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Jason and the Argonauts: Agnostic Supercut

Thank you for taking the time to review, @Dwight Fry! And I'm sorry I robbed you of the gods. Perhaps I'll win you over next time with my Atheist cut? Where the gods will be replaced instead of removed...
 
Thank you @gilhodges for your review and kind words. Super glad you enjoyed both versions :)
 
I am so glad I "discovered" fan edits. As I write when I ask for links , I say I like to see different POVs. While some are just cut up. I as I am sure others can see when someone puts thought into an edit. And for me many of the edits I watch are so much better than what I saw in the theatre. I have almost 2500 titles so I have alot to watch...lol
 
My students had fun with the Harpies scene. Hopefully, I'll get to show the whole edit to one of my younger classes soon.

I've got one class in mind but they're currently watching Wakeupkeo's Tron Legacy edit. The whiplash from the cutting edge CGI of 2010 to stop motion SFX of the 1960s will be interesting for them to experience ;)
 
A while back, I tried watching this edit, but couldn't stand how the scenes with the frame interpolation looked.

It wasn't the motion itself, which was very good. I like how the frame interpolation makes the motion look smooth. Rather, the issue that I had was that as a side effect of the frame interpolation method, film grain would get frozen in place and "clump together" (for lack of a better term), making areas with large patches of the same or similar colors (such as the sky) look like a gritty-textured flag moving in the wind or a blanket being pulled in various directions. Areas with a lot of color variation tended not to be affected too badly (for example, this issue was barely detectable during the Hydra fight). I also noticed that some of the skeletons during the skeleton fight had a "halo" of pixels all around them.

Essentially, the side effect is due to the presence of film grain in the original shots. The frame interpolation would work perfectly with grainless digital footage, but what it does to film grain in areas of the image such as the sky or other large areas with little color variation looks horrible.

This side effect wasn't visible (as far as I can recall) in the Vimeo previews that I had watched when you were first making the edit and its companion piece edit, as it is only noticeable in full HD with the image filling the screen. I think it could theoretically be fixed with rotoscoping to keep only the stop-motion creatures from the frame interpolated shots, with the sky and other such elements from the unaltered shot being preserved, but this would take a lot of work.
 
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^^ thank you for the honest feedback (though I wish you'd said something ages ago, before I deleted all my files for that edit).

I know what you mean though, as heavy grain can "trigger" motion blur and also get smoothed by the AI when you don't want it to.

As a matter of fact, I do mask out the stop motion action from the rest of the shot in most cases. The actors and majority of the background are untouched by the AI. It isn't to the pixel accurate, but I do regularly go frame by frame by frame to adjust what part of the image was being affected. You say the hydra wasn't so bad for you - well, that had A LOT of glitchy frames due to the necks getting tangled up by the AI, so I did spend a lot more time trying to get that looking right. Generally, I hybridise frames that turn out glitchy, so that quick motion on an arm, for example, would be AI, whereas the rest of the body would be the original movement. An exception may be a shot where a creature nearly fills the frame, in which case I may have processed the whole shot.

I don't know if that will still bother you with my current edit for Sinbad or not, as my method has changed and the grain movement for that film is less heavy. If the skeletons bothered you though, you probably won't like Kahli's scene, as the motion blur is quite prominent.

One thing that could resolve it is to try scrubbing the grain from the shot prior to processing, then adding the grain back on. Some detail would be lost, but may be a lesser evil. Regardless, I do think I can do a better job with Jason now, so would love to go back to it sometime, but it won't be happening any time soon.
 
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The Scribbling Man said:
^^ thank you for the honest feedback (though I wish you'd said something ages ago, before I deleted all my files for that edit).
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Unfortunately, I didn't start watching it until long after that.

The Scribbling Man said:
As a matter of fact, I do mask out the stop motion action from the rest of the shot in most cases. The actors and majority of the background are untouched by the AI. It isn't to the pixel accurate, but I do regularly go frame by frame by frame to adjust what part of the image was being affected.
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Interesting. I didn't realize that you did that. What software/method do you use for the masking? There are some now (like DaVinci Resolve's Magic Mask) that can create very accurate masks much more easily than with old methods.


The Scribbling Man said:
You say the hydra wasn't so bad for you - well, that had A LOT of glitchy frames due to the necks getting tangled up by the AI, so I did spend a lot more time trying to get that looking right. Generally, I hybridise frames that turn out glitchy, so that quick motion on an arm, for example, would be AI, whereas the rest of the body would be the original movement. An exception may be a shot where a creature nearly fills the frame, in which case I may have processed the whole shot.
Click to expand...

That might be why it looked so good compared to a lot of other scenes. I had assumed it was because of the lack of large areas (such as the sky) where grain is more noticeable.

As a more specific way of demonstrating what the issues in some scenes are, here are some screenshots with some explanations. These are just examples; there are other shots with these issues as well.

In this shot, if you look around Talos, and especially around his sword, the grain doesn't look right. It's much more noticeable in motion than in this snapshot.



This shot looks almost normal in this still snapshot, but in motion, it looks as if the sky is a blanket being dragged around by Talos as he moves. It looks very bizarre and distracting



In these shots, the skeletons are surrounded by blurry haloes that disrupt the grain for a significant radius around themselves. It's noticeable even in the snapshots, but much more so in motion.





EDIT: I also notice now, that in some scenes, if I compare the human characters to the stop-motion ones, it seems to be that the amount of motion blur that you applied to the stop-motion characters seems to be significantly more than the amount of motion blur naturally present in the unaltered live-action footage of actors moving at roughly the same speed as the stop-motion characters. This is especially the case in the skeleton fight.
 
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The Scribbling Man said:
One thing that could resolve it is to try scrubbing the grain from the shot prior to processing, then adding the grain back on. Some detail would be lost, but may be a lesser evil. Regardless, I do think I can do a better job with Jason now, so would love to go back to it sometime, but it won't be happening any time soon.
Click to expand...
You naturally came to the conclusion that I was going to suggest. It may be best to do this for future projects. You might even be able to do it to this project, even without the original files.
 
hbenthow said:
As a more specific way of demonstrating what the issues in some scenes are, here are some screenshots with some explanations. These are just examples; there are other shots with these issues as well.

EDIT: I also notice now, that in some scenes, if I compare the human characters to the stop-motion ones, it seems to be that the amount of motion blur that you applied to the stop-motion characters seems to be significantly more than the amount of motion blur naturally present in the unaltered live-action footage of actors moving at roughly the same speed as the stop-motion characters. This is especially the case in the skeleton fight.
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Thanks for being detailed. Maybe the motion blur needs to be more restrained. - it can be tempting to go further than needed in order to compensate for the lack of smoothness in the animation, since increasing the motion blur does make it smoother, but if it makes it jarringly unrealistic, it probably needs to be reeled in.

One thing I will say though, is that there are some pretty dodgy shots in the original footage. In particular, I remember spending a bit too long trying to fix what I thought was an AI-created gltich on my own end with the very shot of Talos you've shared there, only to realise that it was how it was presented on the original shot. I think there are even moments where segments of the ship mast vanishes, probably due to poor compositing. Really threw me through a loop.

It's also worth noting that there are already halos of sorts around many of the creatures anyway, and that's just how a lot of those old FX looked as part of the limitations of the time. I'm struggling to find specific screencaps online and don't have the original footage to hand, but note the pale haze around the animation here for example:

image.png


That's not me making excuses, just checking that none of what you're seeing isn't already there in the first place. Obviously newly created digital weirdness from AI is a different matter. Sky-wise, I know what you're referring to and think scrubbing the grain and adding a layer back on after may be my best bet.

EDIT: missed this:

What software/method do you use for the masking? There are some now (like DaVinci Resolve's Magic Mask) that can create very accurate masks much more easily than with old methods.
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Masking has been entirely manual in vegas. I should probably look into magic mask. However, if I mask too closely, the old animation pokes through, which is part of why some of my masking is loose around the creature, and seemingly causing a "halo" effect.
 
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