NeverarGreat

I have a bit of a problem right now, hopefully someone can help...

In attempting to fix the blown out highlights in the Burning Homestead scene, I used Photoshop Elements to experiment with the histograms. By using the "darken highlights" tool in the highlights/shadows toolbox, I was able to obtain a very promising result with both underexposed and overexposed parts of the film.

Here's the problem. The shadows/highlights tool in Premiere Elements 11 doesn't work for me, because it seems to be unable to darken highlights. Does anyone know of a plugin for Premiere that will do this, or some sort of workaround?

JEDIT: Nevermind, it seems to work, and the results are quite good! The tool is not particularly intuitive though.

Some evidence for the "cloned Emperor, disreputable troops" idea:

The Emperor's "best" troops are babes in the woods, easily dispatched by teddy bears.

The inept Admiral Piett was stationed on the bridge of the Executor, Vader's flagship. Vader was instructed by the "Emperor" to return to the ship, but Luke's arrival on the planet disrupted this plan. The bridge shields of the Executor failed during the attack, to the seeming surprise of the officers onboard. This could have been a deliberate sabotage in order to ensure that Piett (and possibly Vader) were done away with.

The Imperial fleet is given direct orders to hold back and only keep the Rebels from escaping. After the destruction of the Death Star, they presumably retreat beyond sensor range to ambush the Rebels before they leave Endor.

Speaking of the Death Star, this time it has shafts running directly into the core, as if someone specifically wanted it to be destroyed in this way. The Death Star itself is honeycombed with cavities, saving on supplies while doing the bare minimum to make the station operational.

Vader only ever sees a hologram of the Emperor in Empire, and the hologram looks very different from the Emperor in Jedi. This hologram could show the true Emperor, with the clone decoy aging very quickly in the time since Empire so that he looked substantially different from the real Emperor.

The real Emperor, suspecting treachery from Vader, who failed to kill Luke after his attempt to turn him failed in Cloud City, chose to send a clone decoy to the Death Star to turn Luke to the Dark Side with the help of Vader. Whether or not Luke was turned to the Dark Side was irrelevant, as he planned for the destruction of the Death Star to make an example of the inept engineers who failed in designing the first Death Star. If against all odds the Death Star survived the Rebel attack, the confrontation between Luke and Vader and the "Emperor" would be instructive as a test of Vader's loyalty. If Luke was turned, he would have a new ally who could kill Vader, and if Vader turned traitor, father and son would not escape the Imperial fleet.

The "Emperor" brought dignitaries with him to the Death Star. These would be men whom he suspected of traitorous intent or ineptitude, and as the real Emperor was constantly in hiding for his continued safety, they would not recognize a decoy.

As to the specific events after Jedi, our heroes spend the night on Endor as the Rebel fleet protect the Ewoks from Death Star debris. Leia senses Luke is in turmoil and leaves Han Solo and the village early the next morning to find Luke and R2 miles away prepping the Imperial shuttle for liftoff. He says that he senses impending danger, though Leia states that there is no way that Imperial reinforcements could arrive so soon. Luke says that he was no match for the Emperor, and that his victory was actually a failure. He is going into exile to become a master, like Yoda.

It is then that the Imperial fleet attacks the planet, and the damaged Rebel fleet is no match for the Imperial forces. The capital ships are shot down, and the Ewok village is bombarded from space. Han Solo, Chewbacca, and Lando are killed in the bombardment, never having gotten to their ship, as is C-3PO (Han Solo never actually saw the Falcon again after his fateful statement before the battle). Luke, Leia, and R2 barely escape the destruction with their lives.

Leia is carrying the child of Han Solo, conceived in the first hours of Rebel Victory before his tragic death. Luke vows to rebuild the Jedi order and train Leia in the ways of the Force.

It is a time of galactic tyranny. The cunning Emperor, using a twisted clone decoy and his most disreputable troops, lured the Rebellion into a false victory at Endor where they were crushed in the grip of his Imperial starfleet.

The galaxy, losing all hope of rebellion, was quickly subdued by Imperial forces eager to avoid the wrath of the Emperor, and for thirty years the people of the galaxy were subjected to the horrors of despotism.

Now, beyond all hope, the Rebel hero Luke Skywalker has returned, and with him are the beginnings of a great order of Jedi Knights bringing the light of peace and justice to the darkening stars....

Alright, so this is not a script that I'm going to be writing, but just an idea that I've had for some time, and wanted to know what people thought of it. Would you like Disney to use an idea like this for Episode 7, if it turns out they won't be following the EU anyway?

I just listened to The Last Crusade soundtrack again today, and man, several parts sounded like they were right out of Empire.

I agree that Williams is best with themes. The Holy Grail theme is just so great, woven into the rest of the music, it gives the trilogy the perfect sendoff.

In trying to bring more brightness to the movie, this latest stab has three layers of video, two with the "screen" option enabled. This means that I can technically have a channel mixer on each one, and alter the highlight color and luminosity separately from the midtones and shadows. With so many settings at once it's kind of overwhelming, so I essentially left the colors the same, but I managed to pull the brightness of the movie up again without crushing the whites. Some shots are right at the far edge of the histogram, which is what we want:

Compare this to the GOUT, and this version may be even brighter:

In my humble opinion, I think the same shot in Harmy's Despecialized 2.1 could stand to use these settings, as it suffers from the magenta tones of the DVD/Blu-ray:

It's funny, but I don't have that movie right now, as it's the only one of mine being lent out to a friend. It's interesting what audiences latch on to, seeing as this is so similar in feel to the beginning of the Matrix, and came out a year before the Matrix.

The best part of the movie is how the detective keeps saying that our hero doesn't strike him as a murderer, when that's exactly how he strikes me.

Williarob said:

The second image in the album (this one), looks like it came from Team Negative1's LPP print, note the green stain and the frame edges.

 

Aye, it did. That album has last year's attempt at a correction, as well as that attempt to repair the Negative1 frame, among with some other miscellaneous items. The most recent album is titled "7-9-13 Star Wars Color Correction", that shows the final effort, and has almost a hundred comparison shots in it.

I really like the reveal of Anakin. Trying to remember Anakin's introduction in TPM, I really had to think a minute. He was just part of Watto's shop, saying really awkward exposition. Your version of Anakin so far, simply by making him a stowaway, says a lot about the character without him saying a word. This is how Anakin should be written.

When you said that that Nellith ran along a wall, I pictured Matrix-esque Trinity antics. That kind of image is fine, but be careful that it doesn't become like CG Yoda bouncing off the walls.

As to how the fight is going, I'd just say that for an enemy to be menacing they need to kill some heroes, or at least drive them back to show their superiority. In the first minutes of Star Wars, we saw Rebel troops mowed down by the dozens by the clearly superior Stormtroopers. Of course, the rest of the movies tried their best to prove this image wrong, but it sets the tone effectively. I worry that we don't really get that feeling here. Not that the Mandalorians must be this deadly, but it seems like now is not the place for witty banter. What is our heroe's game plan, precisely? Are they trying to kill all of the clones? Are they trying to get the Holocron first? How do they expect to "get out of this alive", exactly? This is not so much criticism as much as wondering aloud. I look forward to seeing how this is resolved.

I just want to thank You_Too for pointing out that the source I had been working from was not correct. I thought that it would be easy to simply apply the settings from my previous work to the correct source (a demuxed video stream of the DVD), but the difference in brightness screwed everything up.

Sigh.

I started over, discarding my previous work. I ended up using two copies of the video file, layered on top of each other, in an attempt to correct the underexposed source. The settings for the top layer of video, set to "screen" in the opacity menu, are:

Image Control: Contrast: 30

Color: Saturation: -100

The lower video is:

Image Control: Contrast 85, Saturation 85.

Gamma 11

Lighting: Brightness 50, Contrast 30, Exposure 80.

Channel Mixer (top to bottom): 78, 23,-6, 1, 5, 82, 5, 1, -12, 8, 90, 0.

The results are almost identical to the previous attempt, but with a very slight increase in overall brightness and slightly less muddy colors. All hundred or so images are here, password starwars as usual:

http://s649.photobucket.com/user/NeverarGreat/library/7-9-13%20Star%20Wars%20Color%20Correction?sort=3&page=1

Some observations that I had during this project:

It seems like some of the color has been pulled down out of the image, especially in the red and green range. I say this because when upping the red and green constants in the channel mixer, the Death Star interior suddenly looks correct. The walls, which have little color in them to start with, are definitely more blue than normal in the DVD. Adding this red and green "fills in" this color, making them much more even and natural looking, especially in the shadows. I didn't want to add too much color here, but the difference is noticeable:

The starfield is also noticeably brightened.

The reds were blown out in the DVD, so dialing them back and increasing the brightness did wonders:

The Binary Sunset looks much better, the red lights throughout the movie are accurate, and the pink flashes are much less noticeable, mostly because of the somewhat repaired highlights.

The downside to these settings is the burning homestead scene, which was actually too bright in the DVD. I settled for not technically clipping anything in that scene, although it definitely looked better before. This is where the limitations of the source become apparent. In the above explosion, the GOUT shows some highlights that simply do not exist in the DVD. Most other issues can be solved by a scene by scene correction, but crushing the lowest and highest parts of the image simply cannot be corrected entirely. However, there is still some wonderful detail hiding in there, and I hope that these settings are at least taken into consideration by other correctors out there (now that the source is correct, that is)!

CP3S said:

Tobar said:

NeverarGreat said:

the original German film (which I have seen, don't ask why)

Er, why would we? It's a classic.

Yeah, in these parts you're much more likely to get questioned if you haven't seen it.

In fact, while reading your post I almost wondered if perhaps it was a typo and you meant to say "which I haven't seen, don't ask why".

I forgot about the character of those on this forum for a moment. In my opinion, most people would consider watching Metropolis to be an endurance test, not just a chore. It is rather long and the acting of the time was sometimes painful to watch.

What the Two Towers Said: "No sign of a quarry but what bare rock can tell."

What I heard for years: "No SON of a quarry but what bare rock can tell."

It makes much more sense now.

I like the lightsaber introduction. It may be better if there was an action scene previously where only blasters were used, to illustrate that they were the primary weapons in this war, but this is good too. My prequels will be largely without the lightsaber for this reason.

I like the use of ion cannons as well. It would be neat to have the gravity go off for a few seconds, to drive home the fact that they are in deep space.

Some of the exposition in this scene, like the "No way these guys are from the Republic" bit seem out of place, for someone who catches the sarcasm wouldn't explain further. It seems like you want someone who doesn't know this universe to be on board, but all of the characters so far are "in the know", and are not available for basic universe exposition. I don't know how to solve this problem, except for making one of the characters, perhaps the computer, more ignorant of the galaxy's workings.

All rather nitpicky, as nothing's really wrong so far. Full speed ahead I say!

I quite like Yoodie. I don't think it would be a problem to have a shipboard AI, especially if it is used as an explanation as to why they aren't used much. I can think of several reasons that would be the case, such as the fact that central computer systems can easily be rendered nonfunctional by way of a computer virus, like in Battlestar Galactica.

My only major worry with this story is that it may be a bit confusing for audiences at first, but if as you say it is intended to be seen after the OT, then that probably isn't so much of a problem.

The OT crew are rebels. That's how they grew up, that's how they think. They are used to the odds being stacked against them, getting out by the skin of their teeth.

But the galaxy has changed. They aren't fighting the establishment anymore. They ARE the establishment. Back then good was good, evil was evil, and it was war. Now everything is in shades of gray. There are no empires to topple, no wars to fight; at least not in the way that they have been fought. There are new enemies to fight, but they are so different that the old guard cannot understand them.

It's a new kind of war, with a new kind of warrior. The heroes of the Rebellion are the first to fall.

(This will never happen, but I'd like the Celestials to return)

I suppose it would work, but Luke would have to be pretty ignorant of most of galactic history to not know what a lightsaber looked like if they were widely used just a single generation ago. Not to say that such wars with lightsabers couldn't have happened at some point. It just doesn't seem like a good fit with the Clone Wars, unless of course the Clone Wars went on for generations and the lightsaber was only used at the beginning of the wars.

That is an interesting idea. It seems like, if such a medieval war was fought, it would have been many generations before the OT, so before the clone wars. There is also the matter of who would build such weapons. Vader implies that building a lightsaber is something that only Jedi can do, so I don't think it would be economically feasible to equip an entire army with them.

By the way, anyone else think that lightsaber should be be a term in this site's lexicon, so that it isn't underlined in red? Can that be changed?

TV's Frink said:

Fang Zei said:

Mayhew got his chance to come back in ROTS.

Which gave us one of the worst moments in all of cinema, Yoda declaring his feelings for Chewie.

It's like Cloud Atlas; it's all connected. Like poetry.

Was the entire Biggs scene on the Blu-ray?

Metropolis (2001 film)

A beautifully animated Japanese movie that takes some elements from the original German film (which I have seen, don't ask why), but tells a different story. I found it to be surprisingly original.

If you watch it and find it perplexing that Kenichi, our young male protagonist, can fall several stories onto razor-sharp debris and emerge without a scratch, or grab onto a metal bar with one hand after a fifty foot drop, I suggest you consider that he is actually a highly advanced cyborg that doesn't know it is a robot, developed by the Japanese as an answer to Tima and smuggled into Metropolis as the detective's nephew. This is something I came up with after watching the movie that makes it much more interesting.

4.5 out of 5 rusty robots.

^My father was killed by a six-fingered man.

Davnes007 said:

It's over 20,000!

Not even master Yoda has a midichlorian count that high!

Oh hai Lando!

Lando...

...Lando, staaaahp!

From another perspective, it was much easier to make irreversible mistakes when working optically instead of digitally, so hairs and smudges could be considered a "consequence of the technique used at the time", despite being mistakes. I don't think that they have historical relevance, but it goes to show that there's always a gray area in this discussion. 

Ah wait, it's a riddle!

By forces, he means the two sides of the Force, dark and light. They come together at full strength when Anakin brings balance to the Force, so they are perfectly balanced at full strength within himself when he saves Luke and destroys the Emperor in Return of the Jedi. This is also when the Forces of the Empire and the Forces of the Rebellion come together at full strength. So the number you're searching for, bruninho, is 6.