The way I see it red = Dark Side therefore red lightning makes perfect sense, arguably more sense than blue lightning.
So… the lightning used by Palpatine and Dooku in the previous films wasn’t the dark side?
I still feel like connecting Palpatine to the Son raises more questions than it answers…
Definitely agree. Though red doesn’t necessarily directly equate to Son.
I’ve always been a big advocate of Clone Wars nods, but I always found the popular Mortis arc way too on the nose and demistifying.
I like that arc, but trying to pull out those elements and equivocate Palpatine with the Son seems wrong to me. That arc was about balance, and if that balance is being reshaped in the dyad of Rey and Ben both Son and Daughter should be represented. Palpatine isn’t channelling the Daughter, so I don’t understand how taking power from both of them would allow him to channel the Son.
If it isn’t going to be that deep mythologically, then it just feels like a video game power up.
Introducing new powers and power levels in the final episode is tough, as there’s no setup. There’s already too many new powers and abilities here, having Palpatine get a new and unexplained power after Rey and Ben get several new and unexplained powers only makes the film less sensical.
Adding Nightsister magic with green fog is less intrusive, as it could be inferred to be natural (similar to a Malastare) just as much as a callback to the Nightsisters.
I still feel like connecting Palpatine to the Son raises more questions than it answers…
I personally love the red lightning idea- ties into The Son from Clone Wars and provides a nice contrast to the blue of Exegol.
This is the only thing that makes it interesting to me… but with Lightning being blue everywhere else, and the Son not being in Live Action or any of the films, I think it would simply add confusion to an edit where the goal is to remove confusion and fix plot holes.
I don’t see it as something that needs to be explained, we see Palpatine absorb the power of the dyad and then he steps down in new (red) robes with glowing eyes again. I feel like it’s safe to say the audience would understand:
Dyad power-charged Palpatine = Far greater power than ever before = Red lightning color
The red could just be interpreted by the general audience as maximum Dark side power since red usually means Sith, and TCW fans would appreciate the connection to the Son in the Mortis arc.
The dyad is so barely touched upon or explained that this would only draw more attention to how confusing that plot point is. Doubling down on confusing and unexplained elements won’t simply make it somehow easier for general audiences… all it does it make people throw up their hands and say “nothing matters”.
I like the call back, but even with being in that world, it still makes me ask more questions than it answers. The Son is dead, so is Palpatine becoming the new Son? Are Ben and Rey the new Son and Daughter? Who is the new Father? How will they be kept in balance? If Palpatine absorbs both of their powers and can then use the powers of the Son, wouldn’t the power and influence of the Daughter happen too? Did Palpatine’s spirit merge with the spirit of the dead Son when he was without a body? This also makes me more curious if Palpatine was all the Sith in his life, or not until the Spirits commingled after death? Was it the Sith Cultists that brought Palpatine’s and the other Sith’s spirits back into his body? Why did they not give those Sith spirits into one of their own younger/healthier bodies? With Ben’s death, is there a new Son?
As much as it looks cool and is a nice callback, I think changing the colour of Exegol would be a better change for the film.
I personally love the red lightning idea- ties into The Son from Clone Wars and provides a nice contrast to the blue of Exegol.
This is the only thing that makes it interesting to me… but with Lightning being blue everywhere else, and the Son not being in Live Action or any of the films, I think it would simply add confusion to an edit where the goal is to remove confusion and fix plot holes.
Oh, don’t get me wrong, Avid is an amazingly powerful program and I fully understand why it’s the industry standard. Like I said, I feel it’s ideal when you’ve got the original, raw footage to start with, but it’s cumbersome at best when trying to use it for fan-editing purposes.
But I also haven’t touched Avid (or Final Cut) in almost 10 years (since I lost any interest in pursuing an actual post-production career…wish I’d figured that out before I got a full 4-year bachelor’s degree in it), so I couldn’t tell you how much either program has changed. Last time I touched Final Cut was when FCPX was first introduced and both myself and everyone else I knew absolutely HATED it and jumped ship for Premiere pretty much immediately.
Premiere is what I’d recommend first, but a free version of Avid is still pretty great. Still vastly preferable to using FCPX, unless you’re on a bleeding edge new Mac (like, if you buy an Apple Silicon Mac, the FCPX might be your only option… shy of that though…)
I dunno how much has changed in the last decade, but Avid is an entirely different sort of beast as far as the way it expects you to set up your workflow goes. I find it works great if you’re the initial editor and are working from all the raw footage, but it’s difficult to work with from a fan editing perspective; Premiere and FCP are much more fanedit-friendly IMO.
I haven’t tried DaVinci though, so I can’t offer any advice on that one.
Avid is a pain, but it’s also the real deal. There are some under the hood aspects that it will always have an advantage with, but yeah… the others will be easier to use and better suited overal. The free version is designed to be quite a bit easier to use, though the media management aspects are likely to annoy people used to FCP7.
Resolve has some finicky media organisation in the app, and project files moving from machine to machine can be messy, but the editing functionality is very similar to Premiere and FCP7.
FCPX is still effectively in beta. They completely reinvented what they wanted an NLE to be, but there are still so many things it cannot do, not due to a lack of power but rather a lacking GUI. It also is more difficult to be as precise as quickly, due to the shared monitor and tracking with mouse hovers.
I’m an editor, I have used all of them many times for differing projects. Premiere is my favourite, but I use Avid most for work. The more media you have to handle, and the more you work with others, the better Avid is.
Thanks! Well, I’ll hopefully have a chance at some point to work on something just to test it out. I don’t want to pay for a subscription to software, and DaVinci has a free option, so maybe I’ll try that one. I assume it’ll let me export good master files to toss over to Compressor.
While waiting for the new computer stuff to arrive, I’ve been just playing some with FCPX by recreating some audio work I already have done before. The 2011 machine appears to work fine once booted up, but hopefully you’re not in a hurry if it does get shut down.
DaVinci has its own powerful exporting, though it’s built into the same app. The free version of DaVinci is only missing advanced color correction tools, but even the free version has more color correction ability than any normal NLE (as that was the original core function of the app).
Premiere Pro has an analogous app to Compressor called Media Encoder. Premiere Pro has better color correction abilities than FCP (7 or X), and though not as powerful as Reaolve it’s much easier to use.
Avid also has a free version, called Avid Media Composer First
I second the Premiere recommendation, from what I remember of working with FCP7 in film school ten years ago (Jesus…), Premiere functioned very similarly.
Literally the same developers, they moved from Apple to Adobe.
Anyone know this?
In FCP7, if you use the blade to cut a clip, there will appear two red arrows to let you know that the clips are aligned despite the cut.
Does anything correspond to this in FCPX? When I make a cut, there doesn’t seem to be any visual distinction between any two clips I could just smash together.
Should look like a dotted vertical line. It’s been awhile since I’ve used FCPX though.
I highly recommend using Adobe Premiere Pro or Blackmagic DaVinci Resolve, as both function much more similarly to FCP7.
Plus, it’s more than easy to re-add dialogue to a scene that only had visual changes and the character in question is masked.
Hi there. There are nearly 7,000 replies in this thread. I apologize if this has already been addressed however, I’m showing my boyfriend tRoS for the first time, and I would like to him to see the entirety of the theatrical release, with the only alteration being the addition of Jonh’s outstanding Force Ghosts edit. Is this available in high quality anywhere? Just the normal film + force ghosts?
If not, would it be possible to make a quick edit as such? I would be outstandingly grateful.
Thank you so very much and do let me know. michaelrahbar@gmail.com
P.S. Also, one of the commenters above called out and condemned an anti-semitic rant; thank you!
As it’s only a visual change to one scene you desire, it might be better to download that clip and cut it in over your own BluRay rip. It’s kind of a lot to have someone pause their edit to export a big file and transfer it over for you… especially when Hal is having some technical difficulties with his computer to maintain his NLE.
If you wanna message me privately, I can maybe walk you through how to get started on doing this for yourself, getting free editing software, etc.
I would be so down for a 3 hour extended version of The Last Jedi, but maybe that’s just me. If only I knew professional VFX so I could finish all the scenes, just watched the Phasma one and I’m so sad I can’t put it into the movie lol
Same… that Finn vs. Plasma showdown scene has to be one of the most coveted for finishing.
I know you were able to get a new-to-you computer, to be able to continue using FCP7, but if you export an XML, not only would that work with Premiere Pro, which is very similar in functionality and GUI, but it would also work in DaVinci Resolve, which is free. Just putting it out there if you want a faster app that can take advantage of more than 4GB of RAM at a time.
Filoni doesn’t care about the books and other spinoff materials. He still goes by the old canon rules: movies trump TV, which trumps games, which trumps books and comics…
All of these people, Abrams aside, are just focused on telling a good story. They don’t care about the continuity outside of what they’re making. That’s why Ahsoka had blue lightsabers in The Siege of Mandalore, it was about visualising her relationship with Anakin and leaving that behind even though Books has already made her sabers green at that point.
Pablo is the one that works to wrangle everything to make sense together… but sometimes it just doesn’t matter.
I’m kind of iffy about the Caretaker village scene. On the one hand, it’s good to actually get Luke’s third lesson that he talked about earlier, and it gives the Caretakers that were pointless in the original version an actual reason for existing.
But at the same time, it makes Luke feel like even more of a jerk than he did originally. He tells Rey that the big party going on is actually a pirate raid, claims that a true Jedi doesn’t help people in need (which is obviously wrong if you’ve even seen a Star Wars movie before), and acts like it was just a fun joke when Rey gets rightfully pissed about it. If that scene was in the actual movie, I feel like I would understand the complaints about Luke’s character much more.
The reason I like it is because, “jerk” or not, it really solidifies what Luke believes and why he’s acting the way he is. It shows why he thinks the Jedi need to end in the clearest way: they can be manipulated by not understanding a cultural context into doing more harm than good.
Yoda was a “jerk” and constantly mocking Luke throughout Empire Strikes Back.
Apparently him seeming like too much of a jerk is the main reason they removed the scene in the first place.
It was cut for time, as a lot of the ideas were already described elsewhere and it’s already the longest Star Wars film.
It’s been a tough morning.
My 2011 MacBook Pro will not power on. It hasn’t all morning. I’ve tried everything I can find to do online, but it looks like their’s a fair chance it’s just totally shot.
Everything relevant to this project is stored on external drives, so I’m not super concerned with losing it.
The potentially showstopping problem, though, is that everything is within FCP7, software that will not run on versions of MacOS more recent than 10.12 Sierra, initially released four years ago.
If my old machine will not power up, and I simply cannot afford to get a new computer at all right now, I will not be able to finish this or even export what I’ve already gotten together without a Macintosh computer that can run 10.12 Sierra. And even then I’m not 100% confident FCP7 will even install at this point.
If the computer does manage to boot back up, the first order of business will be to export the current state of the project as ProRes video and lossless audio stems.
Sorry to hear about your laptop! That’s the worst…
You could also export out an XML, which could be imported directly into Premiere Pro, and you can set the keyboard shortcuts to work like FCP 7. That would give you a 64-bit app to work on your edit as it is currently, rather than starting from scratch on a ProRes export.
Like I said, I won’t be including the evacuation of D’Qar in TFA. It’s staying in TLJ.
I get that, I was just trying to make a suggestion that could give you an ending shot you wanted… since you seem to want a shot that doesn’t exist.
D’Qar evacuation in TFA, opening on Ahch-To in TLJ, and then cutting back to the fleet in a state of constant fleeing could also better sell the idea that the fleet has no fuel. Just a thought.
Otherwise, just end it on that group shot. If that shot is too short for you, slow it down. If that looks too unnatural, don’t. If you still don’t like the very specific thing you want and don’t want any suggestions to achieve the story goal that you have… don’t know how to help you.
I feel the other shot better rhymes with TPM and ANH and just feels more Star Warsy…or at least it would be those things if it weren’t moving! I really want to end on a static version of that shot because it just looks wrong when the iris to credits happens on a pan, but I don’t see any way to remedy it here.
Your version just cuts from space to space so it looks really weird.
The only other think I can think of for you would be to extend that group shot somehow… I doubt a static version exists at all.
The more difficult option would be to move the evacuation of D’Qar into TFA, or at least a truncated version. Maybe cut from the Falcon leaving to a Star Destroyer arriving above the planet? Then down to Connix or something. Or maybe you could create a pan back from the jump over to the transports loading, the post-crawl opening shot of TLJ. It would take more work and the film would end on more of a downer… but it might salvage the last of time between films. Then open The Last Jedi with the discovery of Hyperspace tracking, since that’s already the inciting incident.
Sorry I wasn’t clear. I envisioned TFA ending on this shot. No Ach-To in TFA.
Oh, gotcha. I ended that sequence with the next shot, of the Falcon launching into hyperspace. But I bet the circle transition would work well on that push in shot on Leia.
I don’t know if I’ve talked about this before and if I have it’s been a long time, but having two Saga films take place back to back just kinda irks on an irrational level. Thus, I’d like to edit the films so as to insert a 1 year gap. Rey and Chewie spend the year scouring Ach-To for Luke’s location, and since in my version there never was a big laser pointed at D’Qar, it’s reasonable to think the First Order would take a year to find it. This change wouldn’t accomplish much, but it would feel more in keeping with the Saga’s style. Then again, so would changing the title and that’s off-limits for iconography reason.
I think an easier way to do this would be to adjust the ending of TFA. The cliffhanger with Luke is what necessitates the back-to-back nature of them. I know we’ve talked about how I overcame this before, but if you take everything out of TFA from after the Falcon jumps to Hyperspace from D’Qar, you can re-use that footage in TLJ when part of it is reenacted anyway. I used Kylo travelling to Exegol as a new cliffhanger, but you could just end it with the jump. Then it becomes ambiguous how much time transpires between the films, as TLJ still doesn’t open with Rey on Ahch-To.
If they’d just jumpstart “Underworld”, we could have Palpatine getting his heart broken by some crime boss lady and get around all the clone shenanigans… maybe some day 😩
Re: Poe’s arc.
If there were a way to insert JJ’s Poe ideas from ROS into TFA, that would give his character some depth.
In fact, a lot of ROS’s ideas have potential, they were just totally useless being introduced in the third act.
For example, the First Order kicking down doors like cops–that should’ve been in TFA, or at least the start of TLJ, to establish exactly what they were doing when they took over.
A radical restructure of TFA where Poe is introduced as the smuggler but already part of the rebels (showing hos desperate Leia is for troops) would make him more interesting.
I don’t know if that’s possible with just editing, as everything about him being a Smugglar was an exposition dump so that he had a past with Zorri. It wasn’t even enough to make us question if we can trust Poe or reveal anything about his character/nature.
Finn and the Villager Deleted Scene - No Timecode
It’s a simple scene that some might consider unnecessary, but I’ve always really liked it. I think it gives Finn’s decision not to kill the villagers a more personal touch.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YRD1oJpk_vKHniG2ZB2_Z1ZpX8Z72xlE/view?usp=sharing
Re-added Finn & The Villager. It’s been cropped at times, but the framing works really well, didn’t notice until I compared versions with the BD.
Considering Palpatine didn’t need to return in the first place
“The basic premise of the entire movie should have been different” is a different conversation entirely, and a pretty pointless one considering the deed has been done (unless you’re somehow planning a completely Palpatine-less edit, which Hal is not).
Full context of the quote was refuting the “need” to avoid Palpatine having a child after they decided Palpatine needed a child. Palpatine didn’t need to be the villain, Rey didn’t need to be related to him, Palpatine didn’t need to have a discarded-but-living clone that’s also Rey’s father, etc.
