The Matrix ReEdited - Page 2

What if you just used bittorrent so you could bypass your server rules?

I'm curious how both Alex and Sairus will deal with the final hour of Revolutions. I have always thought it would work better, and be much more dramatic and exciting, for the final battles to be integrated into one climax. I guess this is the "Star Wars" style of editing, but what is important is it works. Even though I pretty much despise Ep. 1 and 2, the final half hour of both is very exciting, as is the orginal three-tiered battle sequence at the end of Ep. 6.

What I'm thinking is that Neo and Trin heading toward "Machine City", Niobe and Morpheous heading back to Zion, and the mecha battle at Zion would all take place simultaneously. Neo would actually be fighting Smith at the same time that the people of Zion are fighting the squidies. With scenes of the hovercraft chase peppered throughout. The machines wouldn't stop attacking until the final moment when Neo is overwritten as Smith. That would coincide with the moment that the sentinals stop all activity and hover around in front of the Zion Temple.

In this way, you get the impression that even though the machines are making a deal with Neo, they are still pressing their attack as a contingency, as I think any logical machine would. Neo never asks the machines to stop everything, only for a chance to take out Smith. What are your guys' thoughts on that? I've actually thought of doing a re-edit myself at some point.

And for the love of God, are you going to trim Trin's death sequence? Please? I would!

I visited SAIRUS's webpage to see how far along the project had gotten, and it's not there anymore.

To be honest, the compression that .wmv files give you is so lousy it was really difficult to make out much of anything.

I thought you were combining Reloaded and Revolutions into one movie?

As I said before, you could try a p2p program to distribute the files, that way you won't have to find space to host it. I recommend bittorrent because that way everyone shares the load.

I don't recommend you share the movie.

But if you are going to I suggest going with BitTorent like Sly McFly said. I think its the best way to share a file for a limited time.

-Jason

You're forgetting about Morpheus' "I don't see coincidence" speech. His whole big rant right before it about fate and prophecies sets up the Architect speech as an even bigger slap to the face to the characters and the audience.

I actually like the idea of re-editing the movie, for the same points Sairus already indicated. I look forward to seeing a complete edit. Ethically speaking, I'm not sure how to deal with this. It's his work, and that's worth something, but it's not his to work on, so it's illegal to be paying for it.

Hrm. Still, good luck with the edits.

Amusingly, I had started a Matrix Reloaded edit of my own a while back, and I still work on it from time to time. Mine goes so far as to remove single frames in many parts. For instance, in the intro when Trinity jumps up to somersault with the helmet, some frames from the beginning of the top-down view jump are removed to make the movement more seamless (i.e., her arm starts pointing up at the camera instead of pointing behind her). The Wachowskis seem to have gotten off on showing slow-motion footage of absolutely every movement from beginning to end, which to me explains why so many of the action scenes feel bloated. I was a bit obsessive about examining every single shot for parts that could be moved or removed.

The second half of the Burly Brawl is almost completely rearranged to remove the unbroken sweeping shots, which are what contribute to the fakeness of the CG. Compare to the original trailer, which showed a clip from the Burly Brawl by editing three parts together. The CG was indistinguishable from the real footage, and it was a great shot. That same shot is used in the new edit.

It's amusing to find a few cheat frames in the Burly Brawl. For instance, when Neo kicks off from one of the Smiths to fly backwards, and Smith jumps up and knocks him down to the ground rolling...you can see where two frames are repeated just before the CG Neo kicks off of Smith in the beginning of the sequence. Editors filling space!

Peter Jackson really had the ability to shoot impossible shots with CG while making it look real, because he had the camera behave realistically. His camera always feels like it has a lot of weight in both real footage and CG shots. A pan over the Pellenor Fields looks like a helicopter shot. Parts of the battle with the Cave Troll are done with a virtual shaky cam so it looks like it was really filmed. I wish Matrix Reloaded had not been so bombastic with its camera movements, considering it was wonderfully subdued in the first film despite sweeping bullet-time shots.

In addition, music is changed in several scenes. Matrix Revolutions is heavily edited as well (Neo's battle with Smith, Niobe's run, and the siege of Zion take place simultaneously). I've never shown these edits to anyone.

Status update, Sairus?

Bonch, Sairus:

Keep me posted. I'll throw you a few dollars for DVDs, high-quality video or no.

That's quite a jump cut at the beginning. I would have let it hang for a few more seconds.

Quality is good, though.

I finished my edits, but I haven't showed them to anyone other than friends, due to lawsuit concerns. They're sitting on burned 5.1 surround sound DVDs.

I didn't try to splice the two films together but streamline what we were given. I could list all the edits, but there are too many (and numerous minor removals, as few as a couple of frames in several instances). The major things I did are rearranging the second half of the Burly Brawl (everything after the helicopter spin) and making the siege of Zion and the battle with Smith take place simultaneously. Beyond that, countless rearrangements and paring down of redundant dialogue. The dead parts flow now. Like others, I greatly cut down the first part of the film to get the story going (the plot of The Matrix Reloaded really doesn't get going until the Oracle calls Neo to meet her).

The easy part was cutting and moving around video, the hard part was going in with Nuendo and Sonar and reworking six audio tracks to make the sound edits seamless. Particularly a few scenes where I had to remove music while retaining sound effects so that I could replace the soundtrack.

Also hard was creating natural-looking post effects transitions, so that, for instance, after we pass through the "O" in Reloaded, it cuts naturally to the clock. The CG Matrix code intros are pointless ejaculatory self-indulgence, in my opinion, and I greatly missed the subdued transitions of the original film--i.e., we pass through digits and stop on a cop's flashlight.

Basically, all editing was done with the approach of someone who was a huge fan with fond memories of the original film. I'm very satisfied with the outcome. This was a project I did for a couple of months a while back. Labor of love done for fun.

The idea of reintroducing the Enter The Matrix footage has been tossed around before, and I've even seen a reedited version of the film with that footage floating around on P2P. To me, the only reason to do it would be to work in Niobe and Lock's backstory so that you know why she volunteered to look for the Nebuchenezzer. The upcoming 9-disc Matrix box set will also be including all the Enter The Matrix footage (over an hour of footage!), so you may want to wait so that you can get much higher 5.1 DVD quality footage rather than the DivX encodes from the game. I don't know if the Wachowskis are planning to actually edit that footage into the film to make a new extended cut, or allow it to be seen in some sort of "White Rabbit" feature for the original.

I know what you mean about wishing for dailies, but to me it made it more fun working within constraints of an already existing cut to make a new cut that looked real. There's a "how'd you do that" factor that feels really cool when people ask you the question. "Tricks of the trade," you tell them matter-of-factly.

If there was a way to release them publicly, I would.

Bonch: IMO the only Enter the matrix scene which really should be added is the scene with Niobe and the oracle, since it clears any confusion about the oracles transformation.

Fucking A.

I wont say they don't "get it" - thats condescending.

I will say however this is a prime example of people not appreciating what the Wachowskis were trying to do.

RD

Amen to that.

I've decided to take a run at this myself. I've used Gordian Knot to "rip" the Reloaded DVD to my hard drive and I have Adobe Premiere prepped and ready to go. However Premiere does not recognize the .VOB files, that are now on my hard drive, as valid input files. Do I have to convert them to mpeg's first? I would have thought that mpegs would have been the end-output file? What step am I missing?

Your attempts at re-edits are futile, Devilspawn. I have tried re-editing Bio-Dome millions of times and to no avail.

But since both Mr. T and I pity you, hopefully I can help. I've been in the same predicament you have. It's a bitch, but I found a solution a while back.

There's a program called AviSynth. Actually, it's technically a plug-in that runs with Adobe. Get it. You will import the .avs file it creates when you render the VOB files into xvid or divx. The .avs file references the VOB files and allows you to edit them on Adobe. There's probably a better way to do this. But that's how I do it.

When rendering to xvid or divx, usually two .avs files are made. Don't use the "test" .avs. Use the one that says "movie".

Hope that helps.

For more info, check out some www.animemusicvideos.org

Also, you will need an AC3 decoder to decode the audio track.

I hear this all the time.

The fact that the Wachowskis were aiming for something doesn't justify the shitty execution. I'm sorry.

I appreciate what they were trying to do. I don't appreciate, for the most part, what they did.

Rename the VOBs to MPG. See if that works

Or, use DVD2AVI and rip to AVI using Huffy lossless compression (will need tons of space).

Renaming to mpg usually doesn't work. However, bonch has a point about the Huffy loseless. You basically won't have a hard-drive, but the quality and control you have over editing in Adobe is great.

VOB is just a container format, so this renaming doesn't always work in all applications, but it worked for me in Adobe Premiere Pro. Though it didn't pull in audio (not that it matters, I rip my audio to seperate WAVs beforehand).

However, I usually work in Vegas 5 which lets me directly import VOBs anyway. It's funny that Premiere takes M2Vs but won't take VOBs, while Vegas+DVD takes VOBs but won't take M2Vs.

I don't bother with any MPEG stream in Premiere though because it's always a bitch to edit in my experience. Frame stuttering and looping errors. Vegas hasn't ever given me that problem which is the only reason I use it. Perhaps it's my home system.

I struggled with even keeping in that little scene between Neo and Trinity. I debated just removing it and cutting straight from Morpheus right to Niobe's geotherm scans scattering across the table. It's a cut that makes sense. "Stand by to broadcast," then we're in the Matrix at the captain's meeting.

To be honest, the Neo/Trinity scene is boring, but those two lines, "I just wish I knew what I'm supposed to do" and "Don't worry, she's gonna call" established Neo's doubts about what to do next, and also that they're waiting for the Oracle to call, as though they don't know where she is (further established when Neo flies to her apartment, and she's gone). It was a tough choice to make.

It would be fun for us to trade edits. Pure fanboy stuff, man.

I renamed them and it worked, but like you said it's a bitch to use mpeg's because of all the stuttering. I edited the whole rave/morpheus speech scene in the cave right the fuck out, so it jumps from Link/Zee to the phone ringing where Bane initially is taken over by Smith. Now I thought I had it perfect, but due to the frame stuttering there's a frame or two of someone running towards the cave that was left in there and i can't get it out. BTW, I'm using Premiere Pro. What is this Vegas 5 program?

SAIRUS, none of your links work

But the weightless and impossible camera movements are what fully make up for the slight inaccuracy of the CG for me and I know a lot of others. That's a great achievement right there. I'd rather have the seen look a little stylized with the CG than lose that amazing camerawork. And splicing stuff in between the final Neo/Smith fight? UGH.

^I've been trying to get those torrents going but to no avail. Just thought I'd let you know so you can fix it if you wish

Strange. To me, that's what made it seem so completely fake and impossible. Watching the original trailer, live-action was mixed with CG and I never knew the difference. When seen as impossible, seamless camera movements in which every flaw was plainly exposed, the plastic CG was all too obvious.

"Amazing camerawork?" You have to be kidding! We just spin around and around Neo as performs CG moves. It's not hard to do that with a camera in a CG scene.

Yep, I edited the hell out of it and didn't look back. No more goofy Smith flying into the sky or incorrectly timed CG-to-live-action cuts.

During my stay at Coming Attractions, one particular poster in my forum was so upset about the so-called "Phantom Edit" -- and a specific individual who aggressively championed it -- that he took the individual-in-question's posts and arbitrarily edited them. While I may not have agreed completely with his actions, I think he did get a very good point across.

So, what ever happened to this? Is this file still alive anywhere?