RU.08

Asaki said:

I have absolutely no doubts. I’ve seen my share of “how did Lucas mess this up?”, but every time I watch one of your clips, I am amazed at just how botched the BluRays really are.

To be fair to Lucasfilm, what they gave us was decent enough for 2004 standards, and was only intended to be for DVD. The fact they couldn’t be bothered to do a proper restoration for HD is where the issue lies.

Williarob said:

Yeah, I was the person who reached out and got stuck in the middle. I had just joined the team and had no idea any of this was happening. Mike had just done a late night video Q & A and had mentioned that he didn’t know what print -1 had but would like to know if it was something he could use. I reached out to him and gave him some sample frames. Mike immediately recognized the print (which astonished me at the time) as being the Spanish print he had already scanned. I asked for help with the Greedo scene and Mike very kindly provided us with the full scene in 4k - which I used in the final version. Mike also requested we send him Reel 1 of the Spanish Print again so that he could get it rescanned, and I passed on the request to -1 who told me “no way”, and went on to bash Mike in another thread here on OT. -1 Also refused to even acknowledge Mike’s contribution to the project - not even a “thank you” for the Greedo scene.

Yeah. The fact that their SilverScreen release doesn’t even thank people who contributed something speaks volumes. They put in a TN1 intro - that’s fine - but without any “thanks to all who contributed” or “thanks to - Mike, Harmy, Poita, etc, and everyone else who contributed but wishes to remain unnamed”.

Also, I’m going to shoot you a PM - it’s about something you are probably already aware of, but won’t hurt to double-check. 😃

Poita, the incredible contribution you’ve made to the preservation communities is hugely appreciated, without you many preservation efforts would never have begun. Godspeed.

poita said:

For any Aussies on the forum…
GIO Insurance are a pack of dicks!

I have been fighting with them for the past week, despite the computer equipment being listed with a value, they are disputing it, saying that this is a graphics workstation, not a ‘home computer’ and would have required separate listing and approval. My solicitor does not think that we can make them pay.
So to anyone else with expensive computer gear, notify your insurance company with an itemised list and get it in writing from them that it is explicitly covered, apparently anything less than that and they can weasle out of it.

Yeah, all insurance companies are a pack of dicks. I’m sure your solicitor has advised that you escalate the complaint and then further escalate it to the Ombudsman who can potentially make them pay if they find in your favour.

I am currently deciding whether to take it as a sign from the gods and bow out of the hobby, or start over. I lost so much work.

If you’d like another suggestion- if your data is lost then perhaps start on a new project for now and come back to what you had been working on later.

I’m very sorry to hear about your misfortune, if I was a religious person I’d be demanding that my deity set things right! 😃

Jorel81 said:

This project is incredible. Totally worth the wait. Huge thanks to everyone involved.

Yep!

Williarob said:

RU.08 said:

But in terms of x264 - quality is set by the CRF value. CRF-19 will always produce the same quality (roughly speaking). With slower values (the so-called right values) it will produce the same quality as the “fastest” preset but at a (slightly) lower bitrate. You can’t feed settings into x264 that will magically make CRF-19 look like CRF-16.

^ This is absolutely true, You can’t feed settings into x264 that will magically make CRF-19 look like CRF-16. However, you can choose to do a multi-pass VBR encode INSTEAD of using a CRF value. If we choose the exact same average bit-rate as CRF-16, the file size will of course be the same, and the quality (according to the documentation) will probably not be visibly or measurable better. But, if CRF 17 produces a 21 GB file and CRF 16 produces a 25 GB file, then a 2 Pass encode could be targeted to produce a 23 GB file which would still fit on a single layer disc, but would be slightly higher quality than CRF 17 - call it CRF 16.5. Also, there are many other x264 options that can be adjusted from the defaults which may improve picture quality at the same file size. If anyone knows what they might be, we’re open to suggestions. Jan, I’m testing your suggestion out right now.

I will test as many options as I can (and more than one encoder) on a short section of the film, including what it might look like if it was a full BD-50 (not that we are likely to go that route - unless the 25 GB vs 50 GB comparison is like night and day), and post the results somewhere.

Yes you’re absolutely right, you can use 2-pass to target BD-R size if desired. You can also “hack” the rate by doing two tests on what you think is an “average” section of the movie and extrapolating the data to work out the CRF that will produce the required bitrate/file-size.

That’s fine to do that, all I’m hoping for is that for version 1.5 we get a .mkv with an unrestricted filesize using CRF-16, in addition to the BD25 version. 😃 They can both exist!

Chouonsoku said:

The settings used on the current 1080p essentially neuter the release. Even scene groups are required to use better quality presets these days. The motion estimation settings alone cause a huge amount of grain shift from frame to frame. There is so much more to x264 encoding than CRF values and bit rate. I already contacted TM-1 with baseline settings that would dramatically improve their video quality. I just hope they use them.

I wouldn’t say it “neuters” the release. You are right about the per-frame grain using their settings. And that’s not as important with a HDTV source that’s mostly devoid of gain because the quality difference between key frames and others is less obvious, which probably isn’t what you meant with “scene releases” though. I agree with you that you do want each individual frame to look more consistent in quality with its neighbours than the v1.0 release.

Chouonsoku said:

Encoding is part of mastering of the disc, you have to compress those big movies to fit onto 50 GB with more extras than most people care about. You said Sirius Pixels was the best, I just provided 3 examples of where it failed with a very large bitrate size. I have a couple of custom Blu-ray discs mastered from DCP with x264 configured properly and the results are quite stunning compared to their retail releases. They also playback fine on a number of Blu-ray players. At the end of the day, most of those commercial encoders do not provide nearly the range of customization that x264 does, and they also aren’t updated as consistently being that they are closed source. By the way, it’s 2016. And the films I listed were on the front page of Sirius Pixels website as “excellent Blu-ray encodes” released in 2015.

I fail to see how poor authoring quality is the fault of the encoder. You could just as easily get a sub-par x264 encode by using x264 with insufficient bitrate (or a high CRF) as well. But I also gave you the example of MPEG2 encoders, where it is still clear that the best commercial quality encoders provide better quality at the DVD5 size compared to their open-source counterparts. MPEG2 has been around for 20 years now, so the free open source encoders have had plenty of time to get the quality to match or beat Mainconcept - but it just hasn’t happened, at least not yet. Perhaps one day. Or perhaps not, perhaps what we have now is “good enough” for the developers to stop trying.

Also, how many free MVC encoders do you see out there?

But in terms of x264 - quality is set by the CRF value. CRF-19 will always produce the same quality (roughly speaking). With slower values (the so-called right values) it will produce the same quality as the “fastest” preset but at a (slightly) lower bitrate. You can’t feed settings into x264 that will magically make CRF-19 look like CRF-16.

Chouonsoku said:

You’re using a lot of words to describe what can be visualized with only a few pictures. You do so much work with this codec you’re bound to have a portfolio somewhere right? Some frame-accurate, frame-type comparisons between your sources, x264 and your commercial encoder at native resolution? Why not share those and prove your picture quality claims while sharing the settings used for both encodes instead of just rattling off numbers and bitrates and ending with “see for yourself!”

No I don’t, I only use x264 like everyone else here, I don’t have any commercial encoders.

And that link you gave to their websites displays some examples of poorly mastered Blu-ray discs. Got a dark area in your film? Have some banding and blocking! Got a fast action motion sequence? You get some banding and blocking!

Well mastering isn’t their issue, that’s the authoring house’s problem, all SP is is the encoder.

If the top authoring houses thought that x264 offered better quality then they’d use it instead. Sonic Scenarist and Sony Blu-print come with entry-level encoders such as Mainconcept and Sonny’s encoder, not with Sirus. They do work fine with x264 though - but do recall that x264 supports BD encoding only as of 2010 which is well after the BD spec was released, and you have to be a little more careful with the settings when compared to encoders such as MC and SP that are purely designed to produce BD compliant encodes.

Williarob said:

While we don’t have access to Sirius Pixels, or whatever the most expensive solution currently is, isn’t it fair to say that that, regardless of who has licensed the x264 codec and built a shiny wrapper around it with some custom presets designed for maximum quality, the codec at the heart of the application is probably exactly the same as the free version it was built on?

No, it’s a different codec entirely. X264 is the best free AVC codec available, and it’s better than Mainconcept - a commonly used “entry level” commercial AVC codec. Try it yourself, grab yourself a bluray encoded using the Sirus codec, rip it and re-encode it to the same size using x264. Preferentially try it with a BD25 as the difference in quality will be more obvious. Doesn’t matter what settings you use, x264 can’t achieve the same quality at the same size.

You can run the same test on MPEG2 encoders as well. In this case the free encoders are TMPGEnc, QuEnc, and HC Encoder. As a general rule the slower the encoder the better the quality, but even the best quality of the three - HC Encoder - is both slower and lower quality than comparable commercial encoders like Mainconcept and Procoder. I think this is why there are so many SL discs out there - Mainconcept will produce with 4.3GB quality that back in the early days of DVD was impossible even with two discs, and that advancement has allowed DVD publishers to press high quality SL discs. If they were using HC Encoder they wouldn’t be the same quality. And the free MPEG2 encoders, as you’ve no doubt noticed, have not advanced at all in the last 10 years in terms of the quality they produce.

In any case, unless somebody wants to buy us a $100,000 license for the Sirius Pixels encoder, it’s a moot point. Tweaking the settings is all we can do…

My point is that what Sirius Pixels can do in 22GB, x264 needs more like 30GB to achieve. My advice is to stick the CRF down to 16, use the Slower pre-set, and don’t worry about the size. It’ll get down-converted and transcoded by others anyway.

Jan said:

2. In my opinion, a total size of about 25GB is sufficient for a 1080p encode at a very good quality (just compare it to encodes of other movies available on various file sharing sites), if the encoding settings were to be somewhat enhanced compared to your V1.0. As you’re aiming for a final file size, 2pass encoding fits the purpose much better than CRF. Additionally, some other settings might need adjustments. Overall, the settings suggested at the official x264 website (see link below) are quite a good starting point. The one thing I would change though is --tune grain instead of --tune film for obvious reasons. Any other possible, manual change of the encoding settings is just fine-tuning in my point of view. With these settings, the encoding quality will be quite a bit better and fine details as well as grain will be be preserved much better! BTW, I helped Harmy with his encodes of the Despecialized Edition😃

Hi Jan, sorry to say you’re wrong on this one. The best h264 commercially available encoders are about 40% more efficient than x264. And I’m not talking about Mainconcept which is the encoder everyone compares x264 to, I’m talking about Sirius Pixels which is much better than x264, hence the reason that top authoring houses prefer it. So if you have a Bluray that’s already encoded using the Sirius Pixels encoder then no matter what you do, the x264 encode will be significantly lower quality at the same size (beyond just the generational loss). A single-layer movie encoded using the Sirius Pixels encoder can match the quality of a double-layer movie encoded using Mainconcept or x264. Also, the 2pass option does not produce better quality at the same size as CRF.

Additionally, movies are made more compressible before encoding as well. Such as removing film grain - especially in the effects shots.

With this release we have neither option - the -1 team don’t have access to the best encoders (and if they do they don’t want us to know), and they want to release the film as it is, and not cleaned up to a point that makes it much more compressible. So in my view it’s not the x264 settings that are an issue, rather it’s the CRF value itself. In this case, CRF = 19, which is just not quite good enough, and leads to visible compression artefacts, at least in some parts of the movie. If it were up to me, which it isn’t as I’m not a part of their team, I’d suggest a CRF value of 16. This might result in a 34-50GB file size, but I’d personally rather see that.

Yes it is much larger, but we have a v1.0 now so I say go all out for v1.5 and so I say: let the material truly shine!

Also: many thanks to the Team -1 - what a terrific effort with this release!!

V

John Doom said:

I’d take any time Anakin’s “death” over Han’s death, Anakin’s inner conflict over Ren’s one, even “Order 66” over the destruction of that Republic’s planet in TFA (what’s its name?).
With that said, it’s not like I think the PT is better than TFA: they’re all terribly flawed one way or another, with TFA not being an exception.

Anakin’s inner-conflict makes perfect sense. He disobeys Windu and goes to the chancellor’s chambers, but he doesn’t want to stop Windu until he makes it clear that he intends to murder the Chancellor in cold blood. He rightly tells Windu that he can’t kill him. What we see in that scene is an example of Palpatine manipulating the situation perfectly, so that Anakin can see the Jedi are not the selfless protectors of democracy that they claim to be, but are indeed power hungry and want to take over control of the Republic. This only works because Anakin is completely ignorant as to how politics works, as is made clear before this. It’s just an elaborate lie that only he would believe - of course if the chancellor dies the command of the republic returns to the Senate, and they can elect a new chancellor.

There a sophisticated complexity to it that Lucas did really well. Of course not everything in the PT was executed as well as that, but there are indeed examples of well thought through storytelling. I think Lucas should have used that, and only that, for Anakins turn to the dark side. When he sees for himself the Jedi try to attack and kill the chancellor - not all that nonsense about Padme dying in childbirth, which was much more poorly executed.

TFA has none of this sophistication. Ren’s “inner conflict” is really poorly executed, especially when compared to Anakin’s.

joefavs said:

I ask you this, though: has there been a single sci-fi/fantasy movie in the past fifteen years or so that featured a major character that wasn’t an actor in a costume that achieved this?

Yes, the CGI T-Rex in Jurassic Park 1 looked pretty real. The T-1000 in Terminator 2 looked great as well, and the effect hasn’t really aged that much either.

Snoke looks like he was designed purely as a children’s toy. SW is all about merchandising, Disney cares much more about the billions in toy sales that they’ll be making over the next two years than the 1 billion or whatever from the box office.

Yoda Is Your Father said:

I agree that Snoke took me right out of the movie. And if you’re suggesting that they would have been better off going down the puppet route, I agree with that too. Yoda was so good they tried to get Frank Oz nominated for an Oscar but the academy wouldn’t have it.

I don’t care how the special effects team does it, they can use CGI or a puppet or a man in a mask or do whatever they want. My point was that you don’t want it to look fake. You don’t want people to roll their eyes and say “lifeless puppet” or “CGI” or “Halloween mask” etc!

Alderaan said:

Great post RU! I also liked the jerky gunner seat in TFA. Little details like that are so important in a film; it’s too bad there weren’t nearly enough of them.

Many thanks!

Yoda Is Your Father said:

Maybe your friend should direct Episode VIII. Or at least be on set to keep the director, special effects team and editor in line. He sounds like he really has a handle on this whole filmmaking thing. Disney are missing a trick.

I was just giving an example bro. I’m the one who said Robocop was done well, not him. What my friend said was “I still can’t believe that’s done with a man in a suit!!” Like I said that’s a credit to everyone involved in suspending disbelief. But I see no suspension of disbelief with Snoke - he looks like a rendered graphic.

But look at ESB- Yoda was a puppet! And the last thing that Lucas, or for that matter Kershner, wanted was to make it look like a muppets moive!

TV’s Frink said:

No, it’s a terrible post, because Jay has been defending TPM. I don’t even know where that post came from.

Um OK. Like I said I think it’s better than AOTC or (shudder…) ROTS. Jay said IIRC that he thinks TFA is better than TPM, but I don’t. I think it’s at the level of the prequels and a good movie in its own right, but unnecessary in the SW canon. TFA may not have had a silly character just for kids like Jar Jar, but it had little to no originality and didn’t expand the SW universe. In TPM everything was original, even Tatooine was shown in a new context. In TFA when we see Jakku it may as well be Tatooine, minus the second sun.

Jay, I think you’re being unfair to TPM - I thought it was the best of the prequels. The CGI in the movie was better done as well when compared to TFA. For example, there are two prominent CGI characters in TPM - Jar Jar Binks and Watto. Jar Jar is a bit of a silly character only there to provide humour for the film, but Watto is more serious as a slave owner. In my opinion, Watto looks more photo-realistic than the CGI characters in TPM which as you say belong in a Harry Potter movie. When using CGI it’s best practise not to zoom it to fill the frame, but with Snoke JJ just puts it right in the frame to pull us out of the suspension of disbelief. Even movies that used practical effects used tactics to build the audience up for a reveal of an extreme special effect. For example, in Robocop Verhoven didn’t show the full suited Peter Weller at first - first they show his vision, then they show him from a distance but obscured. So that the audience would accept what they saw.

I showed Robocop to a friend of mine a few years ago, and he kept remarking about how he couldn’t believe that it’s a man in a suit. To quote him it didn’t look like it was possible to fit a man inside the Robosuit. And that’s a credit not just to the special effects team, the director, and the editor - but also to the actor who was able to create believable mechanical movement in nothing more than a rubber and fibreglass suit. One of the parts of TFA I liked was that jerky mechanical movement of the Millennium Falcon’s weapon chairs. That looked really good, it looked authentic. But as for Snoke he looked like he belonged in the Special Edition, or in Harry Potter.

Jay said:

In the second teaser trailer, Luke says, “The Force is strong in my family. My father had it, I have it, my sister has it…you have that power, too.”

It didn’t appear in TFA, so maybe we’ll see it in VIII, and while it’s not definitive, it does imply a familial connection between Luke and Rey. (It’s clearly a new recording of Hamill’s voice, and my assumption is that it’s being spoken to Rey.)

It was kind of depressing to watch all the trailers again, because the trailers are excellent.

It also clearly implied that we would get to see Leia use the force.

ANH 9.5/10
ESB 10/10
ROTJ 8.5/10
TPM 8/10
AOTC 6.5/10
ROTS 6.5/10
TFA 6.5/10

FYI Thanks Laserschwert, sorry for that!

I know I’m a bit behind atm on this project, but I do plan to finish ASAP on it, I just need to overcome a couple of technical issues. 😃 Sorry to keep everyone waiting 😦

Mavimao said:

I think the main reason is that the real story is about Rey and her mysterious origins. The starkiller base, when you think about it, is actually very insignificant to the plot it’s easily forgettable. It’s a MacGuffin in the truest sense of the word.

Well the main story in the original is about Luke and his origins. If you take the Starkiller base out of VII and Death Star out of IV then they’re still the same story. A lowly young adult on a desert planet stumbles across a droid carrying important information, Stormtroopers are sent to the desert planet to retrieve the droid, and so they go off on a grand space adventure leaving on the “what a piece of Junk” Falcon. Darth Vader/Kylo Ren interrogates people and kills them afterward, etc, it’s a straight remake with a few throwbacks to the sequels thrown in.

It doesn’t take the Star Wars story anywhere, by the end of the film everything we just saw was just action with no advancement in the story. It’s a bit like Matrix Reloaded compared to The Matrix in regards to the focus on action. And by taking Rey to Luke at the end of the movie the only difference between IV and VII is that VII ends at the beginning of the second act of V instead of at the end of the third act of IV.

Smoking Lizard said:

It seems pretty clear that the plot on paper is just a blatant carbon copy of the original movie. Sure, there are some tangential differences, but the essential elements of the movie are identical to the first film.

So knowing this, how can anyone still say this is a good movie?

Yes it is. I guess it’s intended to serve as a series “reboot”, but just like Jurassic World for example there’s no originality to it at all, it’s just a straight remake, made into a marvel-style non-stop action movie. It’s good in its own way, but a wholly unnecessary sequel really. I wouldn’t really say it’s a good “Star Wars” movie though, as a standalone film it’s fine, but slotting into the SW narrative it’s pretty mediocre really.

towne32 said:

Are you talking about Kylo Ren? Having him throw a tantrum would have been extremely risky in light of Episode III, were it not for the fact that it was executed fucking fantastically. And his hair isn’t allowed to be long, either? He didn’t have a PT mullet.

Well he’s Han and Leia’s son, so he should remind me of them - not of Anakin!

I think the main thing this film has convinced me is that people on this site love to hate films. Especially Star Wars. That’s not to say there aren’t plenty of valid criticisms. But, I think we do get pretty neurotic about ridiculous things around here at times. Myself included.

Well I remember saying not too long time ago in a thread not too far away, that I like quite a lot of the prequel trilogy content. Not as much as the average TFN member, but certainly more than a lot of other members here. They have their flaws, and they have their good points.

TFA is a good movie in its own right, but, it is at the end of the day just a direct remake of Episode IV - with a few things from V and VI thrown in. I can watch Star Wars and get the same story that I saw watching Episode VII. To me that makes VII pretty redundant and unnecessary. I mean, Death Star III - really? They even compare “Starkiller Base” directly to the Death Star in the movie itself. I thought the “New Order” was going to be more different to the “Galactic Empire”.

Actually I do apologise, there is in fact ONE throwback to the prequels in TFA. Is it one of those moments we loved from the prequels? HA! Nope! It’s Anakin’s archaic hairstyle from Episode III and his child-like demeanour from Episode II. It’s exactly what we hated in the prequels!

SilverWook said:

Who the hell reads Forbes for movie reviews?

Not you I suppose. I liked the review though, it was a good read.

Didn’t Lucas originally have drafts for VII-IX that he gave to Disney? What did they mistake the draft for Episode IV as the next movie to make or something?

“The Star Wars movie we got is one we’ve already seen more times than we can count” - Forbes review.

It starts in space then cuts away to a desolate place that looks much like Tatooine (except without the podracing, or the Dewbacks for the Stormtroopers to ride). There’s some kind of droid that functions as a mechanic for spaceships, carrying an important messages that must be delivered to the Rebellion, that just happens to find their way to a local inhabitant who as it happens is unknowingly gifted in the force, and also a pretty amazing pilot. At first they don’t want to get involved, but then they do anyway. Then the storm troopers come and they escape from them by flying to safety in the Millennium Falcon, which then gets caught in a tractor-beam and swallowed whole by a larger ship. They then leave from this location with Han and Chewy in the Millennium Falcon to make their way to the Rebel base.

Oh yes and don’t forget there’s a sub-plot where the girl has to be saved from the Death Star, and the scary man in the black mask kills an old man by striking him down with his red coloured lightsabre. And the Death Star fires and destroys large celestial objects just to prove that it works.

Then the rebels plan an attack on the Death Star, which involves flying along a long trench-like channel in their X-Wings and hitting a target so that the whole massive space station gets destroyed. Leia of course stays in the base and plays a significant role in coordinating the attack.

And then the Death Star is destroyed, and that’s pretty much the end of the movie.

Okay, what movie was I just describing? Star Wars Ep. IV or Star Wars Ep. VII? All this movie is is a shameless direct remake, nearly scene-for-scene, of the original movie. There are some additions from the other two films in the OT like Vader talking to the Emperor’s hologram in a large room, Luke using the force to get his lightsabre out of the snow and into his hand, destroying the shield generator on Endor, so that the rebels can attack and destroy Death Star II, and Luke going off on his own to find a mysterious Jedi master who’s living alone like a hermit on a deserted swamp planet.

In fact the movie it seems pays constant tribute to just about every aspect of the OT, even referencing to the “garbage chute” on the Death Star, those Mynocks in Empire, many of the characters/aliens seen in the OT, the death-star laser cannons, etc. But JJ Abrams & Co seem to have gone out of their way to ignore anything from the PT, spaceship and droid designs and all. So much so that they don’t show us the Republic itself, they just show the Starkiller Base (aka Death Star III) fire at them and destroy 4 or 5 Republic planets all at once, of course with no explanation whatsoever as to why the Republic wouldn’t be able to defend themselves (or for that matter why they wouldn’t be able to retaliate against the First Order).

From a review on Forbes titled “The Empire Strikes Out”:

“The film follows the structure of A New Hope to such a significant degree that I spent much of the first act wondering if I was watching the Star Wars equivalent of Gus Van Sant’s Psycho. It also omits or neglects vital connective tissue and merely hints at a far more interesting story than the one we get. Considering what a precedent-setting franchise the original Star Wars was, it is not a little disheartening that this new installment does not blaze its own path, but rather rehashes its former glories for our approval.”
(snip)
“Say what you will about the prequels and their visual callbacks (and wow is series low-point Attack of the Clones a slog before its final show-stopping reels), but George Lucas didn’t just retell the same story a second time out. He told new stories and offered truly eye-popping action sequences (the “Duel of the Fates” in Phantom Menace, the entire last act of Attack of the Clones, and the whole first reel of Revenge of the Sith) that raised the bar for popcorn blockbusters in their day even as the likes of Lord of the Rings and Spider-Man encroached on Lucas’s territory.”

It’s a good movie, but it’s just a remake of Episode IV, which makes its story unnecessary, and as the Forbes review says, the movie just doesn’t present any new ideas to the Star Wars universe, it just relies on the previously established stuff. Lucas at least brought new things every time - in Empire we got Yoda, cloud-city, and carbon-freeze, in Jedi we got Jabba the Hutt and the Sarlacc Pit, in Phantom Menace we were introduced to Naboo as the home planet of Anakin’s love interest, as well as Coruscant and along with it the Galactic Senate and the Jedi Council, then in Clones we got Kamino - an ocean planet where the Star Wars version of arms dealers create ready-made armies of clones, and of course Geonosis and the Separatists. One of the interesting things we learn in Clones is that the Empire did not design the Death Star, they just stole the plans and built it! And finally Sith shows us the Star Wars version of an Opera, shows us Chewy’s homeworld, and how a State-funeral looks in the Star Wars universe when a much loved public servant dies.

Harmy’s working copy of 2.0 is on the spleen. That’s a MKV is that what you want?

I already read both those points months ago in a “leaked” script overview, that turned out to be surprisingly accurate.

Harmy got a really nice write-up on an Australian news site the other day. I love how mainstream news websites are so favourable to the DeED!