The green is for you Frank!
Well, and also for matching to the Senator photos, and, yeah.
Yeah, it's not particularly problematic, it's just that I'm trying to get a feel for the differences. Not a game changer by any means.
Just getting a feel for the Death Star interiors:
Same settings for both shots.
In preparation for working with the Blu ray, I thought it would be a good idea to determine in what ways it differed from the DVD. Looking at the pink flashes and the highlights, it seems to me that the DVD is actually better than the Blu ray. The Blu ray seems to turn the highlights red to a greater extent than the DVD, and in some cases the highlights actually have less detail than the DVD!
I used a screenshot of the Blu ray that I found online for this comparison. The highlights are clearly blown out in the Blu ray, and also in the GOUT for this shot, though I didn't include it in this comparison. Despecialized seems to fix this problem to some extent, but some detail has already been irretrievably lost in the Blu ray, such as in the bright part of Luke's hair and the ridges on his armor, so it's obviously not present in Despecialized in these places. I'll continue examining the Blu ray, but I'm disappointed that the DVD is a better source in some regards than the Blu-ray.
Pink removal:
I'd say your new attempt is quite an improvement, and probably not possible to get clean audio in a silent scene.
As to the amplitude change, I'm not sure it matters in any case. I used the Amplify effect in Audacity to make the volume of both tracks similar. The thinking behind it was carried over from when I was trying to cancel out audio by inverting the waveform of the copied audio track, and to successfully cancel the two waveforms they needed to be of equal height. Again, not sure that it matters when using Knockout, but I did the same thing to the Leia hologram speech and it seemed to improve the quality.
Your hat is nice.
@ Frink: Your version seems to remove all traces of the music, which is remarkable considering how much louder it is in this scene compared to the Leia Hologram scene. You mentioned that Windows Audio Recorder is whack, have you made sure that it's not using input from a microphone? That messed me up when I tried this approach.
I've made an audio clip from the Phantom Menace AC3, using the exact settings that I've outlined above, except that I increased the amplitude of the right channel by 3.
Password: toostrong
It has a tinny ring to it as well, and you can still hear the music, but if you're planning on putting other music over it, it may be acceptable.
No restarant would be complete without some Pallies. While we're on the subject of the prequels, you'll also need some strange fishlike things hanging from strings and something on the menu called "Jawa juice", which is usually just Sunny D in a Jawa-themed cup.
Bingowings said:
The other tip I would pass on (not just for losing weight but for thrift reasons too) is never waste stock.
If you are boiling vegetables or meat transfer the stock to measuring jug and when it's cooled down cover it and refrigerate.
If you have any left overs like random vegetables, Brassicaceae cores, leaves and storks, meat bones etc Just fry up an onion and maybe some garlic, throw in some herbs after a few minutes throw in the scraps and a chopped potato and leave to simmer for about an hour.
Sift out bones or stringy storks and if you like blend it.
You will have that most mythical of things, a free meal (or as free as to make no odds).
As it was mostly liquid it will also be very filling without having much in the way of calories (depending on the ingredients naturally).
Soup making is an essential life skill. No two soups will be the same.
There is very little need to starve if you can make soup and it will balance your weight.
Yes, yes, to Bingowings you listen. Soup, remember the soup!
I learned how to make soup last year, and it has helped me tremendously. When we get a whole chicken, we have a meal off of it and then the bones are picked, cooked, and simmered to produce a fine broth. Add a bottle of original V8 juice and you have the beginnings of a fine chicken soup, just add whatever else you want.
You can do the same with beef bones, which we got from a local farmer along with an eighth of a cow. The procedure is a bit more tricky to get right, but you have a formidable stock that can contain anything.
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!