Puggo - Jar Jar's Yoda

Is anyone here bidding on it?  Please let me know, because if not, I will.

Darth Ideias said:

I am a christian and need to be on the safe side. When you join tell me your name and what church you came from.

I'm trying to be on the safe side too, so I can't give out that kind of personal information to strangers on the internet.

The music during the lightsaber duel in TPM.

There’s an interesting 16mm film up on eBay right now:

http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=250398159084

Advertised as from the late 70s, Star Wars advertisement promoting vaccination for kids.

If it hasn’t been preserved before, I’m willing to do it.  Thus, if we want it, it would also make sense to coordinate, rather than bid against one another.

When I was making "Rescuing Star Wars", I had a difficult time replicating the clock wipe in Vegas.  Vegas DOES have a clock wipe, but (at least in my version), when you turn on "feather", it only feathers the moving portion.  In SW, the stationary portion is also feathered.  It took a ton of tweaking to get it to look right.

Ripplin said:

corellian77 said:

The climax of the film could be discovering that it is George himself who is hunting down the team members in an attempt to halt any version of SW that looks better than the GOUT from hitting the public.

Nice, but a little predictable, though. ;)

How about if in the final showdown, George tells Laserman: "I am your father!!  Join me and together we'll make more changes to the SE.  It is your destiny!!!"

C3PX said:

Really? How did I miss that? I have seen MP and the Holy G millions of times. You are not talking about the Black Knight bit are you? Because I am pretty sure he wasn't singing any opera.

I was joking... hoping to evoke pictures of Hayden sitting there in the flames, his arm burned off, saying "it's only a flesh wound!".

Unfortunately, a similar scene was already done in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

vote_for_palpatine said:

I wonder how Lucas' prequel-era editors would have handled certain OT moments

We already know the answer to that question:  Han would step on Jabba's tail, jawas would do a 3-stooges routine, there'd be extended dance numbers with characters from Monsters Inc, etc.

The artist's gallery is amazing, and very funny.  My favorite was "My Little Storm Trooper".

SilverWook said:

Ripplin,  those are licensed legal "digest" versions sold by Ken Films back in the day.

Right, if you want the "illegal" versions, then you need to find a copy of the Puggo Edition, which is basically an unauthorized DVD telecine of these same [legal] 8mm Ken films.  :)

Just so y'all know where I've been, here's a quick update.  I've been going through reel #1 making all of the patches it's been needing - little things here and there that crept in during capture.  Also, I've found that the spatial and temporal smoothers work great in some scenes, but poorly in others.  So I've made passes with and without, and am going through scene-by-scene selecting from them.  It's quite slow - I can get through about 4 minutes of film in a one hour session - but it should make a noticeable difference in the end.  So, progress is being made.  Of course, without seeing how cruddy it was to begin with, it'll probably still look cruddy to most of you, but hey at least I will have tried.

By the way, as I was looking very closely at some of the frames of reel #2, I made an amazing new discovery... shortly after Luke and Han arrive at the death star, one of the storm troopers bumps his head...

netgurucr said:

Puggo - Jar Jar's Yoda said:

netgurucr said:

Puggo - Jar Jar's Yoda said:

Can Photoshop be used to color-correct video?

Yes, you save each frame as a PNG or JPG, and then correct them.

Oh, well in that case, after I'm done with the Puggo Grande, you're welcome to borrow the original .avi files and do your magic.  Should be easy to remove all of the spots and scratches one by one too, while you're at it  :)

When you're finished, send it to me in an uncompressed PNG or JPG format, on a USB flash drive. Then I'll do the color correction magic.

Awesome!  Better yet, how about if I email it to you?

netgurucr said:

Puggo - Jar Jar's Yoda said:

Can Photoshop be used to color-correct video?

Yes, you save each frame as a PNG or JPG, and then correct them.

Oh, well in that case, after I'm done with the Puggo Grande, you're welcome to borrow the original .avi files and do your magic.  Should be easy to remove all of the spots and scratches one by one too, while you're at it  :)

netgurucr said:

Photoshop.

Can Photoshop be used to color-correct video?

SilverWook said:

I presume it's stuff along the lines of the phony dialog Dave Prowse was given on the Empire set. "Obi-Wan killed your father."

Which in my opinion would have been a considerably better plot twist.

Spaced Ranger said:

Puggo - Jar Jar's Yoda said:

neither of the DVD players that I have tried have explicit settings for 4:3 vs 16:9.

I'm surprised to read this. Of units I've seen (in passing), DVD player setup is usually accessible via the remote control's dedicated "setup" button. There may be certain models that rely on covert number-pad sequence entries or "press & hold" keys -- those would be revealed in a user's manual or a website

Now look here... I'm ok with scanning a two-hour motion picture, experimenting with filter settings, color correction, and winding my way through the maze of dvd flags and aspect ratios.  But are you seriously asking me to read the user's manual?!  C'mon man, be reasonable!!

Ok, this is all very helpful.  Thank you so much for the detailed answers! Unfortunately, neither of the DVD players that I have tried have explicit settings for 4:3 vs 16:9.  I've got a couple of other players I can try, which I'll do tonight.

After having tried several filter options, it's looking more and more like I will be doing less and less.  The film is noisy and grainy enough that trying to really clean it up aggressively always seems to leave heavy artifacts or loss of detail.  I'll probably end up doing some color correction, a little bit of patching, maybe a very light temporal and spatial smoothing (as much to improve compression as anything else), and that's about it.  So far my attempts at spot removing, cleaning, sharpening, and even contrast adjustment(!) have all - in my opinion - made it look worse. I'm still playing with smoothing/cleaning filters and settings.  I don't want any artifacts.  Of course, if anyone else wants to try and work with the original captures and do their own cleaning, that is always possible because I'm keeping the raw frame captures too.

And, after playing with many sample clips, at the risk of enduring some agonizing cries, I'm going with the slightly curved borders.  In my opinion they look the best on a large screen, considering the degree of vertical cropping.  Actually I think they look cool, even a bit "retro".

OK, now I have a very specific technical question regarding .m2v encoding.

I have been able to resize correctly to 16:9, and verified it against the 2004 disks.  However, there is one small point I need to make sure I'm doing correctly...

I am using TMPGEnc to encode to mpeg2.  One of the parameters is the output aspect ratio.  It allows me to select 4:3, 16:9, or 2:11...(can't remember the exact numbers on the third one - but that choice is irrelevant anyways because if I choose that, DVD-Lab claims it isn't compliant with encoding to DVD).  The question is, should I choose 4:3 or 16:9.  Now, before you tell me that I'm stupid for even asking, hear me out...

It doesn't seem to matter on both DVD players I've tried with my widescreen plasma TV.  In both cases, if I view it in 16:9 it properly stretches the image across the width of the screen.  And, in both cases, if I view it in 4:3, it produces the same gray side bars in both cases and uses the same provided letterbox.  I can't tell any difference whether I selected 4:3 or 16:9 during encoding to .m2v.  Also, to my consternation, BOTH versions fail to squish to the proper aspect ratio if I set the aspect ratio on the TV to 4:3 (i.e., it doesn't add additional letterbox in either case).

However, there is SOME difference in the resulting files, because the icons that are created in DVD-Lab when I open up the .m2v files are different - one icon has larger letterboxes than the other. My question is, what is the difference in the .m2v files?  Is it just meta information stored along with the video, that some applications use?  Is my television somehow compensating and the end result just looks the same on that particular set?  Is the difference significant, and should I care?  Is it normal for the 4:3 playback to still look unsquished (too tall)?  I thought that anamorphic DVDs were supposed to have correct aspect ratio regardless of playback at 4:3 or 16:9 (mine are only correct if I set my TV to 16:9).

I know this is a lot of questions, but I want to make sure and encode this thing correctly.

Jedikev said:Which did you like?

What an odd choice of words.  Sorta like, "which do you like, being hacked by an axe or burned in a fire?"

I've also exchanged emails with Alexandre.

C3PX said:

As for George's creation to do whatever he pleases with, yeah, that one never gets old.

That one never fails to drive me up the wall. It's such pat bullshite.

What I always find so hilarious about that argument, is that it is used as part of larger argument defending how great the PT and SE are.  That is, someone starts by saying the PT/SE are great, and then when that doesn't impress, they say "well, it's George's so he can do whatever he wants."  Well, frankly, I don't see how that does anything but concede that what we have here is a madman wrecking havoc... it's certainly not going to make me think any better about the PT or the SE, as far as their quality is concerned.  To stretch the analogy, it's like saying Naziism was great because Hitler could do whatever he wanted with Germany.

Interesting.  There are also some really wierd motion artifacts.  Look at the frames as the scene changes from the ship approaching the green planet, into the scene of the ship above the forest.  Besides the obvious movement of the planet and forest as the scene changes, there's a HUGE tear at the top of the planet, presumably as "depan" tries to extend the top of the frame after having moved it  This particular problem might be fixable with better scene detection - is it an option?

So what's not to like about "weeza freeee!!!" ?

One of my favorite moments in the OT is when the three have just escaped from the garbage masher, and Leia starts complaining about Han... at the beginning, Han totally ignores her - specifically, here is a princess trying to get Han's attention and give him an order and he doesn't even acknowledge her, he's too busy barking at Chewie, calling him a coward. I really think that scene is masterfully done and shows the degree to which Han doesn't give a rat's a** about someone's rank.

I also like the scene when he and Luke are in the cockpit talking about Leia.  Although Han expresses his interest, he seems to be doing it as much just to tease Luke.

By contrast, even in ESB Han's dialogue was a bit less carefully crafted.  Although it had moments of brilliance ("I love you" - "I know").