4K is tricky because of the HDR. You’ll have to adjust the colours yourself; maybe Dre’s tool can help. Just make sure to preserve the 10-bit colour depth, because if you convert it to 8-bit and then try to tonemap it to SDR it’ll probably have some gross banding.
I think flipping and editing a shot from a different movie is fair game because Lucas did it for the SEs. Spot the differences!
These are both from the 2011 Blurays by the way, highlighting the oversaturated grade that ROTJ release had, and also the DNR present on that TPM release (the latter issue unfortunately persisted to the latest TPM release).
Knight of Kalee, just spotted your edit.
Close enough 😉
Had a look at the finished version of the Mandalore episode. The intro is really solid, but I wouldn’t mind more of a transition from the episode title to the actual start of the episode. As it is, it feels as if the intro is a commercial and then the show returns from a commercial break, if you get what I mean. The episode starts quite suddenly and doesn’t feel led in to. Perhaps you could try to shoehorn in the shot the others mentioned before while the intro music is still playing, or something.
The editing is as solid as it was every other time I watched it before, and Obi-Wan’s saber doesn’t seem like an issue to me: he clearly shows he’d forgotten about it since he tries to grab it from his waistband, and we can easily infer that Vizsla or one of his men picked it up offscreen. I think the conversation Kalee is referring to is at 18:59 - Satine claims to have saved Obi-Wan’s life even though that’s not really justifiable anymore. The cut in the later portion of the episode from Obi-Wan in the lift to “a civil war killed most of Satine’s people” still feels very sudden even without the lift door noise, because Obi-Wan starts speaking INSTANTLY on the cut, but I guess that’s a limitation of the footage.
Edit:
The outro/credits feels like it comes in a touch soon and not very gracefully. Is there any way you could preserve more of the original credits music build up? TCW always made a big point of building the music all the way up and then suddenly hitting you with the credits, much like the movies, and I think attempting to work off of that (maybe even also irising out to be able to use more of the footage), rather than trying to cut off the build-up with a fade out, could work better. The actual outro sequence is awesome though, and I think the character art even works nicely (concept art Satine looks even more like Cate Blanchett!). One little thing; did you deliberately put the text shadow such that it’s a little far away from touching the text on the top line? I’d be tempted to squish it up so it’s touching as much as the shadow for the names on the bottom line.
On a completely different note, this absolutely bizarre fanfilm has a sequence about Ben’s childhood. The impressions aren’t good enough to actually use for anything and it’s all clearly fanfilm-tier footage, but maybe there’s something in there that’s useable somewhere.
Again, I’m not arguing that the heroes are “heartless” for fighting the First Order - obviously the Resistance is morally correct in fighting against fascists, and seeing them all die at the end of the movie is no more troubling than watching Luke blow up the Death Star. My concern is mostly with the specific scenes of them gleefully blasting through stormtroopers like they’re videogame enemies, in a trilogy of movies which - rightfully or wrongly - seems to be trying to make some sort of point about stormtroopers not always being faceless videogame enemies. Divorced from any personal moral judgements (which I try to suspend when I’m watching Star Wars, because otherwise ROTJ is about Space Hitler being given eternal life because he was nice for five minutes, and I find it much more satisfying to instead interpret the movies on a mythic/symbolic level), it still strikes me as out of place, especially given how choked up Rey gets about nearly killing Space Hitler 2 later in the movie, and how she’s supposed to be grappling with her dark side.
I’m imagining Poe just blasting Finn directly in the face as he disembarks from the FO troop carrier on Jakku at the start of TFA.
Edit: anyway, this is hardly a hill I want to die on. This is barely even an issue, let alone a major one in TROS, I just feel like our heroes using stunners instead would fit just as well without giving me any “huh, they sure have gotten used to all the killing” vibes.
I don’t mean to excuse the stormtroopers - they’re soldiers for a genocidal fascist regime. But for some reason the movies go out of their way to mention multiple times that they’re recruited as children, and to demonstrate that, given the opportunity, many do defect, which I read as them being intentionally cast as at least slightly human or sympathetic (I assume the actual purpose of this writing decision was to justify Finn not requiring any redemption and that the wider implications weren’t really considered). It’s not like the First Order suddenly revealed themselves to be evil with the Hosnian Cataclysm but we’re still supposed to read Jannah and Finn as goodies because they eventually left.
Ultimately, I don’t actually have a problem with all the baddies exploding at the end of the movie - it’s a fun, melodramatic space opera, after all, not a hard-hitting gritty piece on the horrors of war - I just think it’d be less jarring for our heroes to be somewhat less utterly unphased by all the killing. It’s less about the stormtroopers and more about the way the heroes come across.
Edit:
Star Wars is very forthcoming with redemption for actions that would be less redeemable, or even irredeemable, in reality. Han Solo and Migs Mayfeld are both supposed to be sympathetic, despite being ex-Imperials, back in the era when you had to actually go and intentionally sign up to fight for fascism. Anakin/Vader has absurd amounts of innocent blood on his hands, but you’re still supposed to feel a little warm inside when his son smiles at his ghost. In TCW he’s supposed to be sympathetic and a goodie, despite having at that point already slaughtered a village full of humanoids out of rage. Bo-Katan is mostly treated as a good character these days, despite that time she helped burn down a village. We’re supposed to root for Ben Solo’s redemption even though he far more complicit in the Hosnian Cataclysm than any of the stormtroopers - he literally takes control of the First Order later in the same week anyway. Etc.
Even if the stormtroopers all die at the end of the movie anyway, I’d still prefer to get the impression that our heroes aren’t quite as ‘shoot first, act questions later’ as they come across in TROS.
It didn’t bother me to see troopers getting shot on Takodana in TFA because it was an active firefight - similar to how we all know that Luke Skywalker probably killed a few innocent people when he blew up the Death Star, but it was that or watch Yavin IV explode, so we don’t come away with the impression that he’s a cold, desensitised killer. But when our heroes in TROS run out of the Bestoon Legacy onto the Steadfast, guns blazing, blasting two FO troopers who have up to that point done nothing except ask for their credentials, and proceed to wipe the rest of the room out without flinching, it’s shoved right in the audience’s face. In TFA, a lot of edits trim Finn’s willingness to shoot his former colleagues, but there they were at least already shooting at him.
I mean, regarding the OT, Lucas has mentioned that “we very consciously didn’t kill very many humans in those movies” - this is obviously an absurd statement, but I think what he’s getting at is that you don’t necessarily get the feeling that the heroes are killing people. I suppose that’s why he chose to go with battle droids in the prequels, so that moments like Anakin killing Dooku (or Tal Merrik, Trench etc. in TCW) could stand out more.
Jonh! Happy New Year. Luke’s haircut is, oddly enough, one of my most eagerly desired changes (the wig really irritates me) and I’m glad to hear you’ll have a chance to look at it.
Oh fantastic, you fixed the framerate issues!
The Mandalore clip is looking great. I still feel the cut away from the jetpacks and helmet shot feels a little premature but I don’t really know what you can do about that. TCW has a lot of weird editing anyway, as we’ve previously discovered. Perhaps if the subsequent shot of Satine was slightly longer it’d feel less like a sudden increase in pace, but I guess that one’s been trimmed for the music? Similarly, the music feels like it dips out oddly just before “Satine, look out!” but I suppose that’s a difficulty with the source. Could you cut to Satine sooner, or cut to Satine later into that shot, to bring the music in sooner?
The rest is flawlessly executed though, there’s no sense that there used to be a conveyor belt sequence.
I’m not sure he’s super fussed about continuing to be Supreme Leader after he yeets his saber into the ocean. Rey does explicitly ask him earlier in the movie if he’s serving a new master, and he denies it.
Kylo’s plan since moment one of meeting Palpatine is to team up with Rey and kill him, which is amusingly basically what happens (besides the minor point that he joins Rey in the light rather than her joining him on the dark side).
The mind trick in TFA also rubs me the wrong way because it feels like another JJ Abrams nostalgia lift, rather than something the character would actually think to try.
Shaak Ti’s hologram is next to Yoda’s head, right?
I’m talking about Star Wars Theory milking it for ad revenue, not you.
Come on, don’t drag that stupid drama here. Pablo already clarified on Twitter and apologised. No need for the “fans” to bully another Lucasfilm creative into leaving the company (except of course, for all the glorious clicks and ad revenue it can bring!).
It works really well, great job! It makes a lot more sense than Obi-Wan calls her before he gets beaten up, and I love how you even used it as a way to fix the weird wipe when she’s on her speeder. Satine’s arrival, the fight and the elevator sequence feel close to seamless to me, even though I know you’ve actually trimmed them much shorter than they originally were.
My only minor, minor quibbles would be:
Hopefully Vegas stops giving you framerate issues shortly because I am very irritated by stuttering, haha. I was an early adopter of G-Sync monitors, even… The black crush is less annoying but still something to experiment to correct.
Anyway, nitpicks:
What was your plan with the Duchess of Mandalore episode, again?
Irrelevant general TCW ramblings: I always knew Pre Vizsla was Jon Favreau but this is the first time I’ve really noticed it. I also forgot how many suicides there are in TCW! I wonder if Bad Batch will be like that. Having this episode so early is still a really good idea: it’s definitely good to get the darksaber involved so early for anyone coming to this from Mando. I love the banter in Voyage of Temptation - “collection of half-truths and hyperbole known as Obi-Wan Kenobi”! “Yes, but he usually leaves out the undercurrent of remorse…”. I really enjoy Obi-Wan’s ‘relationship’ with Satine as a contrast to Anakin’s marriage to Padme; one of the best bits of the show for setting up ROTS. “Right… no Anakin, she’s not my-”. The spider controlling the clone’s corpse is very spooky. “…and slugs are so often trod upon!” is awful though, but I love it. I also love how Anakin just stabs Tal Merrik. Classic.
I’d appreciate having a look over it, please, though be warned I’ll have a long list of extremely minor nitpicks.
I’m afraid I haven’t touched that effect since May, so there’s no better version. After the Obi-Wan series comes out, I’m sure my desire to edit ROTS will once again stir, so perhaps then I’ll get back to it.
I’d enjoy a PM too. Have you considered doing the ROTS novelisation? I’m not sure if that’d be a bigger task or not. What I’ve read of the novel always really interested me, but I felt it was a shame that it couldn’t reference Ahsoka or TCW because of being released in 2005. You might have to get a little fanfictiony because I doubt there’s a smooth way to include thoughts of Ahsoka otherwise.
I’d be happy to re-edit together the Christophsis video to match your reference and audio track, if that’d be useful, but I use Premiere rather than Vegas.
I detect frame issues: for example, one duplicated at 106, one skipped between frame 116 and 117, duplicate again at 129, another dupe at 223 etc. MPV and MPC demonstrate this behaviour, so I think it’s inherent to the file. I’ve checked my local rips of TCW theatrical and the Hidden Enemy and they’re constant FPS 23.976 and don’t have any dupes. I’d double check your rips and how you’ve converted them.
I agree with DZ that the intro text could be spiced up a tad, but there’s a fine balance with not making it too wordy, and it definitely should continue to avoid spoiling that Ahsoka is assigned to Anakin (edit: whoops, about six new messages appeared while I was typing this one, and I see this was already iterated on). Perhaps you could work in a little reference to “Like fire, across the galaxy, the Clone Wars spread. In league with the wicked Count Dooku, more and more planets slip. Against this threat, upon the Jedi Knights falls the duty, to lead the army of the Republic. And, as the heat of war grows, so too grows the prowess of one most gifted student of the Force.”, though obviously that’d be super redundant if you then later turn CW2003 into an episode of this.
The actual editing is really solid, though, and an inventive way to put the Hidden Enemy together as just a prologue to the movie. I feel this works well as an introduction, as we’re rapidly reintroduced to Anakin and Obi-Wan, who aren’t too far from their AOTC characterisations, and then we meet Asajj quickly to get us used to the new characters.
Nitpicks:
McFibb, the droid stuff is pretty heavily baked into TCW, so you’ll probably just wind up inevitably having to stomach some of it. Same with Yoda using a lightsaber and many other traditional PT complaints.
Hmm, that framerate issue is odd. I thought TCW was always at 23.976. I’d encourage you to tell your editing software to interpret all the footage as 23.976, if possible. Be sure to vet the final render for duplicated/skipped frames.
To which I’ll reply “That’s actually how it is in the original episode. SHRUG.”
I am looking forward to posting lists of nitpicks of your edits only to rediscover that most of them are inherent to the original episodes. I suppose I could just check the original episodes myself before posting…
I don’t think you’re supposed to root for the Maul-collaborating terrorists. I’d even argue Bo-Katan gets too much of a free pass, given her actions when she was part of Death Watch.
It’d certainly be daring and radical to put Mandalore up front, but I agree with Knight of Kalee that Christophsis should remain first because of all of its specific character introduction moments. That’s one of the things that’s always irritated me about the chronological order having Cat and Mouse first: you’re just dropped straight in. I think that’s part of why, when I first decided to watch TCW, I wound up starting Cat and Mouse three or four times before eventually actually getting through it and bingeing the rest of the show.
If you’re too concerned about introducing Ahsoka and then immediately dropping her, you could jigger the order slightly and put Cloak of Darkness or Malevolence in second, though they’re unfortunately weaker episodes. Alternatively, you could continue the precedent, and arrange the episodes such that Ahsoka is occasionally randomly absent from one episode, but never two in a row, if possible.
