[HN Gopher] The movie mistake mystery from "Revenge of the Sith"
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       The movie mistake mystery from "Revenge of the Sith"
        
       Author : CharlesW
       Score  : 273 points
       Date   : 2025-04-20 17:29 UTC (5 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (fxrant.blogspot.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (fxrant.blogspot.com)
        
       | the_af wrote:
       | I have to agree with the article's author that what he calls
       | "overzealous" removal of movie mistakes seems wrong. It wouldn't
       | matter so much if the original movie was still readily available,
       | but it's often the case that only the latest "fixed" version
       | remains available.
       | 
       | With Star Wars in particular, Lucas' incessant meddling has long
       | have gone far past the point of diminishing returns, and
       | frequently making the movies worse.
       | 
       | More in general, I like watching the original movie, warts and
       | all. I often disagree with the corrections, especially when they
       | restore scenes that were left out for a reason, make color
       | correction choices I disagree with (e.g. Blade Runner's "green
       | tint" is inferior to its original bluish tint), etc.
        
         | pnw wrote:
         | Agree 100%. In addition to fixing mistakes and changing the
         | color palette, I also object to the use of DNR and similar
         | techniques to remove the film grain from older movies, in order
         | to make them look more "modern", like films shot on digital.
         | Unfortunately Cameron's recent 4k remasters of his classic
         | films all suffer from this problem.
        
           | hammock wrote:
           | I get it though, it's crazy that I know so many people who
           | now say "I don't like old movies" or "I don't want to watch
           | this movie, it looks old" when what they see and are really
           | saying without realizing it is , it was shot on film.
           | 
           | It's especially worse since the hit rate of actually good,
           | creative movies is so much lower in the digital era.
           | 
           | My big pet peeve now is these "ew, this movie looks old"
           | attitude.
           | 
           | I was watching Sum of All Fears the other day and my partner
           | had this attitude. Funny though as soon as people in tuxedos
           | showed up on the screen she changed her mind and started
           | watching. Tuxedos are one of those movie magic things.
        
             | jimbokun wrote:
             | Weird how what we grow up with influences our tastes. To me
             | the look of films shot on old school film signals "high
             | quality" and overly digitally edited movies signals "cheap"
             | in the sense of being shot on a green screen lot to save on
             | shooting on location.
        
               | alabastervlog wrote:
               | I think people who start to get into the craft of film-
               | making (even academically, not making their own films)
               | even a little tend to open up a lot to older films.
               | 
               | It's so much more impressive when they had to actually
               | arrange for the thing you're seeing to exist, at least in
               | some sense, in real life, so light could bounce off it
               | and hit the film. That is a real landscape that the
               | actors and crew had to travel to! They really made horses
               | jump off that train car! They really had two thousand
               | extras for this shot! That kind of thing. If there was a
               | set at least they had to build it, and even if the
               | results look a little janky it's usually interesting and
               | the craft impressive.
               | 
               | They shot with environmental lighting? They had to rig
               | their other lights _just so_ and maybe just work with
               | what was available to get a good shot. The light is the
               | light. The constraints on their options often seem to
               | improve, rather than harm, the final product.
               | 
               | Now it's like oh they couldn't even be bothered to film
               | on a real damn _street_. Ugh. All the location shooting
               | is just getting backgrounds to composite in later. The
               | light on the actors didn't even exist when and where the
               | background was shot. It sucks and is boring.
        
           | neckro23 wrote:
           | It's a travesty. I was sourcing video for an Alien/Aliens
           | watch party (for a couple of adolescents who had never seen
           | either) and I had to hunt down a copy of the older HD Bluray
           | of _Aliens_ because the 4k remaster looked so awful.
           | 
           | (By contrast, the 4k of _Alien_ looks fantastic.)
        
         | phreack wrote:
         | This is why archiving is such a worthwhile endeavor. We could
         | end up losing the original movies otherwise!
        
         | jimbokun wrote:
         | It's the artistic equivalent of Stalin erasing disfavored
         | figures from Soviet photographs.
        
       | 615341652341 wrote:
       | Finally! I've only been casually following this over the years,
       | so this is a great write up!!
        
       | vmilner wrote:
       | I noticed watching the recent 4K release of The Terminator that
       | the garage attendant in the final scene has a piece of paper in
       | his top pocket with "There's a storm coming" written upside down
       | on it.
        
         | xhevahir wrote:
         | Did you notice the Terminator counts his kills in floating-
         | point numbers? I'd hate to see the studio correct these things.
        
           | p_ing wrote:
           | "Casualties", not kills. Perhaps using floating point is for
           | working with another Terminator, or the decimal value being
           | calculated based on the wound inflicted, with a whole number
           | being a kill.
           | 
           | Or really, just to Look Cool And Technical And Shit.
        
             | kibwen wrote:
             | To nobody's surprise, Skynet is a strict utilitarian who
             | has rationally concluded that plucking one billion
             | eyelashes is equivalent to one murder.
        
               | p_ing wrote:
               | There's a lot of camera-eye real estate for zeros!
        
           | varjag wrote:
           | So T800 is indeed coded in Javascript, I knew it! What else
           | to expect of devs in 2029
        
             | jimbokun wrote:
             | It's because JavaScript has the most example code in the
             | LLM's training data that writes the Terminator source code.
        
             | tannhaeuser wrote:
             | Of course not! As is well known, T800 is coded in COBOL
             | ([1]).
             | 
             | [1]: https://www.theterminatorfans.com/the-terminator-
             | vision-hud-...
        
               | fortran77 wrote:
               | By this guy:
               | https://x.com/ThrillScience/status/1249742678532620293
        
           | adzm wrote:
           | Maybe it is fixed point though
        
       | p_ing wrote:
       | > Painting out these movie mistakes as part of a restoration is
       | wrong. What's in the movie is in the movie, and altering the
       | movie to this extent is a form of revisionist history.
       | 
       | How many times has Lord of the Rings been revised? Dune? <Insert
       | other long-lived actively managed novel>. Is the active
       | management of these novels "wrong"? Is fixing grammar, spelling,
       | or clarifying story beats "wrong"?
       | 
       | I personally don't think so, and I'd rather read something which
       | has been corrected, especially if done for story clarity.
        
         | rightbyte wrote:
         | George Lucas had an especially hostile stand against the
         | unaltered versions though.
        
         | jimbokun wrote:
         | All of those are absolutely wrong.
         | 
         | In the vast majority of cases it's "fixing" the original in
         | this sense;
         | 
         | https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/nov/18/painting-match...
         | 
         | Also, it's important to be able to see these works as
         | originally published. Otherwise, you are passing off a forgery
         | as the original.
        
           | alabastervlog wrote:
           | I'm not necessarily opposed to all fixes like this, but in
           | film most of these strike me as totally unnecessary and
           | making the movie strictly worse.
           | 
           | Normal viewers almost never notice these things, and movie
           | nerds _like_ little glimpses behind the curtain. So it's
           | doing almost nothing for one sort of viewer, and making it
           | worse for another.
        
           | p_ing wrote:
           | How are they wrong? Which ones are wrong? Which spelling
           | correction, grammar correction, story clarity is wrong?
           | 
           | Is the Blade Runner Director's Cut wrong?
        
           | wat10000 wrote:
           | That's absurd. The incident with the fresco was an outrage
           | because it ruined the original. If the well-meaning vandal
           | had merely defaced a copy, nobody would have cared.
           | 
           | If you want to see works as originally published, get a copy
           | of the original publishing. Buying a re-issue and expecting
           | it to be identical in every way is silly.
        
       | _wire_ wrote:
       | The only one I've ever noticed on my own in a long life of
       | watching movies is the compressed air tank to overturn a chariot
       | in Gladiator (2000).
       | 
       | I was told about the pole that causes the truck to flip in
       | Raiders of the Lost Ark and now I can't unsee it.
       | 
       | --Warning to those who enjoy 2001 A Space Odyssey with their
       | blinders on...--
       | 
       | 2001 made a big impression on me as a kid and I've seen it many
       | times. There was a point when watching for the Nth time in middle
       | age that I first noticed that all the anti-gravity shots show the
       | actors bodies carrying their own weight. Especially in the aisle
       | scene with the floating pen, which itself is rotating about the
       | center of the sheet of clear plastic it's attached to rather than
       | its center of mass. Later in the same sequence, food trays are
       | brought to the bridge after the long scenes of a flight
       | attendant, who picks up trays as they slide downs from a
       | dispenser, and as she hands the trays to the crew, one of them
       | instinctively puts his hand out under the tray to helpfully catch
       | its weight. In the next scene an officer joins other crew by
       | coming up from behind them, leaning over and resting his arms on
       | their chair backs as the scene cuts to details of anti-gravity
       | meal consumption. Finally Floyd stands in front of a toilet
       | reading a 1000 word hard-printed list of instructions after the
       | viewer has been shown electronic displays used everywhere else.
       | The self-consciousness of that clip provides a lovely relief from
       | all the previous cognitive dissonance. I'm not able to unsee any
       | of this now and it detracts from the spectacle. But at the same
       | time, it makes the orchestration and ideas of the movie seem all
       | the more artistic, so nothing lost except innocence. There are
       | many other oddities to find in the movie working on different
       | planes of awareness, including proprioceptive assumptions about
       | reality, intelligence, progress, and spirituality.
        
         | WalterBright wrote:
         | I too have seen 2001 countless times, and I missed some of
         | these! One you missed is when food is sucked from the tube, the
         | food flows back down into the container.
         | 
         | We had very little experience with zero g at the time, and
         | surely Kubrick and his crew had zero. They did a remarkable job
         | despite that.
        
         | JadeNB wrote:
         | > Later in the same sequence, food trays are brought to the
         | bridge after the long scenes of a flight attendant, who picks
         | up trays as they slide downs from a dispenser, and as she hands
         | the trays to the crew, one of them instinctively puts his hand
         | out under the tray to helpfully catch its weight.
         | 
         | Is this one clearly wrong? As you say, it's essentially an
         | instinctive motion, so one can easily imagine the reflex taking
         | over even if the scene were genuinely in zero gravity.
        
       | alganet wrote:
       | Toasty!
        
       | crazygringo wrote:
       | > _Painting out these movie mistakes as part of a restoration is
       | wrong. What 's in the movie is in the movie, and altering the
       | movie to this extent is a form of revisionist history. Cinema is
       | worse off when over-aggressive restorations alter the action
       | within the frame. To me, this is equivalent to swapping out an
       | actor's performance with a different take, or changing the music
       | score during an action sequence, or replacing a puppet creature
       | with a computer graphics version of the same creature decades
       | after release._
       | 
       | It's really not the equivalent though. I don't see anything wrong
       | with fixing a license plate or removing a reflection or a modern-
       | day wristwatch.
       | 
       | It's the equivalent of fixing a spelling error in a novel, or a
       | wrong chord in sheet music. None of the filmmakers wanted those
       | things there. They weren't done with intent. They were just
       | mistakes.
       | 
       | Changing music or replacing a puppet with CG, of course I'm
       | against. That's changing the art of it. Different music makes you
       | feel different. A CG creature has a different personality. Just
       | like you don't want to replace vocabulary in a novel to make it
       | more modern-day.
       | 
       | I think it's usually pretty easy to distinguish the two. The
       | first ones would have been corrected at the time if they'd
       | noticed and gone for another take. They take us _out_ of the
       | movie if we notice them. The latter category is a reflection of
       | the technology, resources, and intentional choices. They keep us
       | _in_ the world of moviemaking as it was at that time.
        
         | alabastervlog wrote:
         | I'm a lot more bothered by the change to the color grading in
         | the "after" of Alien than the minor change to the effect, and
         | by the picture looking way shittier in the "fixed" Goodfellas
         | shot (the first is blu ray, the second "blu ray and streaming",
         | so hopefully the example was taken from streaming and that's
         | why it looks so much worse)
        
           | crazygringo wrote:
           | Oh yeah. Totally agreed on not changing the color grading.
           | That's as big as changing the music.
           | 
           | With blogs that take screenshots of 4K content though,
           | sometimes that's using a media player with poor HDR color
           | decoding though. Bad HDR always winds up with a green tint,
           | that's the telltale sign. VLC is the worst with that.
           | 
           | But I don't think that's the case here. There are definitely
           | a lot of rereleases with badly done color.
        
           | tvaziri wrote:
           | It was taken from streaming but that's the "new" color grade
        
         | madrox wrote:
         | I also found this take interesting coming from someone at ILM
         | where they grafted Hayden Christensen into Return of the Jedi.
         | 
         | Though in this day and age I can't help but ask "why not both?"
         | It feels easy to add a choice to your viewing experience. If
         | they can do it for Black Mirror then they can certainly ask up
         | front "which version would you like to see?"
        
           | bigstrat2003 wrote:
           | > I also found this take interesting coming from someone at
           | ILM where they grafted Hayden Christensen into Return of the
           | Jedi.
           | 
           | Presumably the author would be opposed to that as well. Just
           | because his employer did it doesn't mean he approves of it.
        
           | simonh wrote:
           | I literally just finished watching Episode IV, the one with
           | the CGI makeover. The extra alien CGI in Mos Eisley is awful.
           | It doesn't stand up at all, with the one exception of the
           | Jaba scene which gets away with it because it is pretty fun.
           | I wish we'd watched the original version.
        
             | Henchman21 wrote:
             | Is it easy to find the original? I'd love a copy of each on
             | my Plex server, but I have had trouble finding an original
             | copy. I admit I may not know where or how to look; advice
             | is welcome!
        
               | Namahanna wrote:
               | What you are looking for is this -
               | https://www.thestarwarstrilogy.com/project-4k77/
               | 
               | "97% of project 4K77 is from a single, original 1977 35mm
               | Technicolor release print, scanned at full 4K, cleaned at
               | 4K, and rendered at 4K."
               | 
               | Opening scene comparison -
               | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P1b47UP6ZGI
        
         | thih9 wrote:
         | > It's the equivalent of fixing a spelling error in a novel,
         | 
         | I was surprised to learn that this is a thing and has been for
         | a long time.
         | 
         | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wicked_Bible
        
           | WalterBright wrote:
           | The trouble with spelling errors is they drop me out of the
           | immersion in the story. I recall reading one that averaged 2
           | spelling errors per page. The story and writing was fine, but
           | reading it was like driving on a beautiful country road and
           | hitting a pothole every hundred yards. I finally just gave up
           | on the book.
        
             | mitthrowaway2 wrote:
             | Spelling errors also are sometimes not introduced by the
             | author, but by the typesetter or publisher. In a preface to
             | the Lord of the Rings, Tolkien complains about how many
             | revisions it took to get typesetters to type the book
             | correctly, especially with the words that he had made up or
             | created new conventions for (elves vs. elfs, for example).
        
         | WalterBright wrote:
         | Why oh why did the music for Rocky & Bullwinkle change for the
         | dvd release? It's horrible. The R&B on VHS have the original
         | music.
        
           | Onawa wrote:
           | Because of expired licenses to use the original music. You
           | can see the same thing happening with later releases of
           | media. As an example, DVD releases of Scrubs were known to
           | have switched out many songs in the entire show.
        
             | pests wrote:
             | This happens in the streaming days too. I believe Arrested
             | Development was one where when it came to streaming they
             | had to change the music.
        
           | shmeeed wrote:
           | They didn't have the license and actually got sued for the
           | VHS release.
           | 
           | https://old.reddit.com/r/FrostbiteFalls/comments/1flr8ue/fra.
           | ..
        
             | WalterBright wrote:
             | Thank you, at last I have an explanation!
             | 
             | As for the people responsible: _You Maniacs! You blew it
             | up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!_
        
               | anjel wrote:
               | Its almost always a rights issue with changes to movie
               | and TV soundtracks.
        
               | bigstrat2003 wrote:
               | And video games too. GTA 4 has had that issue, and
               | digital copies of the game have had music (which Rockstar
               | no longer has the rights to) patched out.
        
           | alabastervlog wrote:
           | If you have wide taste in film and TV, at some point you
           | _have to_ turn to piracy (and /or fan edits) to get the "real
           | thing". Impossible or impractical to get it any other way.
        
         | Ghos3t wrote:
         | There is some value in the mistakes and limitations of older
         | movies, I am sure if you look it up people who can explain it
         | far better than me can give lots of examples, I saw a video
         | once about the growing trend of analog horror where people
         | intentionally watch older horror movies in older storage and
         | display formats like VHS and CRT televisions, because in many
         | ways the high def modern tv screens and 4K mastered prints
         | actually take away from the atmosphere of the original movie
         | that was made keeping the limitations of the technology of the
         | time. Wes Anderson also talks about how watching the fur
         | pattern constantly changing on the model of King Kong in the
         | black and white stop-motion movie due to the puppeteers
         | touching the model to manipulate it inspired him to do the same
         | in his Fantastic Mr Fox movie
        
           | mort96 wrote:
           | It's similar to how old games look so different on modern
           | hardware: the pixel art on a current-day screen looks like
           | high-fidelity perfectly sharp uniformly colored squares,
           | while the "pixel art" of old games rendered on a CRT didn't
           | look like "pixel art" at all but rather like high-fidelity
           | art rendered on a low-fidelity screen. There's a lot of
           | detail implied by the way CRTs render what's encoded in
           | software as perfect squares.
        
             | teddyh wrote:
             | Illustrative images: <https://imgur.com/gallery/SSpcDzA>
        
           | wat10000 wrote:
           | Are they watching made-for-TV movies? Otherwise I'd think the
           | movies would have been made for theater viewing, and watching
           | it in 4k on a big modern TV would be a lot closer to how the
           | creators wanted you to see it than using VHS and an old TV.
        
         | jancsika wrote:
         | > It's the equivalent of fixing a spelling error in a novel, or
         | a wrong chord in sheet music.
         | 
         | Your analogies don't pass a simple self-check-- they are vastly
         | different in scope.
         | 
         | At worst a spelling error will create a single alternative
         | spelling in history. Wrong chords, however, typically create
         | entire branches of full pieces of music that include allusions
         | to and variations upon the wrong chord. For example-- there's
         | no way to "correct" the C major chord in Rachmaninoff's
         | Variations on a Theme by Chopin. What are you going to do,
         | change _every single variation_ in Rachmaninoff 's piece to
         | reflect the correct chord (C minor) from Chopin's prelude?
         | 
         | It gets even more complicated in jazz where chord substitutions
         | are not only expected but often supersede the original chords.
         | Even more to the point-- a lot of the die-hard Charlie Parker
         | fans not only love the recording he made while obviously drunk,
         | they love it _in spite of_ Parker 's wishes for nobody to ever
         | hear it it (much less repeatedly play it and talk about it).
         | 
         | That's all to say a) correcting an entrenched wrong chord is no
         | simplistic task, and b) in any case it's wrong to assume that
         | the artist's intentions are always the chief concern.
        
           | davidcbc wrote:
           | The analogy was fine, you're just stretching it too far.
           | 
           | Of course there are times when it's better to leave a "wrong"
           | chord in music, but it's incredibly common for sheet music to
           | have unintentional errors, especially in an ensemble setting.
           | If trumpets are playing a unison part but 1 and 2 have a Bb
           | and trumpet 3 has a B natural nobody thinks twice about
           | fixing the trumpet 3 part. That's the analogy, not jazz and
           | Rachmaninoff
        
         | tvaziri wrote:
         | agree to disagree
        
         | krick wrote:
         | Yeah, I knew there must be a debate about this in the comments
         | the moment I saw it.
         | 
         | Honestly, I personally disagree with the sentiment on all
         | levels. Meaning, I agree with your observation that there are
         | degrees to "restoration", and fixing a mistake is just not the
         | same as changing music.
         | 
         | But then, I also have no sympathy to your objection of changing
         | music or replacing a puppet with CG. I mean, I may like the old
         | take better, but whatever, I'm not the one who made the movie.
         | The people who made this particular cut for this particular
         | release made it (duh). And these may or may be not the same
         | directors and producers that made the cut you consider "the
         | original one". It's their vision. Surely, it may seem
         | surprising to a naive viewer that it's not the director the
         | movie is attributed to who "made it" in its entirety, but this
         | is just never the case and obviously any cinema enthusiast
         | knows it all too well anyway.
         | 
         | (But then I should probably mention that my fundamental
         | disagreement with the sentiment spreads way farther than that,
         | and I myself consider it kinda extreme. I often would be fine
         | with the kind of "restoration" that essentially destroys the
         | original thing. This would be off-topic to explain it here,
         | because it wouldn't be about the movies anymore, but I just
         | think that too much respect for the great things of the past
         | often leads to losing sight of why these things were made in
         | the first place. They were meant to be great at the time, not
         | to be respected as a very old pile of rubbish a couple of
         | thousands years later.)
         | 
         | The only thing I am kinda objecting to is when changes made
         | reflect the current political agenda in one way or another
         | (i.e. censorship, be it taboo on display of tits on TV, cutting
         | out statements that seem "politically incorrect" at the time
         | and place of the release, removing some persona non-grata who
         | made a very minor cameo appearance in the original movie or
         | anything else like that). But, again, I don't really object to
         | that because "they don't have the right to do it", but because
         | it's just irritatingly stupid and makes me roll my eyes. It
         | doesn't necessarily make the movie worse or even substantially
         | different (I might not even notice), but unlike with
         | remastering of the original movie, the intent clearly isn't to
         | make it "better" (in their opinion), but just acting out of
         | fear to cause trouble by displaying today something that was
         | fine yesterday as is.
         | 
         | What I think is kinda lacking is very clear and non-ambiguous
         | versioning of movies. I am not that much of a movie enthusiast
         | myself, but some people obviously care if you can see the
         | original number-plate falling off the car, and it would be nice
         | if these people could easily refer to that particular edit they
         | like better. They kinda always do it anyway, but that only
         | happens if they need to specifically mention this number plate
         | falling off, and normally they try to pretend that 10 edits
         | made for 10 releases on different media in different countries
         | are all the same movie, which (almost by definition) is not the
         | case. I mean, for books we have versions and ISBNs, and it's
         | normal to reference specifically that, not just one of the
         | authors and the title. Should be standard practice for movies
         | too.
        
         | noizejoy wrote:
         | >> Painting out these movie mistakes as part of a restoration
         | is wrong.
         | 
         | > It's really not the equivalent though. I don't see anything
         | wrong with fixing a license plate or removing a reflection or a
         | modern-day wristwatch.
         | 
         | I think it depends on the primary objective of the restoration.
         | If I'm trying to preserve history, I shouldn't fix errors. If
         | I'm trying to make a (by implication derivative) work that
         | maximizes enjoyability for (new) audiences, then it's ok to
         | fix.
         | 
         | e.g. a long time ago, I once transferred vinyl recordings of an
         | extremely amateur community musical group to CD.
         | 
         | After thinking long and hard, I decided to fix recording
         | technology flaws (a bad hum) and vinyl degradation flaws
         | (crackles, dust, etc). But I didn't fix any of the musical
         | performance flaws.
         | 
         | Bottom line: I decided to respect the history of the
         | performance, and disrespect the history of the recording and
         | playback technology/medium.
        
         | jart wrote:
         | I believe it was a historical mistake to have so many white men
         | in cinema. Like correcting a spelling error, we shall use AI to
         | edit these films to recast them with black and brown women who
         | represent the global majority.
        
       | haunter wrote:
       | I hate editing mistakes more. The Aviator has quite a few of
       | these where for example in cut A two characters talk by walking
       | side by side, in cut B they stop and turn towards each other
       | (still talking), and in cut C they continue the talking but you
       | can see cut A and C are the continuation of each other and cut B
       | was inserted in the middle https://files.catbox.moe/dljiiw.mp4
       | 
       | And that's just one example that film is full of those. Here is
       | another jarring one https://files.catbox.moe/9m3gjq.mp4
       | 
       | Despite that it won the Academy Award for Best Editing...
        
         | alabastervlog wrote:
         | I've managed to make myself so sensitive to this that I get all
         | tense when there's a multi-camera setup for a conversation,
         | waiting for the moment when they cut from A to B and someone's
         | hands or head have teleported to a slightly (and sometimes not
         | slightly!) different position.
         | 
         | Very few such sequences complete without my noticing some spot
         | where shots don't match up.
         | 
         | Another one is key lights reflected in eyeballs. Nearly ruins
         | Jackson's LOTR trilogy for me, it's in basically every damn
         | scene. In several shots you can practically diagram out their
         | whole lighting rig from a the reflections on an actor's eye, so
         | many lights are plainly and distinctly visible. You see it some
         | in lots of movies but OMG it's bad in those.
        
           | andrewinardeer wrote:
           | I have always considered it an actors job to ensure their
           | hands or cigarette or whatever are in the same position when
           | they hit the same word during multiple takes.
        
         | Cruncharoo wrote:
         | Oh, I have a similar pet peeve but for watching live sports.
         | Sometimes they'll cut from the 'main' camera angle to a
         | different one mid-action but it will be slightly out of sync
         | and noticeable. For whatever reason this is super noticeable to
         | me and bugs me to no end.
        
         | crazygringo wrote:
         | You might be interested to know that in terms of editing skill,
         | physical matching/continuity is the _least_ important thing to
         | get right:
         | 
         | https://www.studiobinder.com/blog/walter-murch-rule-of-six/
         | 
         | Anybody can edit a scene so that there are no inconsistencies.
         | The art of editing comes from maximizing emotional impact, then
         | the story, then rhythm. When editors sacrifice matching for
         | those, it's not a mistake -- it's intentional.
         | 
         | The fact is, editors work with the footage they're given --
         | reshoots happen when new scenes are needed or footage is
         | unusable, but not for continuity errors. If the most
         | emotionally impactful combination of shots has a continuity
         | error, the worse for continuity.
        
       | jonathanlydall wrote:
       | I watched Aliens at least half a dozen times (still one of my all
       | time favourites), and only noticed it when a friend pointed it
       | out to us as it was playing at New Year's party.
        
       | sickcodebruh wrote:
       | There's a really funny duality to mistakes in recorded art that
       | is vastly different when viewed as a fan and the creator.
       | 
       | As a music fan, I really love little mistakes in incredible
       | albums. They're humanizing, they show that the recording was made
       | by people and it makes the highs feel so much higher.
       | 
       | As an artist, I loathe mistakes in my own work and I will spend a
       | basically limitless amount of time fixing annoying performance
       | quirks in software -- I'm talking things that I can do but didn't
       | get quite right -- so I can listen to it without distraction or
       | regrets. I know that nobody will notice these except me and the
       | type of listener who does catch them will either not mind or
       | appreciate it the way I would. But when it's my own work, it's
       | different. I'm sure it's the same for filmmakers so I understand
       | the impulse to fix it later.
        
       | codeflo wrote:
       | Looking at the green screen shots of that Mustafar fight in
       | Episode III: If that was the actual lighting of the in-camera
       | scene, then it's not a mystery at all that everything in that
       | movie looked so fake.
        
         | Cthulhu_ wrote:
         | I want to believe they've improved the process by a lot since
         | then, including getting the lighting right. Although I'm sure
         | most of that is done in post-processing.
         | 
         | The making of The Mandalorian is interesting though, by using a
         | projected screen as the set rendered in realtime, they can get
         | the environmental lighting on the actors correct as well
         | without much post-processing.
        
           | joshvm wrote:
           | The Volume is pretty cool. A practical version of this that's
           | often overlooked is Oblivion (probably because the plot is
           | naff). The "sky tower" set is physical with 270 degrees of
           | front projection to handle the sky. It would have been a lot
           | harder to convincingly re-create all the optical effects and
           | not worry about what light would look like scattered off
           | glass or other occluding objects.
           | 
           | https://www.fdtimes.com/2013/03/29/claudio-miranda-asc-on-
           | ob...
           | 
           | Another example is the motion simulator/projector setup from
           | First Man, which makes the cockpit and landing sequences look
           | so good. They won best VFX.
           | 
           | https://youtu.be/sw57ORTgGG4?si=NjRNt551HJhL_l9k&t=193
           | (relevant footage starts around 3:13)
           | 
           | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UChwuyWVzsI
        
         | alabastervlog wrote:
         | By Episode II, Lucas had decided to make damn near everything
         | green screen. They weren't even building chairs and benches the
         | actors sat on. Green boxes in many cases.
         | 
         | It looked like complete shit even by the standards of the time,
         | and of course hasn't aged well.
         | 
         | I watched a "film edits" fan edit of the Clone Wars CG cartoon,
         | and one of the odder things about the experience was the end,
         | where the editor cut together the final arc of that show,
         | another shorter 2D cartoon, and the live action (well... mostly
         | also just CG) Revenge of the Sith in roughly chronological
         | order (including some nifty simultaneous action bits).
         | 
         | What was so odd was how _very_ much worse and less-real-feeling
         | the "live action" film was than the wholly CG cartoon. The
         | writing, the line delivery, the sets, the action, the editing--
         | it was all worse and came off as far _more_ fake than a literal
         | cartoon.
        
       | bombcar wrote:
       | Does that Civil War movie have a modern electrical box in the
       | background? Because that's what it looks like to me - totally
       | distracted me from the watch.
        
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