous resulting image is used as the new test image.

Agree with everyone here. The Mandoverse has sunk at an alarming rate. The first two seasons were not a masterclass in writing, but it had a very clear throughline, with clearly defined characters, who had an arc. The lone gunman approach served the first two seasons very well. Then came TBOBF, which was surprisingly bad. The only highlights were the Mando episodes, which gave the impression, that TBOBF was just a placeholder for the main event, the third season of Mando. The fact that they undid the story of the first two seasons in a spin-off show was of course a big red flag. Sadly, this new season is every bit as aimless as TBOBF. Like Boba Fett Din Jarin is a side character in his own show. I don’t know why they brought back Grogu, because he’s little more than a prop now. After the writing masterclass that is Andor, the drop in the quality of the writing of this show is all the more jarring.

I don’t know, if I will be watching much more of this season. Mando was never a series with great writing, but I thought the lone gunman approach for S01 was effective, for S02 it still worked although the memberberries became pretty intrusive, but ever since TBOBF the entire Mandoverse feels like a directionless mess with questionable writing. Like Boba Fett in his own show, the Mandalorians act like morons. Given that they’ve been in this situation before, you’d expect someone to be on the lookout for (flying) monsters, and why would you use your jetpacks for a chase knowing full well you don’t have enough fuel to continue the pursuit? Are Din Jarin and Bo the only Mandalorians with space ships? Why did they wait for a day to rescue the kid? Did the monster of the week have him in his mouth all that time just waiting for the moment the Mandalorians arrive? Why was the kid so clean coming out of that thing’s mouth? I have a bad feeling about this…

Wuschel said:

This is amazing! Are you planning to offer this as a fully authored BD/UHD BD with all available audio tracks (including the new Atmos tracks) that can be added to the original BD/UHD BD sets?

The 1080p version was bluray compatable, but sadly that version has been lost due to a mistake in syncing the files. The UHD version is an mkv file. If someone wants to create an authored UHD BD from it, they’re welcome to it, as long as it’s not being commercially sold.

Williarob compiled the tool for Mac with my support as a favour to some users, but there’s no long term support for Mac outside of what people like Williarob are willing to do. I don’t have a Mac, sadly, so I can’t be of help.

Ronster said:

DrDre said:

I’m oke with the new HDR grades. They look fine to me, but I prefer the original look for all three films.

Ok but what about the sudden swap from Day to Night?

We see the big tree roots at the base “Daytime” when pan up the bigature model of the winding stairs around the trunk it’s night.

How about grading the first shot as night for continuity?

This feels a quite choppy otherwise…

That’s beyond the scope of this project. The aim is to get the colors close to how they looked originally. In any case the sun goes down pretty quickly in countries closer to the equator. I was in Spain a while ago, and it was light when I entered a building, and dark by the time I exited the elevator on the 12th floor. They were walking pretty slowly, so if it was sunset at the time they reached the tree, it would be dark by the time they reached the top.

That’s annoying. I have W11 and it still works fine.

I’m oke with the new HDR grades. They look fine to me, but I prefer the original look for all three films.

Rec709, since it is based on a Rec709 source.

Personally, I would be happy to see Disney finally moving away from the legacy characters. The first season was quite effective in its lone gunman approach, although even that season had its filler episodes of varrying quality. The second season had way too much fan service for my taste, but generally the season was entertaining enough. Like many here I felt TBOBF completely removed the stakes by undoing the conclusion of the last season. This in my view was made worse by the fact that this show doesn’t have much story to begin with. The entire second season hinged on little more than Mando finding a Jedi, such that Grogu can get back to his kind. Putting Grogu back in the mix in two episodes of TBOBF felt cheap and pandering. Now IG-11 will be resurrected lowering the stakes even further. I think The Mandalorian had potential, but it would have been better if they had moved on from the character after season 2. Either that or hire a great team of writers to really flesh out the characters and a story for multiple seasons.

I watched the episode, and it felt very formulaic to me. It wasn’t terrible, but the writing is just so mediocre and it’s still a video game plot. After Andor showed what real character development and world building looks like, Mando’s characters are very two dimensional. There’s very little going on beneath the surface. Just one example of what bugs me about this episode and the creators’ approach to this series without going into spoilers:

Mando goes to visit a character from the past. He enters the person’s HQ. The HQ is totally deserted and the person is sitting in a chair. The person spouts some exposition and off Mando goes. The person just seems to be sitting there waiting for Mando to arrive for the person to do their thing to move the plot. It reminds me of those conquest games, where the screen is black in the area where the characters haven’t been yet. There’s nothing there until the characters need something.

It’s done. Send me a PM.

I watched the video a while ago, and thought is was pretty moronic, and clearly created with an agenda. In other words it is biased as hell. Anyone that can’t distuinguish between altering a sound mix around the time of release, and adding in CGI effects decades after the fact, I’m not going to take too seriously. I personally believe it is actually not that cheap to recreate the OOT. The negative is conformed to the SE, and the original pieces of negative as well as the original elements that were replaced are likely in pretty bad shape. So, I would say restoring the OOT would likely be similar to the Coppola restorations of the Godfather trilogy. It would be a restoration based on many different sources of varying quality and would require a wealth of expertise including the people involved with the creation of the originals to get it right. I also don’t believe releasing the OOT would be hugely profitable. The market for physical releases has shrunk considerably, becoming a niche market for videophiles, and the group of people that grew up on the OOT are going the way of the dodo. So, the main motivation of restoring the OOT is to preserve the original 70s and 80s film experience for posterity. These films in their original form were hugely influential, and it’s a shame, that it can no longer be seen in the best quality warts and all.

Servii said:

That guy with no name said:

Servii said:

What’d be more interesting would be asking an AI to write a sequel to Rogue One, and seeing what story it’d come up with.

https://shareg.pt/wuZDfWH

Not bad.

Too bad it doesn’t realize all the characters are dead.

ken-obi said:

Stardust1138 said:

ken-obi said:

Interviewer: “Sorry, I mean like the… the vision of George’s final cut of the film that he left us with? Like whether that might be altered over time?”

Kathleen Kennedy: “You mean the themes and ideas in the six movies he has made?”

Interviewer: “Just the Edits… he has changed over time… like the Special Editions and that sort of thing…”

Kathleen Kennedy: “Oh! I haven’t touched those. (laughs) You kidding? Those will always remain his.”

It’s good to see full context after like you said a clickbait website misrepresented what was said to an extent but this part of the exchange I quoted I find is key to the whole discussion as the interviewer asked about the edits and clarified for her to give an answer. Like she said she hasn’t touched them as they remain George’s and they’ll always remain his. This I think alludes to changing them back to the unaltered state. I wouldn’t put it pass them after the whole Sequel Trilogy fiasco and adding part of the Holiday Special to Disney+ but I don’t think it will happen either. If anything not mentioning Jason Wingreen in their Boba Fett special proves they have no intentions to release them.

Again:

ken-obi said:

Kennedy said she wouldn’t make more changes to the films, and nothing at all about the unaltered theatrical versions.

 

Stardust1138 said:

She gave her answer in an interview at Celebration 2017.

So, no. Kennedy did not give her answer to the OP’s question as you claimed.

If you want to now take Kennedy’s comments from that 2017 interview to somehow now be “alluding to changing them back to the unaltered state” then that is up to you, but you likely shouldn’t misinform others like that, especially with the facts at hand.

It depends on how you interpret her words. If she means, that by not having touched those, that any changes to the final cuts of the films are out of the question, even changes to revert the final cuts back to the theatrical cuts, then she did answer the question. It is the fans who insist, that the unaltered versions carry some special kind of reference point status, and any changes should be viewed in relation to that reference point. However, to Lucas his final cuts are the reference point.

I watched both videos, and I can’t stand either of them. One video follows from a trend, which takes the in my view valid criticisms of the prequels, but then uses those criticisms to create a narrative (which gained traction in the 2000s), that the OT was a success in spite of Lucas rather than because of him. The other would treat Lucas’ stool like they are nuggets of gold. My view is quite simple. Lucas was and is a creative genius, who in his early days tended to be more collaborative, and more open to criticism. However, even that Lucas could create a turd, like Howard the Duck. The Lucas that created the prequels initially wanted similar collaborations, but many of the people he approached turned him down, finding the task to create another Star Wars film too daunting. So, he did it himself, rusty has a was. Despite all of its flaws, and the fact that Lucas became too enamoured with the technology, TPM is still the most Star Wars prequel of them all in my view, and clearly a labour of love for Lucas. My theory is, that the wave of criticism, and hate, that followed TPM made Lucas dig in more, and he became more isolated, more controlling, and less receptive to criticism. To him fans demanding changes to the prequels were not much different from studios trying to meddle with his movies, and so that set the stage for Lucas sticking to his guns, and cemented Lucas’ refusal to release the OOT. That’s my theory anyway.

I ran the whole film. I haven’t seen any issues with artifacts from different shots with the latest versions. For the EE I created by own custom combination of upscaling settings, which is now possible in the last two versions, because I want to retain all the film grain in the original source, whilst adding detail and deblurring the frames.

That guy with no name said:

HDR (wich always f***s with film colors), and finally the price: $74:99 (USD).

This is actually not correct. Film is inherently HDR, meaning that film has a much higher dynamic range than what SDR is able to show. Most films benefit significantly from HDR color grading if done right, and aside from the technical superiority (higher dynamic range, and a wider color gamut, which allows for more realistic colors), the colors tend to be closer to what is seen in cinemas.

With regards to Star Wars, while it is definitely not perfect, the HDR color grading is the closest to how the movies looked in cinema’s we’ve had officially. The old laserdiscs looked nothing like film, and the DVD’s and Bluray were clearly intended to be revisionist.

TiredEditingGirl said:

I have a couple questions:

1. If you were to match an HDR source to the color grade of an SDR source, and the intended final product will be rendered in SDR/Rec 709, would it be best to an HDR->SDR conversion before using the color matching tool?

It would be best to first convert the HDR to SDR and then do a color match.

2. When matching a source with little or no film grain to the color grade of a highly grainy source, should you apply noise reduction to the latter source before using the tool, or would that not affect the results either way?

The grain will not affect the results, unless it is chroma noise, but even there the effect will be quite small.

That guy with no name said:

DrDre said:

Hal 9000 said:

I’ll do that. I was erring on the side of more smoothing only because I assumed it mattered how closely the test and reference images were identically aligned.

They should be cropped the same.

If I understand correctly, I could shuffle the pixels of both images into a random order and get the same result.

Exactly this.

Why’ll you’re here Dr, why do sometimes weird colored pixels show up in the highlighted areas and never seem to go away on any settings?

It’s an artifact. If you find an example, please let me know. Usually it can be fixed.

Hal 9000 said:

I’ll do that. I was erring on the side of more smoothing only because I assumed it mattered how closely the test and reference images were identically aligned.

They should be cropped the same.

If I understand correctly, I could shuffle the pixels of both images into a random order and get the same result.

Exactly this.

Hal 9000 said:

It… doesn’t matter if the images are aligned? I assumed the way it worked was to compare each pixel with the pixel at the same address in the other image.

If it doesn’t matter what order the images are in, I guess it shouldn’t matter if the two images are even perfectly aligned. If one were slightly stretched or squished relative to the other… that may not matter?

They should be perfectly aligned, but stretched or squished doesn’t matter, because it does not affect the information in the image. A squished or stretched number four is still a four. A number four that is missing it’s top is not a four. Because the method works with color distributions across the image, the precise location of the colors doesn’t matter, and so the order of the processed images doesn’t matter, but they should have the same content.

Hal 9000 said:

Thank you, that helps me plan how to wrangle them into usable input. Should it matter whether they are stacked horizontally or vertically? It’d be easier and more precise for me to do that than to arrange them into a grid.

No, it doesn’ even matter if the source and reference frames are in the same order. What matters is that the source and reference contain the same color information.