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Preserving the "German" Original Trilogy (Released) — Page 8

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Why, this is just the same ANH cover motive:

 

 

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But that's the widescreen box set with the executor style covers. This was a 4 VHS box set with plastic covers for the VHS and the Classic Creatures doc on a separate VHS.

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Oh, I've never seen this. A friend of mine has it, he made a copy of the Classic Creatures tape for me, so I get the german voiceover. But I don't have the original.

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That makes me sad. And what makes me even more sad is that my uncle can't find it, as it seems pretty rare :-( I can't find any pictures of it on the internet.

I found this:

 

I believe it's either the one one the left or the one on the right (not the middle one) - if you notice they're just about wide enough to be housing 4 VHS.

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YES!!! That's the one!!! I remember that unfolding ESB duel picture! Thank you! Now to find higher def pics!

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OFF Topic und deshalb auf deutsch: OMG, ich sehe mir gerade die VOX Star Wars Kultnacht von 1999 an. Abgesehen davon, daß ich etliche Leute die da mitgemacht haben mittlerweile persönlich kenne und sogar zu meinem engen Freundeskreis zähle, ist die Nacht eher alles andere als kultig. Eher ziemlich trashig. Wer hat's gesehen?

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Nee, kenne ich nicht.

Back to topic:

Laserschwert, would it probably help trying to re-create the ROTJ text crawl the same way as Harmy did with his ANH scroll?

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This way:

However, I would consider resetting the crawl basing on the original German theatrical textcrawl entirely anew.

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Yeah, that was pretty much my idea in case I'd re-create it, though creating the text from scratch intead of taking the lines from an upscale. But first I'll check what an upscale of the ROTJ-SE crawl looks like (it's the theatrical one).

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Yeah, that was pretty much my idea in case I'd re-create it, though creating the text from scratch intead of taking the lines from an upscale.

Yeah, sure. I just meant, to use the original lines as a guide for character placement, kerning, etc.

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TheHutt said:

Yeah, that was pretty much my idea in case I'd re-create it, though creating the text from scratch intead of taking the lines from an upscale.

Yeah, sure. I just meant, to use the original lines as a guide for character placement, kerning, etc.

Yep, I fully agree.

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HERE's my re-creation of Jedi's opening.

And honestly I'm surprised how quickly I managed to re-make the crawl from scratch (took me about 5 hours after Grisan - thanks again - gave me the SE crawl) and it's pretty spot on, if I may say so... I challenge you to overlay the original crawl with mine ;). The only thing I didn't emulate was the warping of the image, as that's clearly a problem of the original crawl (although I did simulate the gate weave jitter, as to me it somehow belongs to the look and feel of optical composites). What I might gonna fix is the umlaut on "RÜCKKEHR" as the Univers font has these more stretched than in the crawl.

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Amazing work Laserschwert! This really looks great. Can you shed some light on how you did it? Would the process work with the ANH crawl from laserdisc or VHS source?

Do you now have all 3 german crawls in 1080 resolution that match the theatrical one?

It would be good to know these are preserved in good quality, although the inconsintensies between the movies bother me.

If I ever create a blu-ray for my personal archive I would have to include 3 or 4 different german openings to fix the "long time ago" title cards, episode titles, font and logo inconsistensies etc.

 

BTW ANH on blur-ray still has the 2004 crawl with the english logo.

A nice thing about the Blu-rays is that they are 24p so after 30 years we finally have german audio that hasn't been sped up (sound a bit weird though if you have heard the sped up version hundreds of times).

 

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 (Edited)

The process was pretty straight forward... just matching the tilt of the crawl by eye (assuming a 35mm lens seemed to be correct), and matching the text, letter by letter, to the underlying SD-crawl:

As you can see, the lines don't match exactly in position, but that's due to the footage being warped, which I didn't want to match. Speed and position are basically a 95% match.

The logo is taken from "Das Imperium schlägt zurück" (it's exactly the same, including the warping) and hand animated to match the ROTJ-logo's motion:

As these are first and foremost meant to be used with Harmy's version, all the final touches were made at 720p res, but all the ground work (the crawl itself and the title cards) are at 1080p, so a FullHD-version is definitely possible. Also I think I can re-create the theatrical SW-crawl this way as well.

TheHutt said:

Great job on ROTJ!

BTW, Laserschwert, the German SE crawl for ANH seems to be different from the original theatrical version - the letter spacing is much wider, and harder to read. You might consider re-creating the original German crawl and the old logo, as well. :)

http://www.schnittberichte.com/schnittbericht.php?ID=4334040

I know that, of course ;) Also there's more lines in the paragraphs. I've used the SE crawl as my "easy way out", and because I didn't know how well a re-creation from scratch would work. I'm quite happy with the Jedi crawl, so I guess I can tackle the SW one as well.

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I'm quite happy with the Jedi crawl, so I guess I can tackle the SW one as well.

I'm looking forward to it!

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First of all your opening reconstruction looks great. Good job! But, how did you manage the re-creation of the alien subtitles in german (post 139)? Is there such a source without these hardcoded subtitles?

And is it possible that you maybe upload your re-created Greedo/Jabba subtitles scenes? Or do you plan to upload your complete german reconstruction?

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Both the 2004 DVDs and the new Blu-rays have all subtitles scenes without subtitles (as they are player-generated).

Right now the German crawls and subtitles are planned to be used in a German version of Harmy's "Despecialized" trilogy, which, ultimately, will be released as well.

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You're right. I have not consider the retail discs. Do you also translate the ending scene? I believe that are just few lines.

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You mean the credits?

Only the first film had German credits actually, but I'm not sure yet, if that will be part of the German version.

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So, how is the Star Wars crawl re-creation going along? :)