Real-time, in-camera background compositing in The Mandalorian

When you hear LED walls, think millions of discrete LEDs mounted on PCBs (and thank China for making this low cost enough to be viable!)

To me, most of the criticism feels like it comes from people who have had time to rationalize the old plots and settings, but who see the new ones with a more jaded mind or a set idea of what they "should" be like instead of approaching them with an open mind. They have flaws, but so does the original trilogy.

Star Wars from the beginning were silly westerns set in space with all kinds of ridiculous aliens thrown in. Taking them too seriously and applying that as a constraint on the following trilogies would never end well.

When people complained about Jar Jar, for example, all I could think about was how people could take issue with Jar Jar but take no issue with Chewbacca, or the ewoks, or R2D2 and C3PO. They're also incredibly cheesy in other ways in a way that was common in the 80's, but that is really dated today (e.g. the Ewok celebration scene).

I think seeing e.g. Spaceballs is a good way of having it driven home how just how ridiculous Star Wars really is and looked at the time if you don't let yourself be immersed in it. Spaceballs crosses the line from "serious" space opera to comedy very clearly, but it to me it also illustrates just how ridiculous lengths they had to go to in order to clearly be a send-up instead of a cheap Star Wars knockoff. They'd not had to cut that many jokes and toned back that many things before it'd have seemed like an attempt at being serious.

Star Wars is fun in part because it manages to "sell" a setting that is on the face of it so crazy and not taking itself too seriously. But it seems a lot of the fans of the original trilogy bought into that and then decided to take it all very seriously instead of seeing them as light adventure movies and "space westerns".

The challenge is also in no large part a question of changing tastes in other ways as well - my son finds the original trilogy horribly slow moving to the point of boredom, for example, and I can understand that. Tastes have changed. Pacing has changed. Composition and cinematography has changed. But that also means that the modern trilogies had to be very different or fall flat with younger audiences in ways that would always annoy the die hard fans; they're trying to reflect how we remember them more than how they are, but different people remember them in different ways.

[I tend to treat criticism of the last Indiana Jones in much the same way; people venerate the original movies, but they were extremely cheesy and contrived, involving literal deus ex machina, but surviving a test explosion in a fridge and interdimensional aliens is suddenly over the top]

As for Rogue One, to me it's one of the most enjoyable movies of the franchise. In no small part because they were allowed to explore the setting with much more freedom (ok to let characters more central to the plot die for example).

If you look carefully at the backgrounds in Mandalorian scenes, a lot of the time, they are slightly soft (out of focus)--which hides the pitch of the LED wall by expanding each LED point into larger, overlapping circles of confusion. To be clear, that softness is a physical effect of the camera lens, not a digital effect on the wall, so it can be captured by the camera sensor up to any resolution you want.

> Also, how do they cope with the scan rate of the background video being played back to sync with the camera recording the footage?

In the article they say the latency is about half a frame, which they handled by using slow camera moves--which conveniently is similar to how the original Star Wars films were shot.

If you're talking about the refresh rate of the LEDs, I believe those can be cranked up way higher than the frame rate of the camera, which was likely 24 or maybe 30 frames per second to give that cinematic feel.