NeverarGreat

To continue the idea of adding gore, extend the scene of Vader helmetless in his pod. His arm is essentially rotting underneath his armor, so several spindly droids are adding additional robotics to his suit. This establishes that he’s falling apart even as he’s climbing the military ladder, and provides a ticking clock to his quest to recruit Luke.

Add many more Wampas to the Wampa lair, so that Luke is forced to flee instead of taking shelter in the cave.

Make the mouth of the asteroid worm more cavelike, with things that look like stalactites and stalagmites instead of teeth. Make the exterior of the beast more eldritch as well, and less like a hand puppet.

Have a ton of small spaceships leaving Cloud City to cover the Falcon’s escape as the evacuation proceeds. The cloud cars hold off the TIE fighters while they rescue Luke, but are destroyed after buying them just enough time.

It looks good, but you can see what I mean about the clipped highlight values if you look at the cloud right above the figures. The brightest part has no more detail in your comparison.

Here’s what I came up with:

http://www.framecompare.com/image-compare/screenshotcomparison/7Y7NNN8X

Keep in mind I have no idea how this shot is supposed to look, but if you’re just going for a neutral color scheme, find areas that are supposed to be white, gray, and black, and correct them to be neutral. The black dress, the gray crosses, and the white side of the church are good points to keep in mind.

The first version has a reddish cast and a greenish sky, and is the most out-of-balance to me. The second one is better, but it still has a slight reddish cast to the ground and sky. What I did was use a curves adjustment in Photoshop, bringing up the brightness and lowering the red slightly. And that’s it, really.

Perhaps I should get in the habit of posting the way we treat spoiler warnings here, except for lengthy deconstructions of the Star Wars sequels and ROTJ. Call it Simple Pleasure Destruction Warning or something. 😉

Using levels in Photoshop can be effective, but if you move the left or right hand sliders you’re almost guaranteed to lose information. The reason is that even if you don’t see any detail in the highlights it’s still likely that there is some detail there. A much safer way of changing the highlights and shadows is to use an RGB curves adjustment. After shifting the overall curve, you can go into the individual color curves to fine-tune the adjustment.

If you’re using Photoshop, I’ve occasionally found the Color Balance tool to be helpful.

As for getting a particular gradient to a certain hue, the Channel Mixer is a powerful tool. Since the primary color of skin is red, you can adjust the hue of the skin tones by adding/subtracting green and blue to/from the red channel. Green carries much more luminosity information than blue or red, so if you add green to the red channel you’ll get brighter skin tones. It takes practice, and isn’t appropriate for all situations, but it’s very useful.

Very nice!

I suppose if I watched the edit enough times to forget the original elements, but one watchthrough wouldn’t be enough for me.

darth_ender said:

Anyone else think this site and fanedit.org make people scrutinize movies too much and suck the fun out of escapist diversion?

P.S. I love it here, but seriously, that aspect of the culture, it just…

As long as people go beyond simple ‘I don’t like X’ and dig deeper to find the real issues with movies, then I think these sites are important. There are a lot of projects that aren’t too interesting from this standpoint, since they seek merely to remove elements from films deemed ‘childish’, ‘slapstick’, ‘boring’, etc. I find these edits less interesting because I often mentally edit these things out of films anyway, and going to the trouble of actually removing them doesn’t significantly alter the experience.

But edits that seek to craft whole new narratives, like some of the more ambitious Phantom Menace edits, can be viewed as different films entirely. Similarly, something like TFA Restructured can be viewed like an experiment to see how much of a difference one (major) change can have on an entire film. And of course edits which make substantial changes to the effects (Adywan) make the films quite different indeed.

darthrush said:

Everyone should also know that the free program “Megadownloader” bypasses the 5 GB limit quite easily. Just plug the mega link into the program, choose your download location, and your on your way!

According to this, you now have to use a VPN to get around the 5gb limit, and this works with the unofficial program Megadownloader and the official app MegaSync. Is this right?

Anyway, I just finished watching this edit, and it’s quite good!
There are some audio level issues, such as when it goes quiet at around the halfway mark and returns after Vader dies. Other than that, very nice!

Thank you!

I’m working on getting a full comparison gallery uploaded, but there’s 3 more reels to go. Each frame selected shows more than basic color correction, and usually this mean that I’ve used another source for color or detail. When a similar fix is applied to multiple shots in a scene, only a representative sample of the fixed shots are included. Here’s the gallery so far:

Downloadable Comparison Gallery

I don’t need to be stoned to have great ideas about our purpose in the universe, which is why I’ve never touched the stuff. I expect it would just make it worse.

TV’s Frink said:

Canadians are weird.

While this is good wholesome entertainment for Americans, this would be considered good wholesome entertainment by Canadians.

Sickening.

I’m not that dark!

You know, I completely forgot about that.
😛
Well in any case, it would be good to change the Mega link.

My Avatar is now appropriately dark and orange.

Valheru_84 said:

NeverarGreat said:

It would be nice to have a <5gb or multipart file option so that Mega would work.

Shouldn’t you just be able to use winzip, winrar or 7zip to split it up into multiple files? This might help also in producing a larger video file if darthrush has the ability to produce a higher quality one (having read earlier that the quality seems a bit lacking when compared to other edits)?

.Val

What I’m saying is that with Mega’s new (since August) 5gb cap, any file larger than that is unavailable unless you’re a paying customer. I just wanted to let him know so he might split the file into parts, since I’d be unable to get this edit otherwise.

It would be nice to have a <5gb or multipart file option so that Mega would work.

Sometimes I listen to “Your Father Would be Proud” on repeat.

Glad you’re feeling better!

It sounds like ‘real stuff’ to me. When you’re more able to type, do you know why you’re getting these migraines? I know someone who got them all the time until they cut caffeine out of their diet, and now just gets them when storms roll in.

Guess I’m just more OCD than normal. But I already knew that.

DuracellEnergizer said:

^This.

Don’t you just hate it when you decide not to quote someone then your response is shunted to the next page?

Ray, if you need to talk to anyone, please tell us here or send me a PM. I must admit I’m a bit worried right now.

TV’s Frink said:

Neverar is gonna be crushed.

To answer the decade old question, yes, I can disregard Leia as Luke’s sister, for the simple reason that there’s no real proof that they’re related. Ben merely says ‘Your insight serves you well’ in response to Luke’s intuition. He’s already known to lie when it serves his purposes, so he could merely have been allowing Luke to believe that Leia was his sister to make sure that the real twin stayed ‘safely anonymous’.

The hint of Leia’s Force sensitivity only appeared after Luke basically said that she should be terrifyingly powerful with the Force, and this tracks in my mind to how the Force should really work - if you believe in it, you can become strong in it. Even The Force Awakens doesn’t ruin this idea, since she would have had 30 years to develop some real Force ability and Ben junior would have grown up believing that he was destined for greatness.