At this point the project’s still officially on ice (and it’s been stalled for some time), having both a small conservatively-defined scope (due to me not being much of a video editor) and a crazy-ass ill-defined scope (due to me being a language geek).
On the A/V end, here’s the small scope as of now:
- Video is simply the Blu-ray video with the extra bits removed at the Anthrax extension. No logos or extras of any sort. Audio is the lossless mono from the Blu-ray, except for the Anthrax transition, which is from a Laserdisc capture. At the moment the encode is 720p because honestly the video quality barely warrants that, and I am able to get a fairly high-quality encode that still fits on a BD25 that way.
- Extra tracks include all of the Blu-ray alternate dubs and subs (chopped at the Anthrax transition), plus a German subtitle track and lossless Japanese audio taken from Laserdisc (the Japanese track is absolutely butchered on the Blu-ray)
On the pain-in-the-ass one last feature that just will not make up its mind to live or die front, we’ve got:
- I want to translate the entire Japanese dub back into English, like they already did with the taunting and shrubbery scenes. While most of the dub may be a fairly straightforward job, there are bits in there that I just must know what the heck is going on, because it simply cannot be a straight-up translation. There appears to be some sort of cocktail party or something going on in the closing “credits” for example, and a chatty narrator who talks over dialogue-free scenes.
- The Japanese audio has a loud pop right at the Anthrax transition that unfortunately is right on top of dialogue, so I can’t edit it out very easily. However, with the help of someone who knows Japanese, I may be more likely to be able to do something to repair it.
The latter two require some sort of Japanese translator, and I recently managed to have suckered someone into at least considering it. We’ll see how this goes. So far I’ve waited years for the Japanese stuff alone, and I’m willing to wait a few more.