Yes, you can read it on the Kindle PC or Mac client. The forthcoming Mac version of iBooks will also read it.
It would presumably not be very hard to crack open the copy protection and extract the video files, but I haven't messed with that stuff for ebooks too much.
I'm seeding now.
Calling a film by its most commonly understood name when writing something intended for large exposure to the general public is not being a "jackass". It's doing things right.
I agree. There's no other name that points to the correct film as accurately, though my experience in talking to non-fanatics has been that the name isn't all that well recognized. The film doesn't really have a truly common name. "Star Wars" is generally understood to refer to the franchise as a whole as much as the first film. Even if you say "the first one," you often have to qualify that you mean the one from 1977, not the first episode (The Phantom Menace). "A New Hope" as a name was of course supposed to become the film's common name but it never fully caught on. Empire and Jedi's posters both clearly spelled out their episode titles and put "Star Wars" in small letters overhead, but ANH always just kept its original logo treatment on posts and boxes and stuff. If he'd wanted to make it stick, Lucas probably should have rebranded the film more strongly with "A New Hope" from the early 80s on.
Also he probably should have picked a better title than "A New Hope," which isn't very catchy and doesn't do a very good job of explaining what the movie is about since it's the first one and the viewer doesn't really know that hope had been lost and thus why a new hope would be needed, especially considering that the film itself doesn't even do a very good job of establishing just how bad life inside the empire is as compared to however it was before, nor for that matter do the prequels do a good job of showing what life was like before the Empire and how it changed, aside from that all those Jedi who were killed. But let's not digress too far. Can't we get back to annoying Harmy by discussing how yellow Ben's first appearance should be?
Great information. Thank you.
Oh, incidentally Apple's website for Final Cut Pro X says that a new version is coming this year. That could likely mean at next week's event where the new Mac Pro will presumably be announced. It might just be a point release to add optimizations for the new machine, though.
I find it impossible to believe Lucasfilm doesn't know about it, though. Maybe someone at Disney would take notice, but my assumption (which is just that) has always been that they just don't consider it enough of a threat to their business to risk angering their most loving fans. I guess if the DeEd got so popular that thousands of people were downloading it, but even then, that would just prove there's a market for releasing the original film properly.
But that's me talking from a place of common sense, a concept which is in very short supply in the US these days.
Gotcha. I'll just stick with Handbrake's AC3 conversion.
I've never really messed around with DVD authoring software.
H_H, can I ask how hard it would be to do Dolby Digital lossless versions? I ask because Apple TV won't pass through DTS. Or is there a way for me to make them from the source files? I'd guess I'd need to do something to make the volume levels equal, too?
If I understood him correctly, I remember him saying not to listen to the surround mix if you're downmixing it to stereo. He said there would be phasing problems--my guess being that when the surround sounds get mushed down with the front signals it doesn't match up right.
Apple TV will not play DTS files. Handbrake converts them to another format but I don't know what the quality loss is.
The version of the SW cover art I have says "RD-D2." It could be an old copy but I just wanted to point that out in case you're reusing some of the elements for the 2.5 Blu-Ray box art.
Count me in as interested in learning more about the different mixes. The samples on this site seem to be down:
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/russdawson/mono/
Something that plays back scenes a few times and points out differences would be interesting.
chyron8472 said:
And, much to Harmy's obvious chagrin, I'm also considering uploading a comparatively small, tablet-friendly m4v to the spleen with only a few audio tracks for people who want to watch this awesomeness on the go or else want to enjoy Star Wars but don't have much HDD space or bandwidth to spare.
I started a thread with a few questions about making m4vs over here. I found that using the Apple TV 3 preset or the iPad one gets you something in the range of 4 gB if you limit it to just one soundtrack or the main three English ones. I remember h_h saying that the surround mix really shouldn't be played on devices that don't do surround because of phasing problems. If saving space is a concern, perhaps just the mono or stereo mix? (May be better to take that discussion to another thread.)
I typically watch Harmy's Despecialized Edition on my TV using my Apple TV 3. I run it through Handbrake's Apple TV 3 preset and everything looks great, but I wanted to see if the community has any thoughts on all this.
1. The new DeEd includes hairy_hen's lossless soundtracks as DTS-HD-MA, which Apple TV will not pass through. The Apple TV 3 preset defaults to encoding these tracks using the AC3 (ffmpeg) option, along with a copy of each as AAC copies for devices that can't play the surround sound. (I don't usually include all the soundtracks but really wish Apple had a better way to display their titles other than "English, English, English," etc.)
Is that the "best" option? What bitrate should I be setting, or should I use its defaults?
2. The Apple TV 3 preset uses RF 20. The quality seems fine to my eyes, and the resulting file size matches iTunes store downloads. The Handbrake people seem to be pretty smart so I tend to trust their judgement on these settings but I'd love to hear some other ideas here.
3. Typically I also create a version for my iPhone using the iPhone preset, and just select one soundtrack to keep the portable file size down. A tip: if you're using Subler to add metadata, you can add a field for ContentID (I use 76759, which is IMDB's catalog number for the film, but it doesn't matter what you use). If you use the same ContentID for your HD and SD versions and import them into iTunes, it will recognize them as being the same movie and badge the file as SD+HD. Then, if you sync your iPhone and on the summary screen select "Prefer Standard Definition Videos", it'll grab the smaller file for you.
4. I also use the .srt file from Project Threepiod (en-native) as the subtitle track. My dad has some hearing impairment so it's important to me that digital files have captions.
Chyron will be taking care of the MySpleen upload I believe.
I know this has been covered, but please remind me if the mkv will be identical video-wise to the Blu-Ray.
CatBus said:
It's the same actor Luke found inexplicably hiding inside Hayden's suit earlier.
Hmm, now that I think about it I'm sort of surprised the SpEd didn't replace Shaw with a digitally aged Christensen in RotJ.
Space Kaijuu said:
I wonder what it would take to do a really good 1080p upscale of these shorts. Something that didn't have jaggies other issues due to excessive DNR and EE, a soundtrack that's not constantly going out of sync, and no stupid company logo in the corner throughout every short.
That's what I'd like to see. As I said, editing isn't my job and I don't have the experience necessary to really do this right. I think I could probably do a more thorough job given some more time, but it would have to be as a low priority hobby as my day job is requiring lots of time at the moment. (Also my trial of Final Cut Pro has expired, so I'd have to pony up for the full version but want to see if the new version coming out with the new Mac Pros is just a point bump or a true new version.)
What I'd like to look over are these questions:
1. Is the Bosko Video version definitive with respect to completeness of the films? No missing or shortened scenes, etc. (Like, can it be considered this project's GOUT?)
2. Is the Bosko Video's audio really superior start-to-finish? I'm not an audiophile to the degree necessary to judge it as compared to the Warner Bros. set.
3. Aside from the places where the Warners set just simply uses the wrong scenes, is its video superior in all cases, or are there places where the Bosko video is better?
4. What other versions would be useful sources?
From there, the question would be, should the whole thing be synced up to Bosko's audio? Are there places where Bosko's video should be used, perhaps with new color timing to match Warners?
The set that's on YouTube is also for sale for fairly cheap on iTunes. The iTunes copies bundle two shorts per "episode" (and the last three together) which is a bit annoying if your kid wants to watch a specific one. Wanting to break those apart is how I got started on this whole enterprise.
One thing I read about these which I couldn't verify was that, in the original first cartoon, Clark's line at the end of the first scene is, "Chief, don't you think that's a dangerous job for a woman?" On all the editions I have, it's just "dangerous job." I'd be curious to see if that's true.
Here's the Max Fleischer's Superman 1941-1942 (Warner Bros 2008) set I used for most of the video.
Here’s a bit of a log of what I worked on:
Superman (aka the Mad Scientist): Fixed the “true justice” (or “truth justice”?), patching in voiceover from the Bosko audio.
Billion Dollar Limited and The Magnetic Telescope: entire videos use Bosko’s audio.
The Arctic Giant and Electric Earthquake: unchanged from Warner Bros. edition.
The Bulleteers, Japoteurs, Eleventh Hour, Destruction, Inc., Mummy Strikes, Underground World, Secret Agent: prologue uses Bosko Audio.
Showdown: prologue uses Bosko audio. “Streak of Lightning” etc. sequence uses Bosko video as well, as Warners video isn’t timed right (I think it’s taken from a different cartoon). The archive.org version has a police siren that plays when the bad Superman is on the roof and he looks over and sees the police cars pull up. That part is silent in the Bosko and Warner Bros. editions. I know there was an edition that added sound effects, so maybe the archive.org version is that one, but since I have two sources that agree, I’m using the silent version.
Eleventh Hour and Jungle drums have entirely the wrong opening sequences. They now use Bosko’s audio. I was able to cut up parts of the video to keep from having to use much of Bosko’s video, as the colors are way washed out (especially the reds on the Superman logo).
In Eleventh Hour, when the film’s main sequence starts, the Warner Bros. version cuts out several frames and fades in the music too late. I would normally here use the Bosko video, but that set superimposes a title over the start of the video with the date it was released, so there are a few seconds that use lower-quality from the archive.org set. It transitions back pretty quickly and I’m fairly happy with where I hid the change.
All shorts except Superman, The Arctic Giant, and Electric Earthquake use Bosko’s audio for the ending sequence. The Warner Bros. set in the other 14 shorts will fade out the music abruptly and then throws in a musical tag over the Paramount logo. Usually I make the soundtrack switch when the scene changes back to Lois and Clark for the epilogue.
pufnstuf said:
I picked up a DVD set a couple years ago and the prints looked pretty nice, but for some reason they decided to stamp the year the film was released in the beginning of the cartoon... Seemed like an intentional screen bug.
Yeah, that's the Bosko Video set.
Over the last few weeks I worked on a little side project: fixing a few audio glitches in the Warner Bros. release of Fleischer Studios’s Superman short films.
These shorts were released in 1941-1943 and have been in the public domain for decades. You can find versions of them for free on archive.org, but most free sets I’ve found don’t look very good. The best one for a long time was a Bosko Video set from 2000 which had been made by sourcing several different releases of the shorts from over the years. In 2006, to coincide with the release of Superman Returns, Warner Bros. put out a boxed set which included new copies of the Fleischer shorts that were “remastered from superior original vault elements.” A few years later the shorts saw release as a standalone two-disc set from Warner Bros. The Warner Bros. set looks wonderful–my three-year-old noticed the color changes immediately–but there are some strange things going on with the music. Almost all of them cut out a little bit of music at the end of the prologue sequences, and do the same prior to the Paramount logo at the end. Some just outright play the wrong prologue. In the first short (which was nominated for an Oscar), the narrator says that Superman is on a never-ending quest for “true justice” instead of “truth and justice.” Often the audio during the prologue doesn’t sync to the video, and sound effects over the few title cards that have them are lost.
What I’ve done is to take the Warner Bros. releases and patch in audio from the Bosko Video versions where incorrect or shortened theme music plays. I have not done an extensive going-over of every single second of the films, but I think I’ve caught the major problems. I’m not a professional editor but do have a degree in film; I think I’ve done a pretty good job of making the cuts seamless. My hope is that you’ll be able to enjoy these shorts without ever noticing the work I’ve done. If anyone is really interested, I’d happily to get more into what changes I’ve made and which I’ve missed.
The 17 shorts are in m4v format suitable for importing into iTunes.
Please reply below for discussion of the shorts or PM me for more information.
I think this makes sense. The major version number corresponds to your use of a better source. 1.x: broadcast. All the 2.x releases: Blu-Ray. So 2.0 would be your first release using the Blu-Ray source and 2.1+ would be refinements.
And then some day 3.0 would be new 35mm captures or maybe even a future OT release by Disney/Lucas, which will of course be imperfect somehow and the perfectionist in you will still have to tweak. :)
Friday night my wife asked our three-and-a-half-year-old what movie she wanted to watch. She replied, "the robot movie." We assumed she meant Wall-E. then she said, "with Princess Leia!" She's seen little bits of a Star Wars before but I guess her friends at preschool have been talking about it. Her favorite part is when Threepio takes a bath. Anyway, we're watching it and, in the first scene on the blockade runner, she says of Darth Vader, "That's her daddy." Spoilers abound on the playground!
Anyway, I'm delighted every time I watch the DeEd, Harmy. It's a great piece of work and I'm looking forward to 2.5.
Harmy had made a point about 4k at home, saying that at the size of home televisions the extra resolution doesn't help all that much and that we'd be better off focusing on 1080p with less compression. For whatever it's worth, Apple's definition of a "retina display" bears this out. You can play with numbers here:
The general notion being that at most TV sizes and a typical viewing distance the pixels are smaller than your eye's ability to pick them out already. A 1080p TV viewed from seven feet away qualifies as a retina display (again using Apple's definition which is mostly marketing but does make some degree of sense).
I'm not too sure we'll see TVs get much larger than 50-something inches for a while. Bigger than that and they become very imposing pieces of furniture. Maybe as panels get thin enough it'll be more feasible to cover large portions of walls with them, but that still rules out diagonal placements and you start talking about something much more like home theaters.