davextreme

Did any scenes scare her? 

A little, maybe. Kids vary *wildly* on how scared they get by stuff. Compared to other kids her age I think she's not as scared by movies as others. Like, she had a four-year-old friend over who got nervous during a Bugs Bunny and wanted it turned off. Also much of what's scary in Star Wars requires you to really understand why it would be scary and I'm not sure she's getting it on that level at this point. The Emperor's stuff in RotJ is scarier probably since he's directly menacing.

I showed ESB to my daughters for the first time yesterday. They'd seen Star Wars but I'm spacing the rest out so the big one can see The Force Awakens in the theaters. Here's the moment when Yoda appears:

http://twitter.com/davextreme/status/531490073980985344

Plus Harmy's work will be the ideal starting point for any changes people want to make. Just like when you're making a photocopy you want a clean original so your copy looks good.

The Despecialized Edition will be the ideal starting place to go in and make whatever changes people want, that way they're not starting from someone else's decisions of what changes to make, first.

> But the Cloud City windows is the one thing I do like so shoot me. :)  Though I agree, it could have been done better.

This ends up being why it's so important for projects like Harmy's to restore the original film. Once we have a very, very good copy of the unaltered film, fans can go back in and add in whatever SE stuff they want, or even add new effects and scenes.

John McCoy's piece, "A Bad Motivator" [1] makes a good argument that copyright is supposed to expire for this exact reason. Once the work is allowed to belong to the public and not one stakeholder, fans can decide for themselves what to do with it.

[1]: http://john-mccoy.blogspot.com/2011/09/bad-motivator.html

Harmy said:

@Davextreme: Yeah, I know - but I've seen some 1080p iTunes files and they look awful compared to their BD counterparts but I suppose that if people are going to convert to this kind of shitty format anyway, it's still better to have a quality controlled encode from the original files out there.

Right. My thought was just that you might want to try to hit a target that people already expect with respect to file size if they're going to be putting them on like phones storage space considerations. Something in the 4-6 GB range or so.

If you wind up deciding to do an mp4 version, I can volunteer to help make sure it gets all the metadata iTunes wants so it looks pretty when you browse for it, and I can figure out if the game systems have particular needs.

I sent Hairy_Hen some thoughts about soundtracks for a possible mp4 file.

Harmy, I downloaded a 720p copy of Raiders of the Lost Ark from iTunes. The total bitrate is 4651 at 3.85 GB, just for reference as to what Apple packages. That's with three soundtracks (AAC English, Dolby Digital English, French).

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if you use the Apple TV preset, it should do a pass through track of the 5.1 sound automatically.

I wonder how many people (I'm one) are converting the video for play on Apple TV, XBOX, PlayStation, etc. would it be worth (in another thread) working out a good compromise for settings and creating one h264 video for these players and uploading it somewhere? The risk I guess is diluting the official release with too many different versions.

I don't have a blu ray player. I watch almost everything as a stream or download and don't want to clutter up my house with any more plastic disc cases. The difference in video quality between Blu ray and iTunes movies isn't important enough to me to be worth the clutter, and the flexibility and kid-friendliness of iCloud is a major plus over physical media.

That said, it's remarkable how difficult it can be for most people to watch a video file on their TVs. People learned how to deal with mp3 files but a comparable revolution never happened with video. There's just too much of a barrier involving needing special boxes, correctly-encoded files, etc. Burning a disc that you can just insert and play really is the best way for almost everyone to watch these.

Your torrent software should let you do this. Mine (Transmission) has a panel that shows you different info about the transfer and one of those tabs is for the files it contains and you can check/uncheck them.

Yes. Download VLC, a free video player, to watch the mkv version. Make sure you pick the mono or stereo soundtracks unless you have a surround sound setup for your MacBook (the 2nd and 3rd tracks from the Audio menu's Audio Tracks submenu).

VLC: http://www.videolan.org

Watching on an iPad or Apple TV gets more complicated since the video needs to be converted.

"should I be able to hear the difference from an average mp3 there?"

For a high-quality MP3, probably not. Some can.

There have been tons of tests on this, and the answer is that even with very good equipment most listeners can't tell the difference between a good mp3/AAC file and a higher-quality file in AB and ABX tests (where you listen to multiple clips blind and then have to identify which is which). This infuriates audiophiles who've spent fortunes on good equipment, but the science is there.

You want lossless sources of course so you can manipulate them without without introducing error, but for almost all listeners, compression is fine. (I know I'l have people chime in saying "I can hear it." Maybe you really can, but I'd wager if you took an ABX test under scientific conditions, you'd be surprised.)

PM sent.

Yeah, that rumor went around a few months ago. The sources aren't named and there's the matter of Fox still having the OT's distribution rights, but it's in both companies' interest to come to an accord and release the unaltered films. Time will tell. And even if it does get released, will it wind up being noise reduced to hell, or have the soundtracks messed with, or the colors poorly restored?

Subler, which I use for messing with video metadata, recommends changing the H.264 Video Profile/Level setting to "Main @ 3.1" for Apple devices. The Star Wars mkv came in at High @ 4.1. Do you think changing this will fix it, or should I plan to recompress with Handbrake.

(I'll use the Dolby Digital video from the AVCHD files. That's a great recommendation.)

h_h, I'm going to run the film through Handbrake to watch on Apple TV. Apple TV (and Mac and iOS) don't support DTS-HD but Handbrake can convert them to AC3. Would I be better served using the soundtracks from the AVCHD since they're already Dolby Digital?

Do we/should we have an official nominee to submit the .mkv to MySpleen? My home upload speed isn't the greatest so I'm probably not the best candidate, but I wanted to bring up the subject.

For me, I'd be happy with just "close the blast doors" added into the surround mix. The echoes right before that would be nice but are fine. I don't care much about the tractor beam line personally.

For Star Wars, at least, "first" is peculiar because movies weren't opened nationwide then. Some towns didn't get it until weeks after others, and few ever got the surround mix. My hometown probably only ever showed the mono version so for me that's very arguably my "original" version. I'd have had to drive several hours to find a copy in surround (and pre-internet likely wouldn't have known to).

This level of minutia is why I check this thread every day. I love it.

> Cinderella's castle

Sleeping Beauty's, actually. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sleeping_Beauty_Castle

(Though in 2014 narrated trailers aren't really in vogue. More like this: http://ofbeaton.com/2013/01/generic-game-trailer/ )

But have they been scanned at 4K or better? I thought George Lucas settled for a much lower resolution when scanning the films.

They'd have to be scanned again, and that's not trivial but as the article says the main work is cleaning up the film itself and that's already been done.

I think VII's release is too early, but time will tell. To get them out then Disney would have to think it can earn more selling then new editions than it'd have to pay to get the rights back early. My bet would be on something happening in 2020, either Fox selling Star Wars's rights for three boatloads to Disney or the two companies working out some split for the trilogy.

And of course there's the question of whether people will sill be buying movies at all in 2020. I don't truly expect everything to go streaming/subscription, but I think the big goldmine for home video sales peaked about when the first set of DVDs came out.

The other test will be whether whatever gets released passes fan muster. You can go ahead start writing the "here's what the new OT versions get wrong" articles now. There will be too much DNR or the colors will be wrong or the sound mix will be off or something. Disney (or Fox or whoever) would be smart to involve the fan community in the process somehow.

I guess it's something to discuss, but the fact is, this is the resolution Harmy has chosen for v2.x. He could spend his time redoing perfectly good work or he could forge ahead with ESB and RoTJ. Eventually, though, the DeEd will hit a point where Harmy just can't do more without better sources, so we can argue these points over and over or sit tight while -1, Poita, and others work on 35mm scans. At that point, hopefully both the GOUT and the Blu-Ray will be lesser sources and 1080p will make complete sense (and surely some of you will be clamoring for 4K).