I saw all 3 of the official trailers and then the Japanese trailer. When I saw the first TV spot, I vowed not to see any more, and haven’t so far. When a spot came on the TV during Thanksgiving, people probably laughed as they saw me dart out of the room.
To collect the synopses in one place:
Episode 1:
Two Jedi attempt to resolve a brewing conflict between a peaceful planet and an aggressive interplanetary corporation, but soon see signs that sinister forces may be at work. After a long and ultimately futile journey across the galaxy to garner support for their cause, a final showdown defeats both the corporation’s military and their shadowy master’s powerful henchman. But the identity of the mastermind of these events and his true purpose remains mysterious…
Episode 2:
After an assassination attempt on a galactic senator a young Jedi is tasked with protecting her, while his master follows the trail of the assassins only to discover a conspiracy of galactic proportions and gets captured. Meanwhile the senator and her Jedi protector go into hiding and fall in love but when the young Jedi discovers that his master has been captured he flies to his aid and our heroes are rejoined for an epic final battle.
Episode 3:
Two Jedi accomplish a daring rescue of the leader of the Galactic Republic, but at the cost of the young Jedi’s conscience. As his master fights to end the galactic war, the young Jedi succumbs to the temptations of the galactic leader, who lures him into a Faustian bargain with the promise of power. The leader then reveals himself as the mastermind of the entire war, thus ending it and turning the Republic into an Empire. In the final battle, the villains are revealed, and the heroes flee.
I think the contractual survival of Yoda and Obi-wan is the worst thing about Episode 3, even more than Anakin’s confusing fall, since it paints them as stupid and cowardly. True Heroism and villainy don’t exist in this film since the characters are so muddled.
One thing that is actually nice for certain threads is that you have to go to the first page of the thread before navigating to any other page. Not optimal for browsing updates to projects, but potentially useful for people who ignore clear instructions in the first post of the thread.
Guys, I think I may have a problem.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l49Yl_gixUI
Yes, I've joined the supercut craze. So ashamed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymia_ivHVOo
Just popping in here to post my regrade of the 3rd trailer, as I don't want to read all the spoilerish stuff around here...yet ;)
RicOlie_2 said:
As I said in the other thread, the only problem I had with it is that it felt too dark. I'm hoping there are some more lighthearted moments in the actual movie.
Thinking back on ANH, there were actually very few moments that I can point to as being genuinely funny. The only one that comes easily to mind is Han's conversation with Luke after the rescue "Do you think a princess, and a guy like me...". As far as lighthearted goes, there's a lot of fussy banter between the droids and the final scene of the film, but other than that it takes itself quite seriously. It doesn't give the audience a wink like Marvel movies, it's not jokey. I don't mind if TFA is serious fare.
Besides, the trailer was selling itself as EPIC, so lighthearted moments wouldn't have worked with the music. :)
Okay, just watched the trailer a good dozen times. I'm not going to spoil any specifics, just give my reactions to the overall effect it had on me.
First of all, I noticed a lot more JJ-isms such as extreme closeups and a few lens flares. Dynamic camera, very in-your-face stuff. It felt most similar to 2009 Star Trek in style, and though that style worked for the Trek Reboot, I don't think it works so well for a continuing story, especially not Star Wars.
I liked a few shots in the first seconds of the trailer, one in particular screamed classic Star Wars and gave me hope for more in the film. but most of the rest of the shots could have come out of any big budget action film of the last several years, for all the effect it had on me.
The colors feel off, as I think JJ prefers a more saturated look than exists in any of the OT films. He's definitely not out to recapture the look of the originals, so I wonder why he even bothered to shoot on film. All in all, it was a disappointment.
One bright note (haha) is the music. If nothing else, we get a new Star Wars soundtrack from the Williams, and that alone is worth the price of admission for me.
Brilliant stuff. Especially Spinoda. :)
FanFiltration said:
I still think people are missing the fact that R2-D2 was present during most of (if not all of) Luke's training by Ben and Yoda. Therefor that little droid contains the knowledge to be the greatest Jedi training master of all.
And of course, R2 was levitating himself in the swamp. He's just a quick learner.
Even if we got a 'perfect' restoration, there would still be people here who would value a GOUT upscale simply because of nostalgia. Besides, there ARE differences between the '77 version of the film and this one, which would be valuable on their own.
About v15: It looks good, I like it more than any previous version! The problem has always been the ringing artifacts, and these seem to be impervious to any attempt to bring under control. But perhaps if there was an automated tool, such as Photoshop's Magnetic Lasso tool, which could identify edges of a sufficient contrast (such as Vader's helmet against a featureless wall) it could be made to equalize lesser variations in luminosity which run parallel to these edges, but only equalize them on the side of the edge which has the most parallel gradients (which are the ringing artifacts). In this way, details on the other side of the edge remain unaffected, which is where most of the superresolution detail is gained.
I say either of the last two are great. On my monitor, the skin tones are practically perfect, the hair is blonde/gray in keeping with his apparent age, the blue of the uniforms remains intact, and the hallway is ever so slightly green, which, as far as anyone can tell, is how it is supposed to look. Why does this last one look worse to you?
g-force said:
Blu-ray regraded from post 445 is better than the improved from post 449 on all three of my monitors.
-G
On both my calibrated monitor and my laptop monitor, the skin tones on 445 shift too much between green (around the eyes and nose) and pink (in the cheeks), though the shift appears more subtle on the uncalibrated laptop monitor. More than that, 449 just feels warmer and better to me, though 'better' is entirely subjective.
DrDre said:
The improvement is a good one :) The skin tones, hair, and shirt all look just right.
rchdggr said:
sunglassesatnite said:
This is a vague feeling and it is hard to explain, but there are micro-moments in Abrams’s various films where I get sucked straight out of the movie, out of the fantasy--and into a realm where “this doesn’t quite make sense.” Or, “that seems odd why that character would do [or say] that.”
There are several of these “micro-moments” from J.J.’s films that I could get into (but won’t). There is, though, one in the latest behind-the-scenes TFA footage (presumably from San Diego, but I’m not certain about that) which, at least for me, demonstrates what I am talking about. For a few seconds, a guy appearing to be Oscar Isaacs is being hustled down a very Death Star-looking starship passageway by a Stormtrooper.
I will get accused of being overly anal about this, but something about the composition of that shot and the body language of the characters was just wrong. It immediately made me think of similar shots in the OOT where our captive heroes are being made to walk places they don’t necessarily want to go (think of Han Solo at the Carbonite chamber, or the surrendered starship troopers at the beginning of A New Hope). Not really a big deal in the grand scheme of things, but in the TFA footage it just looked “off.” For one thing, in J.J.’s footage the Stormtrooper has his gun on Oscar Isaacs with one hand, while attempting to briskly shuffle him down the passageway with the other; presumably to take him to some kind of “detention block.” The thing is, why does the Stormtrooper have his gun on Isaacs when they are presumably on the Stormtrooper’s own ship to begin with? Why the hell is the Stormtrooper in such a hurry when, again, they are on the Stormtrooper’s own ship? Why aren’t there two Stormtroopers handling Isaacs? Why am I being so completely anal about two seconds of footage, the completed version of which I haven’t yet seen?
The reason is because it just looks “wrong.” It doesn’t look like Star Wars (or at least the only Star Wars that exists to me—namely the OOT). In the OOT, a shot like this would have had two Stormtroopers walking behind our hero, weapons at port arms, with a pace and body language that suggested power and control…thereby infusing the scene with a sense of gravity and foreboding. This scene, by contrast, just doesn’t come off well. It just looks like a Stormtrooper hustling some dude down a hallway, and doesn’t really communicate anything beyond that. Worse, it kind of makes the Stormtrooper look like--in the words of late-great TV series the Wire—“a graspy little bitch” who can’t handle his business somehow.
Am I making my prediction of TFA’s lack of quality based on this one scene? Hardly. I am merely attempting to give an example of how J.J. Abrams’s style, for me, doesn’t completely work.
The lone stormtrooper does look off. He seems nervous and agitated. Not typical stormtrooper behavior. He doesn't seem to be just like every other stormtrooper. It's as if he has more personality and emotion to him.. See where i'm going with this?
He does seem 'a little short' for a stormtrooper ;)
I wonder if the steelbooks version of ANH has fixed the mis-encoded highlights situation of the 2011 Blu-ray.
Chewtobacca said:
poita said: 6) Every print, and every screening would have looked different...
...grading Star Wars now is really down to the individual.I completely agree with this and with everything that you wrote in post #333, poita. It's what I've believed for some time.
1) The IB Techs are all too green, Senator print included.
Even though this is true, I still absolutely love the way all the green makes Star Wars look. It feels right to me somehow, and I don't want my go-to version to look any other way.
Let's hope that this new tool will lead to more people's finding a release that pleases them in terms of color.
Perhaps it's not strictly accurate to the scene, but the greenish shadows combined with just slightly reddish/blue highlights do give a nice 'antique' or 'romantic' look to the film, in my opinion. It may be partly a time period color choice combined with the natural shifts in the Technicolor process, but the Technicolor version of Star Wars is what made me fall in love with the color of the film more than anything else.
Hmm, the blues are somewhat better, though that's making some things such as skin tones and highlights turn that dreaded pink, and it's losing the filmic quality that was so good about the previous version. This is where I usually break out the channel mixer. If you decrease the blue in the red channel while putting that blue into the red channel, and also decrease the green in the green channel while putting that green into the blue channel, it can often give a more filmic look. Here are your latest screenshots with an RGB and Channel Mixer adjustment:
Some things to look for:
The sand in the bottom picture is of relatively uniform color, a yellowish brown with no shifts to pink or green. The greenish tub on the left is now closer to the brown indicated in the 35mm print. The green door in the middle shot is now less saturated as well. Incidentally, it's useful to choose screenshots which have areas of very saturated color in the red, green, and blue channels so that you can see easily if one channel is more dominant than another. In this case, it looks like there was too much information in the green channel and not enough green filling out the blue channel.
These are great settings! Very filmic. The first comparison made me notice a potential issue with your settings that I have had to deal with when making a custom LUT for the Star Wars blu-ray.
In this shot you can see the that the darker areas of the (supposedly neutral) blackboard are indeed neutral, yet the areas where the light is striking it appear yellowish green. The 35mm frame perhaps goes too far, making the entire board blue, but in my opinion the regrade goes too far in the green direction. This was a big problem with Star Wars, and made things which were supposed to be white look green. A good way that I found of making things look filmic was to boost the blues in the highlights while reducing the blues in the shadows, though usually you will want to just aim for neutral highlights.
I guess what threw me was this frame:
The cream colored suit has turned green, and on closer examination seems to have some green artifacts in it. This shot however:
seems to be much closer to normal, though his striped shirt is closer to pink. So it looks like the shots are inconsistent from the outset, and simply correcting both with the same settings isn't going to fix these sorts of problems. If you want a global color fix (as you indicated earlier) then I entirely understand and retract my nitpick. Life is too short for shot by shot color corrections and sanity is a good thing :)
It is a bit red, though now his cream colored suit is shifted green. Perhaps somewhere in between:
JEDIT: Imageshack is turning up the saturation of the image. This is part of why it's so hard to talk about color online. Here's one with less saturation:
Now this is interesting. I noticed in the trailer still, Belloq's tie is quite blue, but so is the balance of the frame. In the other grades and regrades, the tie turns quite green. So I searched for how the tie is supposed to look, and came across this:
Here the tie is clearly gray, whereas the Nazi officer's tie remains quite green. Overall, Belloq's suit seems more balanced here. Just some more data to consider :)
CatBus said:
I guess I should add that while snicker used the RGB channel differences to reconstruct clipped highlights, I think in the Death Star hangar example he uncrushed the blacks by pulling usable detail out of the BTB data, and I'm not sure if you've been making use of what unseen detail is lurking in BTB and WTW.
There is definitely a great deal of data hiding in the superwhites or WTW in Star Wars, and it can be pulled out if you don't clip the detail through a colorspace conversion, but how would it be possible to pull useful data out of the superblacks, since most of the data is random noise within a point or two of RGB 0,0,0?
I think the original 35mm frame is slightly green shifted in the highlights. This is most noticeable in the sky of your predicted frames, which shift oddly to green. Other than that, I really like the look.
Okay, I've done my first color test with the software and the results are quite accurate. FYI though, I had to reverse the order of steps 1 and 2 to get it to work. The biggest problem is that the Blu-ray has such compressed gradients that the color is flattened, and no algorithm can fix that.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but as of now this program will only accept separate images, so it's rather awkward to use this for an entire shot, much less a whole scene. So for me it's back to correcting entirely by hand, at least for now ;)
Theorizing here for a minute - Say you match the color of the Star Wars Blu-ray to a source like a 35mm scan or the GOUT, and then the program compares the final result for each frame to that reference source. Any colors that are matched 100% remain, but any colors that don't match, say, because of missing gradients, are then added to the Blu-ray through some sort of color blend mode (which I've done to the Blu-ray using GOUT color in certain places). This would require first registering each frame. Thoughts?
JEDIT - Another idea, instead of cropping the reference and test images, perhaps the program could employ a system of target points that the user can place on the frame and essentially tell the program to correct to those, rather than the entire frame. So details that are important, like C-3PO's gold color, or the skintones, will be weighted more heavily in the correction than other parts.
Regardless, and echoing what others have said, it's an exciting proof of concept and I look forward to seeing where you go with it!
