NeverarGreat

jarbear said:

Its progressing really nicely Nev, really nicely.

I’m thinking the Luke by the Log stuff is going to be the pain in the butt to work with since is glowing is different affected by the original shot’s day time coloring/brightness.

You have no idea. Luke has basically no glow in the original due to the high-key lighting, so practically all of his brightness now is due to roto work. Same thing with Rey’s hood. Luckily the scene just short enough that after working on it, I still have some sanity left. Barely 😉

Okay, here is the new attempt at implementing these critiques:

https://vimeo.com/520121712

Password: fanedit

The fireside chat is now even darker, with much more roto work.

The second half of the Hut scene is now lightened to merge more seamlessly with the next scene.

The sunrise scene has a grade which is now at 50% strength to keep a bit more of the original look.

Somebody get Adywan on the line!

Ah yes, that’s a good one.

DominicCobb said:

This is the best I’ve seen it so far, but I’m still not buying those shots in the sitting on a log scene. Way too warm and bright.

Harsh, but fair.

But I can’t look at it anymore tonight, my eyes are more tired than this movie’s cliche’s.

JEDIT: One thing that I’ve noticed while working on this is that I ‘buy’ Luke’s ghost much more in dark scenes. There’s a good reason the previous films only showed Force Ghosts at night.

To show how much I love y’all:

https://vimeo.com/519825458

Password: fanedit

No sound, for even my love has limits. And I don’t have a good source 😉

Anyway, there’s no second establishing shot since I’m not sure if it can be made dark enough for these scenes.

The fireside chat is just about as dark as it will get, methinks, and the light entering the hut is slightly brighter to give more of a gradient into morning.

It’s an interesting idea to start the island scene in total darkness. It would make sense to have a shot of the island at night from TLJ for this, maybe with a small spot of fire. To darken the flaming TIE sequence is doable, and I bet the next shots could be darkened a bit more as well to further match the hut.

Yeah, it’s best to keep the scenes together.

Here’s a mockup of what I was thinking:

https://vimeo.com/519778585

Password: fanedit

This way we can interpret as much time as necessary between hut and shore, and doesn’t spoonfeed us the answer to the wayfinder problem.

Jar Jar Bricks said:

It’s important to clarify that I’m not trying to be rude when I say the following. I think your work is really well done, Nev.

But why should we delete portions of the film in order to keep this cosmetic change? It looks like Luke’s “You have everything you need” would have to go so you could create a transition to something else for a while. I’d personally prefer to have content rather than a little less content in a different shade. What do you all think, though?

Again, I think it’s a cool idea but might not be worth it.

No offense taken!

I was just spitballing ways to make it seem like more time could pass, and in that idea the ‘you have everything you need’ could stay and just be moved to directly after ‘the thousand generations live in you’, and the transition would happen right after that. The idea would lose the lines from Rey about how she’s stuck on the island, but that feels if anything like she has allowed Luke to make her decision for her and is now committed to going to Exegol where as if you cut those lines of Rey’s we can allow her more time for her decision.

It’s not strictly necessary of course, but it might be worth looking at if people aren’t sold on the passage of time based on color grading alone.

ThisIsCreation said:

I think the scene in the hut looks beautiful and the dialogue should remain untouched.

Would having a night shot of the island from TLJ help in any way?

A night shot of the island would only make sense at the beginning or end of the Hut scene since I don’t think the first part of the sequence would work at night. If it went anywhere, it would probably go right before the Hut scene, but I don’t think it’s necessary if the time is implied to be dusk at the beginning of the scene.

The trouble is that it’s really hard to sell a nighttime look to the island except for inside the hut, so the time skip would have to happen between their conversation and the hut, which isn’t great, or between the hut and her finding the wayfinder.

Yes, it’s cut.

I wonder, what if the scene in the hut ended with ‘A thousand generations live in you now.’ (cut to Rey, Luke’s voice offscreen which drifts off into echoes) ‘You have everything you need’.

Cut to: Rey finds the other wayfinder.

This would allow Luke’s ghost an exit and give Rey a chance to think and decide what to do, maybe have a bit of sleep, then get the wayfinder the next morning and Luke’s help would then be a bit more of a surprise since he’s already had what could amount to a decent exit, with his last appearance being the fanservice icing on top of the plot cupcake.

I feel like it’s similar to the trip to Alderaan in ANH; based on the events that happen on the Falcon, it feels like it takes maybe twenty minutes, but the ‘canon’ timeline takes hours at least.

Every change of location in the island scene is written to lead into the next, but there’s no reason that Rey couldn’t have had a bit of a sleep at some point while waiting for Luke to appear in the hut or the TIE to stop burning. In a perfect edit I would maybe try to cut Rey racing out of the hut to check on the TIE so as to better imply that she took her time and spent the night while waiting for the fire to die down, but that may not be feasible.

Jar Jar Bricks said:

Hal 9000 said:

Here’s a full mockup of the Ach-To sequence, featuring a regrade by NeverArGreat:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UpnKp8-35PMwuWDXiv2ZjIvsZ93y0BE0/view?usp=sharing

I agree with everyone else that the nighttime and morning regrades look fantastic. Not sold on the evening, though.

Also, I find it somewhat hard to believe that Rey and Luke would be talking ALL night long. Of course, Ahch-To could have a shorter day/night cycle if we wanted to. But the impression for the average viewer is that she was there for about 10 hours. Meh.

Is it possible that when she is burning the Falcon it is night? That would not only make the timing make more sense, but also remove the evening regrade that doesn’t look as good.

The issue is that there are quite a few shots with a bright sky directly behind/through Rey and Luke. I masked those out and darkened them for an evening look, but I don’t know if replacing them with night would work at all, and if it did it might just look obviously day for night. It would certainly be harder than masking the door and window of the hut.

As someone who didn’t know much about the historical events described in the film, I also felt like it was rather directionless and dull, but my girlfriend found it interesting because she knew a lot about those events beforehand so it was interesting when the narrative ‘went off the rails’ by the end.

I just didn’t know there were rails in the first place, and after being told that my estimation of the movie went up.

I can certainly give the scene another go, since I agree that the first bit is too orange and it probably doesn’t go dark enough leading into the hut.

As for a de-blued Luke, what kind of effect should we be going for here? Do we want the overall blue of the effect pulled back so that he’s more ‘ghostly’, or is the intent to bring out more of his natural colors so that it appears like a faded version of Mark Hamill?

Based on the discussion of the Kylo Falcon scene, I wondered what progress has been made in modern content aware filters so I did a test in After Effects and compared it to Telecine’s work:

https://vimeo.com/519372759

Password: fanedit

Keep in mind that Telecine probably used multiple approaches whereas I simply threw the shots into the machine and rendered the results. The settings were set to ‘object’ tracking, and I did a fade around the timecode of 5 pixels. I think some of these results are pretty good, all things considered. Of course, Telecine’s work is more seamless in most shots.

In particular, shots 2 and 4, the long tracking shots, are both improved in AE. There’s some trouble with both, but it’s not insurmountable. Also, shot 5 looks just about perfect to me right out of the can. This is good news to me since the moving camera shots are the hardest to work with in my traditional Photoshop approach. I think a combination of approaches would be ideal here, doing the more painstaking image replacement for static shots with elements moving past them, and content aware filters for moving camera shots.

Although, I wonder if the ‘surface’ option is better for static shots where objects move in front of the background. Used with the ‘reference frame’ option, it could be ideal.

So, has anyone else played around with this or other content-aware filters, and if so, are there any tricks you’ve found to get good results?

LesPaul32 said:

21C Peasant said:

Kylo Searches the Falcon - No time code

Most of it is not my work, but I did touch it up a bit.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1zBPwVfzpl8kW58uNOWS5UPHgDklb3kMt/view?usp=sharing

On the topic of the TFA Kylo in the Falcon scene: 21C Peasant posted the above wizardry over in the “Info: Fixing the TFA and TLJ Deleted Scenes” thread a few months back.

For my money, this is the most polished version of the scene out there at the moment. It’s so close to being completely seamless, imo.

However pie-in-the-sky the idea may currently be, I would absolutely LOVE to see this Kylo/Ben moment integrated into TROS somehow.

That version is Telecine’s work with the first shot cropped to remove the timecode.

JEDIT: I have done some experimentation here, so I’d suggest moving this discussion away from Hal’s already burdened thread. 😃

Hal 9000 said:

If I recall correctly, Sir Ridley helped remove the timecode as well. It was some advanced, painstaking effort and far from automatic.

That’s correct. SirRidley did most of the work on the Leia scene timecode and I just tackled one complicated timecode shot in that scene. It’s really painstaking, and this page details how I did it with moving objects in the frame:

https://originaltrilogy.com/topic/The-Force-Awakens-The-Starlight-Project-WIP-WORKPRINT-RELEASED/id/54912/page/7

There might be better technology now which can better automate the process.

BrotherOfSasquatch said:

NeverarGreat said:

Hey, I’m all for someone removing the timecodes and attempting to include the Falcon deleted scene in this movie…for totally selfless reasons of course 😉

Slightly off-topic but has anyone been able to successfully remove the time code from it? Or even from the rest of the TFA deleted scenes for that matter?

I do really love the Kylo Falcon scene and that was a deleted scene I couldn’t understand why it got deleted. However, I do think it would fit better in an edit of TFA rather than this TROS edit.

The only completely successful attempt was the Leia and Kor Sella scene for Restructured. A user named Telecene did a partial timecode removal of the Kylo Falcon scene, but every other attempt has largely just cropped the timecode out.

Eventually I hope to do the timecode removal of the Klyo scene and several others from TFA, but the time and effort required are quite daunting.

I don’t think it would be practical, but I’m all for someone removing the timecodes and attempting to include the Falcon deleted scene in this movie…for totally selfless reasons of course 😉

Ehh, I think it’s too much on top of the action.

Replace each crawl with an opening narration by the main character of the respective films.

This narration continues as the interior monologue of the main characters ala Lynch’s Dune.

Hal 9000 said:

Maybe Luke hallucinated a second Sun as he was dying from focusing so hard.

The novelization suggests that the Ach-To scene begins near dusk, continues overnight, and ends with the sunrise. If that can be realized well and without making the scene difficult to see, it could be a good way to imply a longer stay on the planet. Especially now that the 16-hour ticking clock has been removed. Yeah they’re in a hurry, but that specific element is gone.

RISE. Anyone feel up to the task? Obviously we will want to use jonh’s haircut footage once finalized, but the work done to the footage can be applied to this footage. This isn’t needed, but could be a nice alteration. I’d say better as subtle; I don’t want it to look like the theater’s bulb burned out. Just enough to convey the time of day using cinema parlance.

It’s pretty easy to make the first and last parts look like sunset/sunrise. Here’s a blanket grade I put over the whole thing pretty quickly:

http://www.framecompare.com/image-compare/screenshotcomparison/KGYZGNNX

The light would be reduced throughout the scene, with some power windows to keep the firelight and ghost effects bright. The trick would be to make part of it look like night. I assume the night would be within Luke’s hut, and would take some more dedicated power windows. Rey would be cast in shadow with a slight blue glow from Luke’s ghost and the bright sky outside would need to be darkened, but it’s possible.

“My powers have doubled since the last time we met, Obi-wan.”