SomethingStarWarsRelated

The crane shot of Mos Eisley greatly overexaggerated the size of the location in my opinion, and its so ridiculed with outdated VFX elements meant to fill every frame of the sequence with life that it comes off as quite overstimulating, so while initially I included it, I later decided to cut it out since it looked too much like a 3D render demo reel and doesn’t serve much function to the story aside from helping extend the score a bit.

Even if AI gets to a point that it could retexture all the bad stuff in the shot, it kind-of defeats the cinematography established in 1976 which had a more documentary-style look to it anyway that the miniature SE shots still retained. I just cleaned it up to match the on-set location a bit more since they literally shot it in a fishing port.

Also, I’m hoping for Dr.Dre’s new incredibly powerful algorithm to recolor some shots of the Yavin battle to make the colors and materials feel a bit more like miniatures and less like demo reels, but even then I still find them appropriate for the time anyway. I’m treading a fine line of CGI and 70s elements to ensure they all line up pretty well.

Excellent points on the Mos Eisley shot.
Dr. Dre’s algorithm sounds intriguing!

Those look fantastic. I’m digging the Mos Eisley shot…which makes me wonder: are you keeping the CGI “crane” shot as the speeder moves into the city? I love the idea of that shot but there’s so much I can’t stand about the execution of it. The main complaint is it’s too fast and too polished of a camera move. One should see some imperfections in the movement of the image (slight camera shake, focus pull, etc).

But the reworking you did of Mos Eisley and Bens hut does look really nice. I would love to see more things like this done to the movie. It’s too bad the CGI can’t be redone in the end battle to blend in and look more model like. To me, some of Howard Day’s stuff looks like a really nice blend (even though it’s all done in the computer).
http://www.youtube.com/@HowieDay82

That guy with no name said:

Nickshimmy said:

That guy with no name said:

New shot:
New source (19SE) re-inserted the missing falcon and adjusted the motion for a more dramatic shot.

Drive: https://drive.google.com/file/d/16CDNixUattNu7e_f3JxZWs4-hEmoWOF0/view?usp=sharing
Streamable: https://streamable.com/pvv9xw

Looks great, completely natural. Can I ask how you achieved this shot?, Was it just a case animating a still of the falcon from the frame it originally appears or was there more to it? I ask as I was trying something similar in an edit I was working on and really struggled to get a satisfactory result (even though it was small in the frame, it looked like exactly what it was, a still image being moved around and zoomed out from). Thanks.

It’s an image broken into 3-4 parts that move independently to give the illusion of parallax shift, ie, the illusion of 3D. It’s done statically, and motion is added afterward.

That’s really cool and nicely done. I don’t suppose you’d care to break it down in a video? 😄

EDIT: Obviously, no pressure. I just like to see that sort of thing.

Looks fantastic to me! Can’t wait to try it out myself!

I’d like to see those Clone Wars shots!

Oh yeah, I don’t think I ever told you but, Chase3, your upscales are certainly the best I’ve seen yet!

I wonder if the paid version of Starlight gives you adjustment options? Or if not, do you think there are elements from the Starlight version you (or anyone) might comp in? maybe lower the opacity so it blends? I don’t know, I haven’t tried anything yet. 😛

So I used up all but 2 of my Topaz’s Starlight credits on old home video clips (which do look pretty dang good btw). With the 2 credits I had left, I ran a clip of Palps from the deleted senate scene in AOTC (Phase3’s upscaled version:

https://streamable.com/bjbpl8

This looks pretty dang amazing. Much more definition in the face.

Sorry, I couldn’t make a comparison video…you’ll have to compare it yourself! 😛

I’d love for someone to upload a video using this template just so I can see how it looks all rendered out. Anyone? 😃

Agreed, Artan42.
I very much want to see the deleted prequel scenes using Starlight. I already tried it on some old home videos and it worked pretty damn well in most cases…I just ran out of free credits 😦 😛

This channel called “Skywalker Stories” on YouTube is pretty cool.
Here’s the latest video:

https://youtu.be/WOS7i42ggU8?si=awXxKzvhkaBCSBoL

Their videos are done using AI. Obviously it’s not 100% flawless but in many cases it has me fooled. I don’t know how they’re going about making these exactly. My assumption is some custom ComfyUI workflow.

That’s pretty incredible! I’m watching this on my laptop and the only real issue I noticed was that Lukes face didn’t quite work. But you could take that footage and face swap a better picture of Luke on it and it might look just fine!

Love it!

Bingowings, you’ve put a big smile on my face. Thank you, good sir.

Thank you all for the kind thoughts.

I, again, am not yet sure what I’m gonna do about the edit. Maybe I’ll start playing around with it again once I get another PC (not sure when that’s happening) but I’m not making any promises at this point. 😃

Thank you for all the kind words you’ve left here!

I believe an apology is in order. I almost put up a post here when I deleted (yes deleted) the channel…and I regret not doing that. Seeing all the kind remarks and genuine concern for me here is very heartwarming. I appreciate all of you and the time and effort you spent reading my posts, watching my videos and leaving great feedback.

To answer your question: I’m doing fine. All is well.
I don’t want to go into the particulars of why I deleted the channel and went silent.
The short version is I was spending too much of my time working on the edit and the channel and not focusing enough on some important personal/family stuff.

Also, as much as I was enjoying working on the edit, AI was not advancing as fast as I wanted (sounds funny now, right?) to accomplish certain shot ideas I had in mind. I would work on a shot, some AI advancement would happen, which would then make my shot look pathetic in comparison. I didn’t want to have to keep reworking shot after shot just to get something I thought, at best, might sorta pass.

Just so everyone knows, I deleted everything. EVERYTHING. (yes, I was THAT done with all of it) Was that overkill? Perhaps. I don’t know.
However, just a month or so ago I kinda started getting the bug again. I did end up recovering some of the YouTube videos and a super early version of the edit that doesn’t have any of the cool things I was more excited about.

Will I pick this edit up again? Part of me wants to…but if I did, I couldn’t spend the same amount of time and effort as I did before. I would have to be wiser with my time. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed a lot of that process. Also, I would need a new (or newish) PC if I were to start up again. My graphics card is fried and it was an old PC I was working with anyway. I basically couldn’t use any of the AI tools in Davinci Resolve. And as of right now, I don’t have money set aside for that.

Just wanted to give a long overdue update. Thank you all, once again for your kind words and concerns.

-SSWR

And if it pisses you off that I deleted it all…I get it. I’m a bit pissed myself. 😛

paja said:

WIP

Working on recontextualizing the beginning of AOTC presenting Dooku MUCH earlier. The sequence playing out as follows:

• Padme’s ship is bombed.

• Padme in the senate (deleted scene) that intercuts with Dooku reacting (from near the end of the film, the Neimoidians redubbed and or subtitled for new context)

• J cut that to Dooku and the CIS table talk.

After that there’s a scene inspired by a deleted scene from ROTJ where Vader force talks to Luke. Here Dooku talks to Yoda (using the scene of him after Anakin killed the Tuskens) that will feature snippets of dialogue of the duel from the end of the film, plus other dialogue implemented, e.g… “Master Yoda, the senate cannot be fixed, it is time to start over”. After that scene we cut to Palp’s office.

“It’s gonna be great”

Love this idea!

I agree with DarthMarv. I’ve never really like that particular shot…especially that leafless tree in the bottom right corner.

Although, I will say that I thought the planet was too …bright(?) when I first saw it.

Thanks!
I think Yoda sounds good (it was trained on OT yoda voice) but Windu i had trouble with…I’ll still have to fiddle with it more.

Alright fellow fan editors,

I’ve attempted to completely re-contextualize a scene involving Yoda and Windu:

https://youtu.be/5XmqZGisOwg

Then, if you stick around, I talk at length about my thought process on the scene.
Cheers (even though I’m from the US)

Agreed! So much better!

Love it!

Something I’ve wanted to see for a while now is a new background for these shots of the droids hiding:

It’s clearly just more walls made of stucco. How bout’ it be someone’s home? Heck, one could use an image of Annie’s room for TPM!

This is a must! Love it!

Ooo! Me likey! 😍

Very cool! Thanks for sharing!

I bet in the not-so-distant future, there will be a way to use ai technology to “recover” that lost detail…

Wow! Simply the best restoration I’ve seen yet!
After these scenes, were you planning on looking at cleaning up any others (ESB or ROTJ)?