Vidmaster

Animaxx said:

Thank you for joining in. No problem, everyone also has a life to get back to at some point 😃

Since I will be working on DS9 and Voyager first, I would contact you once I get around to SG-1.
Also, I am planning to work on Babylon 5 (later on).

While this all sounds really cool, I cannot recommend a one-step-at-a-time approach enough. Such projects eat time and energy.

I think it is time for me to request a workprint link too.

mrbenjamino said:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1EIIUPBtBVwgtNvsb3JAnaPsChVNY_dAf/view?usp=sharing

I dunno how to remove the watermark either lol.

We zoom the shot slightly and then employ an upscaler. Won’t be perfect but should be servicable enough.

Icecream2448 said:

Were there any explicit references to Rey’s dad being a failed clone of Palpatine?

I do not think the timeline would add up on that, plus it would feel really forced. Another clone? Fully with HAL on this one, we should not even try.

smpearce1981 said:

Watching the Ben vs KOR,(…)
I think we missed a trick not having one (or all) screaming ‘Traitor!!!’
Mirroring Kylo himself (to Finn) at the end of TFA.

I really like this. Remind me, what exactly was done here now? HAL mentioned an “earlier” line?

darkshadowspike said:

Vidmaster said:

So say we all.

I understood that Star Trek DS9 reference! /s

It is actually more of a Battlestar Galactica (reboot) reference.

I shall humbly request a link with this very post, oh wise one…

So say we all.

This is a really nice project. Noughsaid.

This is really good for the most part. Would watch this.

SparkySywer said:
There is no Star Wars saga. There’s the Star Wars Trilogy, and like them or not, two orbiter trilogies. Each trilogy is its own atomized story.

For all the faults of the prequel trilogy, I must disagree on that. GL certainly tried to tie it together thematically.

The sequels on the other hand, are rubbish in that regard.

BedeHistory731 said:
Thinking ahead to things that should change with the Battle of Yavin, I’ve got a few ideas.
(…)
4. Get volunteers to add dialogue for the expanded battle sequence (if it remains).

I offered (via Facebook) to attempt to extract sound files from “SW: Rogue Squadron II” a while ago, a gamecube game for which Denis Lawson (Wedge) recorded new lines. And obviously, there are other usable lines in these games as well. Never received an answer from Ady though, so I never started work. Could have failed, could have succeeded, who knows…

But I am with you, that sequence is great but lacks dogfighting dialog, no matter how nonsensical.

Not to bad, missing just a little bit of sharpness for my tastes but that will of course introduce new artifacts which need to be cleaned up by hand.

StarkillerAG said:
It’s not finished, and from what I understand it will never be.

Why that? I mean, yes, it is an insane amount of work. But was this “stopped” or “abandoned” at some point?

Hal 9000 said:
I’m leaving the Imperial March in order to imply as strongly as I can that these are old imperial ships

+1

Hal 9000 said:

Well, here’s the scene with a temp audio clip for Palpatine. Could select a different portion to use, but having the static conclusion to prompt the crowd reaction seems to work.

JEDIT: https://vimeo.com/442206729

This is already pretty good but I think it can be improved further, due to:

Hal 9000 said:

If there were ten seconds more footage we could get most of the message in, ideally.

I agree with you here. Maybe this is one instance in which one could actually either reuse 2 or 3 seconds of an ealier (or later) shot. Do that three times and we got it. For example, we could simply add a still image of the C3PO-shot later (“Exogol does not appear…)” as C3PO has no facial expressions anyway, same for R2.
Gives them both a little more screen presence (as they are part of the “party” of these movies) AND gives us a few previous seconds.
Maybe the same can even be achived with Maz (the shot from this scene later), which would establish her presence as well.

Everyone listening to the message, that is the idea here right?

Hoop28 said:
… but his revisited films go a little overboard for my tastes.

Yes, but most of these things are being reigned in for the ANH:HD release.

Hal 9000 said:

Well I’m not a fan of the shockwaves anyway, and I didn’t really have great ways to remove the other two. I didn’t want the battle of Yavin to only have one OOT shot at the most critical moment. So I removed the DSII shockwave so it’s not like all OT and only OT explosions have them.

So a big fancy CGI explosion without a shockwave would be okay?

Chase Adams said:

Actually, Adywan has already released a look at what Alderaan’s explosion will be like in HD ANH:R, and yes, there is a quite a magnificent shockwave if I may say so myself:

https://youtu.be/VFp1WuYKWtI

Sorry for the off-topic that that is a wonderful sample reel.

Seconding Adywan’s work.

Hal 9000 said:

I don’t think so, guys. I don’t think it really belongs there, so I’m gonna cut that off.

I really hope we produce an archive of all the great special effects scenes the people of this forum are creating for this edit. After all, not everything is going to make it in the final edit BUT many ideas are worthy nonetheless.

While that would be nice, the quality we got those scenes in prevents that.

Hm, I think I need this as well. Looks like what I would have wished the prequels were… …namely, Star Wars that is a little different but well written.

The goal “Make as seamless and professional an edit as possible” is what has convinced me to request a PM now, as I fully agree with your statement regarding the immersion of edits. I want to be entertained first, not plainly see what someone else did change there. Analysis can come afterwards 😉

Hal 9000 said:

This probably isn’t helped by having all the chatter on a single channel, but that’s how comm chatter has to be.

I’ll reduce the overall volume of content here before tossing the whole idea, even if severely.

I think the real goal here is something like StarTrek: First Contact did, an inaudible undertone with, small clearly understandable “vignettes” in one of my favorite scenes of the movie:

https://youtu.be/piMRgm9Ga6o?t=97

I also believe that one of the unsolved questions in this community is how to produce versions of the prequel’s deleted scenes suitable for fan-edits, as having deleted scenes indistinguishable from at least 1080p footage would be a really big help for various fan-edit projects out there.

Your post goes into a similar direction, so may I redirect you to this post of mine:

https://originaltrilogy.com/topic/Best-HD-Versions-of-Prequel-Deleted-Scenes/id/49632/page/2#1345185

I have made some experiments, but my rig here is far too weak unfortunaly. The guy I am quoting in that post employing an Nvidia Titan XP, something my PC can only dream of.

But maybe you can help?

Vidmaster said:
I reached out to various people I know from all over the internet who performed various successful upscaling projects I know of. Basically, the plan is to accumulate some additional knowledge and maybe get to know some variants in technique.

Having deleted scenes indistinguishable from at least 1080p footage would be a really big help for various fan-edit projects out there.

The results are in, mostly standard stuff like “I just run Gigapixel”. HOWEVER there was one answer in particular I want to highlight. Its from someone who is working on (and was mostly very successful) in upscaling old Full-Motion-Video Games:

For the upscaling part of the process, he is using a combination of Topaz Labs’ Video Enhance AI and Gigapixel AI. The former is specifically for upscaling video and the latter for still images.

The first step is to do a pass with Video Enhance AI, checking if there are any spots where it didn’t do a particularly good job. Afterwards, he hecks if he can improve on that sequence frame-by-frame with Gigapixel AI. That second step can be a really arduous process, obviously.

A couple of other Gigapixel-packages (DeNoise AI and Sharpen AI in particular) can be very useful - but given the resource-intensive nature of the work, coupled with the inevitable trial-and-error process to see what works and what doesn’t, it can be a very lengthy process to attempt to use all of them.

In addition, he also employs use AVIsynth+ a lot for cleaning up footage before upscaling it (since some of the original footage he is working on is terribly messing, compressed, sometimes interlaced, and so on). In particular, he mentioned to me that I might “find this necessary for some of your upscales, depending on the quality of your source footage. If they’re fully-completed-and-mastered-but-just-deleted scenes from DVD extras, they should do just fine in terms of quality - but depending on the DVD region/interlacing, you might need do a bit of that to clean up quality before you upscale.”

emanswfan said:

Eventually, I hope to get around to creating proper 4K upscales of deleted scenes using Gigapixel AI, but in the mean time HAL9000 has the best upscales currently around.

I reached out to various people I know from all over the internet who performed various successful upscaling projects I know of. Basically, the plan is to accumulate some additional knowledge and maybe get to know some variants in technique.

Having deleted scenes indistinguishable from at least 1080p footage would be a really big help for various fan-edit projects out there.

Seconding that.

Disaster of a movie but my fascination with it remains.

Yes, pretty much so. In the director’s commentary track back on the DVD, they mentioned that once they decided to remove the petition-plotthread, the entire rebellion-thing had to go. Unfortunently, the movie works way better with it.

This is all looking very good from my end, aka an outsiders’ perspective.

Let me just say that these people a very very right:

fidodido said:
Rey’s parents really shouldn’t matter. They sold her for drinking-money, and as far as I’m concerned, they can just as well already have died of liver cirrhosis or something. Somewhere, sometime. Doesn’t matter.

stevepaynter said:
The less we hear about Rey parents in Ep9 the better. Best to continue with the TLJ plot line and keep Rey Nobody and deadbeat parents as is. IMO the whole Rey and Palpatine grandkid dynamic just doesn’t work. I understand what they were going for, but the execution of it was a failure.

In regards to the “Rey killed her parents”-twist idea, I am somewhat torn. I agree that it would be a really cool twist and is probably doable with the material, plus inserting a child’s hand, some desert background and some lighting is achievable as well. On the other hand, what exactly does this accomplish despite having a twist?

One thing I would really like to see is somehow, retroactively, giving some more meaning to Rey’s vision in the dark-side cave in Ep8.