I haven’t seen the 720p, does it look nice? I cannot wait for the Kraken Bluray though, it’s about time.
It’s a Toho transfer, so it’s decent but unremarkable. That said, the Toho HD master is the best source we have to work with at the moment, so it’ll have to do. The 720p TV recording I’m working with also has a little movie camera channel logo in the bottom right corner, which is a drawback, but that’s why this isn’t the final version.
I don’t think it’s a good idea to use the Japanese version as a main source. Your best bet would be trying to improve the MHD as much as possible, perhaps only using the Japanese footage for the 2 shots that have macroblocking.
The MHD isn’t available in HD. The point is to try and prepare a decent-looking HD copy of the film with as little upscaled SD material as possible.
Anyway, a progress report:
It’s been a grunt, but I’ve finally finished the Russian sub scene. I had to make three passes at this scene: one to line up the Japanese footage with the US version’s editing, another to mask off the Japanese subtitles, and a third to add the English subtitles. The English subtitles aren’t precise recreations of what’s on the video version, seeing as we have no reference for the theatrical subtitles that I’m aware of, so I took a few minor liberties.
The line breaks in the video subtitles are preserved, though the positioning is different since the video version was severely cropped to remove the theatrical subs, meaning that lining mine up with the video subtitles would put them in very awkward-looking positions. I positioned them roughly the same distance above the bottom of the frame, with similar line spacing. Since the font, as far as I could tell, was the same one used for the opening “100 MILES SOUTH OF TOKYO” location super, I used the same font for the subtitles that I’d previously used to recreate that. There was a heavy black outline/shadow on the video subtitles that I didn’t replicate exactly, but I did add a subtler version to help make the text a little more distinguishable from the background. The video subs had other idiosyncrasies such as putting spaces before question marks or exclamation points, which I confess I didn’t replicate because it just looked really odd to me. Also, except for a few cases where a subtitle appeared in the video version one frame before a cut to a different shot (I simply started those at the same time as the cut), the timing should otherwise be a frame-for-frame match.
Here are a few before and after samples to compare:
For now I’m taking a break to catch up on today’s Steven Universe with my girlfriend, but after that I’ll be back at it.