Tyrphanax said:
I like that they may be going for an original trilogy dynamic with the casting of unknowns for the main characters. Having the old crew return in a mentor position would make sense, and focusing on unknowns would help to make the movie unique. They certainly don't need to sell the movie with big names.
Reegar said:
Is there anything I might do to help?
Not unless you can flash-forward, speed up the pacing, or invent a plot device to get him off this rock. :)
Love the slower pace though, it reminds me of the Radio Drama.
Ah, Biggs is right, Luke's never gonna get out of here!
The intention is conflicted with regards to shots like this. The goal is to return the movie to its '77 technicolor look, but do as much as possible with color correction. So do I attempt to fix the color on things like the sky in this shot or the Leia hologram even though these elements have been physically altered? I think that the answer is a cautious yes, for though the offending elements would need to be replaced in a true restoration, I would like to release a version of the movie that is in the spirit of the original, colorwise. Perhaps I've gone too far in worrying about something that is a non-issue, but someone who knows how the original looks would probably be bothered by a blue sky instead of a red one. So as long as the color correction of an SE element doesn't compromise the correction of the original elements of the shot, I'm going to try and fix it as much as I can. Harmy did the same thing with his version 1 of Despecialized where the blue of the Leia hologram was corrected. Later he replaced the element altogether.
Basically, I'll do my best to make it look like the 77 technicolor version unless it compromises the rest of the image.
Yeah, the artifacts are a problem. I reworked this to minimize the artifacts and rendered it, but as you can see there are still some artifacts around C-3PO, and Luke's manual rotoscoping job is painfully obvious. This looks like a job for Team Negative1!
So it may be true that the sky was cut out of the frame for the SE, and that would make sense, but I'm just trying to get it as close as possible with color correction alone:
Thanks for pointing that out Harmy, I didn't even check Despecialized on that one. Your image came from the comparison image gallery, so I'll make sure to double check from now on. The real image is much better.
How do you think this shot was changed? I would guess that the background was isolated with a chroma key of some kind and then the color was swapped. This would mean that the original sky remains, it's just a different color. Or would the entire sky be replaced with something else? That doesn't make sense.
Chewtobacca said:
NeverarGreat said: Password: icare
Haha! I like the password. :D
That scene looks incredible. I've never seen Star Wars looking so good for color.
Thanks! Of course, it's much easier to make a single scene look good with a single set of settings than an entire movie. Going forward, I may just post shots and scenes like the Binary Sunset that are entirely different than the DVD, as these are the ones that will take most of the time to get right. The above shot is an example of that.
Another test to see whether the original sky color in this shot could be recovered:
I'd say so. But unfortunately for the DVD, most of the detail on 3PO's shoulders is on the blue channel, so it's a compromise.
JEDIT: I've updated the image. This one keeps almost all the blue detail by turning it red.
Here's an uncompressed video of that scene:
Password: icare
This one's a bit more subtle.
Getting the brightness right for these scenes may be the most time consuming part of this project.
I like this back and forth you've got going.
Imagine if these guys all went on the adventure with Luke; I'm guessing that Fixer would sneak off of the Falcon with his girlfriend while everyone else was busy rescuing Leia, and those two would escape into hyperspace after stealing Vader's TIE fighter. They would never be heard from again. Windy would be Luke's wingman along with Biggs in the final Death Star assault, and would chicken out while Biggs got fried by Vader in his conventional TIE fighter. Windy would then circle around and destroy Vader's TIE, and Han Solo would not come back to save anybody, having tried to pay back Jabba the Hutt. Chewbacca however would return in an empty Falcon, having left Han in a lurch back on Tatooine, where he would have to be rescued in a later film.
Incidentally Reegar, please don't use this plot, as it is a jokingly suggested hypothetical. ;)
I liked:
The overall look of TPM. The fact that they used film and actual models sometimes was good.
Nothing from AOTC except for the music.
Three scenes from ROTS including the crash landing on Coruscant, the dialogue-less sunset over Coruscant, and the first minute of Order 66.
The audio sync issue remains, but the color looks really good!
Molly said:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voices_of_a_Distant_Star
Prolly the closest anyone's gotten to a one-man film.
I've seen that, it's somewhat good. Don't know what it has to do with the thread though...
TV's Frink said:
Wow...that might not be perfect, but for my projects that could be extremely useful!
You're certainly free to use this or future audio samples.
There's a kickstarter out there for a new game from Cyan called Obduction.
http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cyaninc/obduction
Cyan is of course the company that made Myst and Riven, two of my favorite games of all time.
Myst defined my first gaming experiences. It was not a game to be played so much as experienced. It created a unique atmosphere, and really opened my eyes to what could be done with computer games. I'll admit that I was stuck on the lighthouse island for days before I realized that my monitor's brightness was turned down too low to see one of the secret doors. Despite this, there was no other game like it until Riven.
Riven was Myst on steroids. It was better in every way, managing to be more sophisticated, classy, deep, and engaging than its predecessor, while making great strides in graphical detail. The one downside to the game was that it forced me to switch disks when traveling from one island to another, but in a way that actually encouraged me to take my time and explore the locations entirely before heading to a new place. The atmospheric music in Riven cannot be beat.
Sorry if this thread sounds like advertizing, but I really want this new game to succeed. If you've got any stories about Myst or other Cyan games or anything, post away!
Bingowings said:
I used to feel that I was a male trapped in a female body, that all ended when I was born.
LOL
Password: leia
Made in Moviemaker, because of laziness.
Listening to it in the video, it seems to have a slight warbly undercurrent typical of heavy noise reduction that gets more pronounced by the end, but it's the best result I've yet gotten.
Joel said:
NeverarGreat said:
Knockout settings for Leia Reconstituted Audio:
Vocals plus music on top, left panned. Right music channel on bottom, right panned.
Select both tracks, start Knockout. Extract Centre off, R input gain 13 dB, Output gain 8 dB, all other settings off.
preview section, record with windows audio recorder.
The moral of this story: It is quite possible to isolate the Leia hologram speech, with some effort.
WOW, Nice work!
Now don't be hasty, I'm uploading it now, so you can decide for yourselves whether it's worth the hype.
Alright, I've been looking for some free options for reducing the center channel of the AC3 file some more, and came across KnOckOut, a plugin for Audacity. Placing the center channel above the right channel, I then pulled the center channel to read as a left channel, and pulled the right channel to read as the right channel. This is so Knockout thinks that it is a simple stereo file. Playing with the settings allowed for a really impressive result. Leia's voice is hardly garbled at all, and except for a single errant note, I was hard pressed to hear any music. This is more than sufficient for incorporating into a trailer, methinks.
The only problem was that this didn't work. It only worked when I clicked the "preview" option, which played the first five seconds perfectly. Trying to apply the effect to the whole track did absolutely nothing except amplify the track. So I did what any sane person would do and recorded the five second previews with Windows Audio Recorder and stitched them together in Audacity. Here are the settings, if anyone else is interested in working from the AC3 audio:
Knockout settings for Leia Reconstituted Audio:
Vocals plus music on top, left panned. Right music channel on bottom, right panned.
Select both tracks, start Knockout. Extract Centre off, R input gain 13 dB, Output gain 8 dB, all other settings off.
preview section, record with windows audio recorder.
The moral of this story: It is quite possible to isolate the Leia hologram speech, with some effort.
Thanks for the lots of nice things!
Joel said:
As snother audio person, I will add that unless you actually enjoy the trial-and-error process, your time might be better spent trying to locate un-mixed soundbites. The M-S processor concept seems to be a more advanced version of the phase cancellation techniques mentioned above (albeit with more fine control over the phase of the signals).
If you DO want to work on it - go, man, go! You will definitely learn what works best, what you can live with and what you can't.
Having never listened to the isolated center channel of the DTS Master Audio from the Blu-Ray - can someone verify that the music is present?
Do I enjoy trial and error? Have you seen my color correction method? ;)
I am very interested in knowing whether the Blu-ray has music in the central channel as well.
It's got more Dune-like elements in it now, for sure. I'm thinking the Bene Gesserit sisterhood:
"Kill this child, it is an abomination!"
This has absolutely the darkest outcome of any Star Wars story I have ever read, though I'm glad that you finished the story - that's rare on this forum.
The moral of the story is that the Jedi are not to be trusted!
It could have worked - if Khan's second in command was revived instead of Khan. He looks a lot like Cumberbatch!
JEDIT: Now I'm retconning STID to actually star this guy, who only pretends to be Khan after the suits at Starfleet unfreeze the wrong guy. He plays along because he wishes to avoid being put back into hibernation, and soon comes to enjoy impersonating his hero so much that he begins to think that he is indeed Khan.