NeverarGreat

imperialscum said:

timdiggerm said:

imperialscum said:

KilroyMcFadden said:

RLM wasn't jumping on the prequel hate bandwagon.

That's exactly what it did.

Isn't that an unanswerable question of motivation?

Well no. They did. Whether intentionally or not is an unanswerable question of motivation.

RLM already made four deconstruction videos concerning the Next Generation Star Trek movies, so they weren't jumping on the "hate bandwagon". They had been doing that for a while. They clearly made the Star Trek videos because they were Star Trek fans who were dissatisfied with the feature film adaptations of the show. If a serious fan voices their dissatisfaction, to me that is not jumping on the bandwagon, that is voicing one's own opinion.

If RLM had no interest in Star Wars, for example if they clearly weren't Star Wars fans and were simply leeching off of a sentiment which was popular at the moment, then they would be "jumping on the prequel hate bandwagon." Listening to Mike's Episode 4 commentary gives me the impression that he is a big Star Wars fan, going so far as to call it a "perfect movie". I believe their gripes with the prequels have genuine belief behind them, as Mike at least is a Star Wars fan.

Now personally I think that perhaps half of their attacks on the prequels are valid, the rest being cheap shots, irrelevant filler, and overdramatized nitpicking, but it's a fun ride if you take your mind off the hook for a while. I for one don't think that the videos are a cynical cash grab.

emanswfan said:

Much more revised version of the Opening battle (now the full scene).  This has better skin tones (though it could need a bit more saturation), now uses the real 35mm film scan for grain (just like the last two clips), further gets rid of the cartoony colors (look at the buzz droids now), and tried to enhance the detail without oversharpening.  This is pretty close to what is the final version, apart from some work to still do on the lasers and lightsabers.  I would again recommend watching in 1080p to see the grain and fine detail work.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4MgAjzSXP30

I was just watching this, and for the first minute I realized that this movie had become much more accurate because of the silence of space.

;)

emanswfan said:

I've always felt this scene was too dark with little shadow detail.

http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/40092

I'd say that every scene in the movie is too dark. You've done a good job removing the green haze and brightening the image, but it looks like Luke's shirt is still too red, and R2 may be a bit too blue.

JEDIT: Looking at it again, I notice that the shadows seem to be more crushed than in the blu-ray.

Mrebo said:

Sometimes to get to sleep I put on RLM's prequel reviews. So cathartic.  Or recently, What If the Prequels Were Good (that actually is quite good and worth considering for PT rewriters). If there was a willing artist, an animated or even still-image alternative prequel with good voice work would be awesome.

I really liked his version of Episode 1, but his ideas about Episode 2 don't address many of the problems of the original, such as the involved political discussions or the Jedi-heavy plot. Yoda doesn't need to be there either.

The screenshot of Luke and Beru looks absolutely right, better than anything I have yet accomplished, colorwise. I would be interested in seeing these same color settings used on other scenes. You say that color correction is per scene, however it's my experience with ANH that practically the entire movie suffers from the same damaged highlights and oversaturated blues, suggesting that a single correction would go a long way to solving these problems, and only minor scene by scene color correction would be necessary to make each scene exact. In any case, incredible work!

What tools do you use for the color correction, if you don't mind me asking?

In the course of removing the blue cast of the DVD for my color correction, I've uncovered startling evidence that suggests that Luke didn't even make the throw. There was actually a second "thrower", and the cord from the final movie seems to be added digitally. You can see here the evidence for the original line:

Remember: Back, and to the left. Back, and to the left.

If you have an awkward friend who has a crazy scientific or conspiracy theory, then it is almost guaranteed to be correct, especially if they are ridiculed or ostracized by the establishment for said theory.

Every newspaper is the same unless you yourself read it.

You will always find the keys to an old truck above the sun visor.

The more obscure your hobby, the more relevant it will be.

The more dangerous your opponent is, the more likely it is that he will want to be captured.

Lightning arcs out of electrical equipment right before it explodes.

If a multinational military intelligence coalition has been assembled, the black guy is from America.

Many computers no longer have mice at all, as everyone can access anything using only the keyboard.

If someone coughs, not only are they sick, but they are either dangerously contagious or they are trying to hide a secretly debilitating illness from you.

If you are wrestling with a complex scientific problem, the answer will be revealed to you through a mundane remark or observation when you least expect it.

If you see him fall but you don't see him hit the ground, he is not dead.

If you are in a sword or knife fight, there is a good chance that someone will get a superficial cut to their cheek.

If you are involved in a lightsaber battle, odds are good that it takes place in the prequels.

The quality and history of the sword is more important than your skill using it.

The effects of the vacuum of space upon you never obey the same laws twice.

Your spacesuit makes you move slowly, even when you're not in space.

The engines of your spacecraft are always on, even when flying at a constant rate of speed.

If you are taught by an old master, you will be his final student.

timdiggerm said:

Let's not forget that the Senator photos are taken casually with a DSLR from a weird angle with no real prep to ensure accuracy.

I don't think that the point of this project is accuracy. I believe that both Frank and I simply like the Senator print a lot, despite, and perhaps because of the fact that it may have faded a bit to green while retaining many subtle details of the original. My work is more artistic in intent, so while I will analyze sources mathematically from time to time, what looks good will trump math any day of the week. We all have a different idea of what Star Wars should look like, that's why there are so many versions. I'd rather there be more versions out there than less.

I don't know, there's something rather attractive about it. It's got that massive green fading that a lot of prints suffer from, but that gives it a sense of antiquity. The skin tones are really nice, all things considered. I'd like to see this compared to the Senator frames, like the dinner scene or Obi-wan's "the Force will be with you" shot.

I'm happy with the settings at this point, so I'll be putting them here soon. Meantime, Here are some more shots that benefit substantially from the blue removal and the new settings:

CO said:

NeverarGreat said:

I'm dreading the appearance of the Millennium Falcon, Han Solo, and dozens of other universe-shrinking callbacks in the Sequels.

I agree that the ST could be a colossal blunder for the reasons you cited, but Lucas tried to cater to the OT fans with the PT too with many examples of universe-shrinking plot points:

-C3PO being built by Anakin

-Jango Fett is the clone of all stormtroopers, and just happens to be Boba Fett's dad.

-C3PO living on Uncle Owens Farm during AOTC, yet Owen doesn't remember him 20 years later when he buys him?

-Chewbacca and his home planet just happen to show up in ROTS and they have good relations with Yoda.

 

Indeed, I'm not defending the prequels. It may be, however, that Disney doesn't fully appreciate how badly these plot points damaged the scope of Star Wars.

I've just added a link to the video on the first page. To get it to under 500 mb in good quality, I had to chop it up, but I tried to get a good cross section of scenes, such as the Binary Sunset, Burning Homestead, Lightsaber Duel, Trench Run, Medal Ceremony, etc. So go check it out and leave some feedback!

skyjedi2005 said:

To me the biggest divergence is that the new star wars are solely made for money by Disney studio and not the singular vision of one man.

The three new films are not Lucasfilms even if Disney can now slap that label on them because they purchased the trademark to it.

Lucas directed 4 out of the six original movies.

He is not writing or directing anything on these new movies nor will he have any say in their editing or be behind the B camera on set like on Jedi.

This is not the sequel trilogy Lucas would have given us in 2005 had he decided to continue on, nor is it any of the other attempts at having it made.

I have a suspicion that many many will look back on the Prequels with more forgiving eyes after the ST, since despite their catastrophic flaws, they are still the movies that Lucas wanted and made, not the movies that a company thought that the public would want. He took a stand and said something about corrupt political leaders and a hero with a tragic flaw, even if the movies had a botched execution.

I'm dreading the appearance of the Millennium Falcon, Han Solo, and dozens of other universe-shrinking callbacks in the Sequels. I am very worried that it will be like Star Trek 09 or Into Darkness, simply because Disney prefers the most marketable Star Wars characters and situations over something new. I just watched Star Trek 09 the other day, and realized near the end that the analytical part of my brain had atrophied from disuse while watching that highly polished entertainment product. It's fun and entertaining, but there's no substance or bold reinterpretation of the material. This is what worries me the most about the Star Wars sequels.

Sure, I was about to show today's progress. Unfortunately, Premiere Elements apparently can't do a screenshot of a layer with subtract as a blend mode, so I am taking screenshots right from my monitor. It will therefore not be exact.

You can really see in this last shot how the blue saturation has been taken way down. There's still blue there, but it's not "pooling" on the image like in the DVD. These images are the result of three layers. I attempted to pull up the violets while keeping the greens in the shadows, and the result is much closer to the Senator I think.

That's kind of what is happening, I think. However, the violets remain even after removing the oversaturated blues and reds, so they have high luminance already, just not quite enough to push them into the highlights. So I think that the violets can be fixed with added luminance, whereas the oversaturated reds, and especially the blues, have no corresponding luminance and shouldn't be there. If that makes any sense.

I was thinking about this problem last night, and this morning I realized that it was much simpler than I was making it out to be. It turns out that you could stack as many video layers as you want to get to the correct brightness and then put one more layer on top to remove the oversaturation in the blues and reds.

Do accomplish this, all you need to do is isolate the offending saturation by bringing the brightness of the image down to zero and optimizing the isolation with the gamma level. This essentially deletes everything in the image except for oversaturated colors, and from there you can use the channel mixer to delete some of the red or blue from the isolated colors to soften the effect. Then simply set the blending mode to subtract, and it eliminates the problem areas, and does it better than my previous convoluted method:

Here are some examples without comparison, to save space:

I haven't completely fixed the highlights yet, but it's getting there hopefully.

Thanks all!

I'm at a bit of an impasse right now, as the brightness boosting technique of using "screen" on several layers and this newest technique seem to be mutually exclusive. Meaning that I can remove the blue, but I can't fix the brightness without putting an unaltered video stream above the rest of the video streams, thus reintroducing the blue that I've worked so hard to remove. I'm sure there's an answer, other than rendering the video and then re-importing it to fix the brightness, which might be a mess.

Anyway, I'm glad people are interested in the work, and hopefully something will be useful for other projects at some point.

Onward!

I revisited this endeavor a few days ago, wondering if I could remove that terrible blue ring from around the Death Star explosion on the DVD version. I realize that this was "fixed" for the Blu-ray, but my thinking was that this blue ring was part of a systemic problem with the entire movie. Previous attempts to remove it with a global change had failed, or had pulled all blue from the movie. So I came up with a more surgical approach:

Starting over with an unaltered base movie layer, I pulled up the values of the green and red in the channel mixer, in order to blow out the luminance. The layer on top of that was set to saturation blending mode, meaning that the luminance and hue was carried over from the base layer, with the saturation of the blending layer. To this layer I brought the saturation down to zero, meaning that now I was left with an image that was black and white, but with no saturation and blown out luminance. Finally, a third and final layer was set to "Darker Color" blend mode and placed on top of this black and white image. Now because the blue and red tones are the result of oversaturation, bringing the saturation to zero in the second layer had the result of targeting the blown out tones and making them darker. When darker color was applied to the top layer, the oversaturated colors were erased, while keeping the overall color balance of the DVD:

There's still some blue remaining, but this is still much improved over the original. I checked some other scenes next, and found that R2 had become much less blue:

I thought that this couldn't be right until I went and checked it against the Mike Verta frame found elsewhere on this blog. Turns out that R2 is actually this shade of blue!

There are many improvements in many scenes, such as the hologram scenes:

There are some blown out reds in the film, such as when Leia is hiding from stormtroopers at the beginning, and these are brought under control as well with this change.

The one problem with this technique is that some of the highlights are messed up, but this technique is still a work in progress

SilverWook said:

http://youtu.be/mgffCdhEQgQ

The first part of that trailer gave me chills.

I hope that they don't bring back ghost characters like Yoda and Obi-wan, but for a different reason. Years from now, a whole lot of kids will have seen Episode 7 before any of the other movies, and to ruin Yoda and Obi-wan and spoil Anakin before they've seen the Originals is as bad as what the prequels did. There will come a time when nobody will have experienced Luke's revelations concerning Yoda and Vader as revelations, having been told this information in both the prequels and the sequels. And that does great damage to the Originals in my opinion.

Thanks you guys!

@ TK: Not a stupid question! I had the WookieGroomer version of the HD broadcast at one point, but a computer virus wiped it out. However, I took some screenshots of it, and comparing them to the DVD version it looks like the DVD version is brighter and has better skin tones, as well as less-crushed black levels. However, this could be from many things, such as the WookieGroomer compression or something, but if the HD broadcast was exactly the same as the DVD version except in higher quality, then perhaps it would make more sense to use it or the Blu-ray. However, the main reason that I used the DVD version was to cut down on rendering times.

@ frank678: I'll consider it, if nobody else wants to use these settings for a future release (Despecialized 2.6? Maybe?).

@ g-force: LOL. Wait, there are other color corrections of the 04 DVD out there other than Adywan's and Harmy's? Where have they been hiding?

http://s649.photobucket.com/user/NeverarGreat/library/8-9-13%20Star%20Wars%20Color%20Correction?sort=3&page=1

Password starwars.

I often return to this photo of the Senator Technicolor print because the DVD differs so wildly:

How does a cup go from green to blue between versions of the film? I figure that the blue cast is probably not entirely accurate to the scene, so I'm fine with a neutral white, but all three of these screenshots are very different from each other, and the GOUT is different again. Anyway, any thoughts and suggestions are always welcome.

Settings (to whom it may concern):

Copy the Star Wars video twice, so that you have 3 layers total, a top, middle, and bottom layer.

Top Layer: Set opacity to screen, enable Shadow/Highlight. Set highlight amount to 100, and the first four options below it to 50, and clip the black at 32%. Set all other sliders to 0. Channel Mixer (top to bottom): 77,10,10,0,5,90,5,0,-30,20,120,0. Adjust: Color: Lightness -25, Saturation -25, Gamma 28, Lighting (top to bottom) 100, -100, 0.

Middle Layer: Set opacity to screen, enable Shadow/Highlight. Settings are same as top layer, except with no black clip. Channel Mixer: 95,65,0,0,10,60,43,0,0,0,140,0. Adjust: Color: Lightness -25, Saturation -25, Gamma 15.

Bottom Layer: Image Control: Saturation 90, Shadow/Highlight: Highlight amount 20, all other options set same as middle layer. Channel Mixer: 90,5,-10,0,-3,95,30,-10,-3,83,0

Whew! Enjoy the fruit of those convoluted settings!

At long last the testing is done, and the settings are applied and rendered. They are rather complicated, but they don't blow out the highlights like previous attempts (Correction on bottom):

I'm finally happy with how the Burning Homestead scene has turned out, and the rest of the film is actually brighter than  previous attempts

In comparing these settings to the Team Blu screenshots, it's remarkable how close this one is:

Full res pics to be uploaded soon, as usual. I'll also post the settings, though it's getting increasingly unwieldy to apply and render them. The last render took exactly 18 hours, compared to 5 on my single layer corrections!

emanswfan said:

Another screenshot with nonanamorphic grain and proper filmic adjustments:

http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/35606

Why do I suddenly and for the first time believe that Coruscant is a real place?

Fang Zei said:

Neverar, that's actually reminiscent of the original plan for the ST circa 1980. Wasn't Luke gonna defeat the emperor and vader in VI and then go off and find the actual real big baddie in VII or am I remembering wrong?

I think that the "original" Lucas plan was to reveal the Emperor at the end of the third trilogy, Episode 9. The Sequel Trilogy would also focus on Luke's search for his twin. Of course, Episode 6 ruined this plot, but I think that the Emperor reveal could still work if the Episode 6 Emperor was a clone.

And for those who say this change would render most of Episode 6 pointless, I would say that Episode 6 would become much more like Episode 5 in tone. It allows for a triumphant victory if you wish to end the story at Episode 6, but when you see Episode 7, you are forced to reexamine one of the main weaknesses of Episode 6 - the frankly unbelievable defeat of the Empire - as the villainous masterstroke that it could potentially be.

Ryan McAvoy said:

Has anybody considered that JJ might lead off the new sequels with the idea that although the Death Star was destroyed, Vader and Palpatine killed and the Imperial fleet driven off... that the Empire is still fully in control under a new ruler?

Maybe things in the galaxy have got even worse. Maybe the defeat at Endor caused the Imperial governers to close ranks and go on a scorched earth rampage. Assasinating the governments of planets like Mon Calimari, Sullust and Corellia. Installing martial law accross the universe, perhaps the Rebellion died away and are only just starting to rebuild their forces.

Most seem to assume it's going to remnants or total peace. But the original Yub Nub ending left it very ambiguous. I'm not saying this is what I want to see but it's possible.

I just posted an idea similar to this on the scriptwriting section (Jedi Dawn). I would definitely like something like this to happen if they're going to be throwing the EU out the window. In Jedi Dawn, for instance, the opening crawl establishes that the "Emperor" on the 2nd Death Star was just a clone of the true Emperor, who now rules the galaxy with an iron fist.

The biggest problem with the new trilogy is that you have to introduce a new set of villains, while having a glut of old heroes. This solves both problems quite neatly.