Harmy's STAR WARS Despecialized Edition HD - V2.7 - MKV (Released) — Page 348

CatBus said:

Also this method would only work reliably on Blu-ray and AVCHD, it may not work on MKV, and it wouldn't necessarily work on software players at all, and it would also suck when scaled down to DVD because DVD subtitles don't have the necessary color palette (or alpha) to be convincing.

This is what I was concerned about. If I convert the movie to a file to watch on such as an AppleTV, then the subtitles may not look right if they're not burned-in.

FWIW, on the Swedish 16mm, the original Greedo subs are there in English, with the Swedish subs overlaid on top of them.

Right.

Chewtobacca said:

chyron8472 said: This is what I was concerned about. If I convert the movie to a file to watch on such as an AppleTV, then the subtitles may not look right if they're not burned-in.

If you are converting what Harmy uploads anyway, you could burn in whatever subtitles you want.

Not with the proper typeface.

PGS files and SUP files don't seem to play well with the software I'm using... nor most other software, from what I can see from a quick Google search. Most software seems to want you to use SRT files, and that's just time-coded text. It doesn't retain the original typeface.

Not that I'm nitpicky about any other movie with regard to this, but I am about Star Wars and Return of the Jedi.

yoda-sama said:

In all fairness Chyron, you could probably make a .ASS subtitle file that'd have a pleasing enough font, still not be burned into the video and be usable across a large number of software and hardware players.  But it'll be burned in, so no worries.

.ASS doesn't give you anything more than .SRT in this context except better positioning options.  The font can be very pleasing but still not accurate--in fact I find the theatrical subs to be harder to read than font-generated subs.  But readability and pleasing appearance are not the point.  Chyron wants theatrically accurate subs, which I don't think is unreasonable for a theatrical reconstruction.  The only way to achieve theatrical accuracy is PGS or burnt-in, and PGS doesn't work everywhere.  You can't work around this by changing the format of a text file.

You CAN get something that makes both you and Chyron happy by using multiple angles.  This path is not a dead end, unlike the path you are on right now.

Yeah, I read that Harmy said it would. I was just sort of continuing the conversation.

The issue for me really seems to be specifically with Bluray subtitles (PGS) when converting to MKV. DVD subs would work fine.

chyron8472 said:

Yeah, I read that Harmy said it would. I was just sort of continuing the conversation.

The issue for me really seems to be specifically with Bluray subtitles (PGS) when converting to MKV. DVD subs would work fine.

DVD subs would function, but they would have lots of aliasing compared to PGS, due to not enough colors/alpha to do curves and diagonals.  I've done DVD subs for one of Chewtobacca's DVD projects, and while I think they look as good as DVD subs can look, they don't really fool anyone about being original theatrical subs.  To sharp, too defined, too regular, too aliased.  Burnt-in would have been better.

CatBus said:

I find the theatrical subs to be harder to read than font-generated subs.  But readability and pleasing appearance are not the point.  Chyron wants theatrically accurate subs, which I don't think is unreasonable for a theatrical reconstruction.  The only way to achieve theatrical accuracy is PGS or burnt-in, and PGS doesn't work everywhere.  You can't work around this by changing the format of a text file.

Ehh... I'm not so intransigent as to only accept one possible answer and be a jerk otherwise. And after reading the Project Threepio readme, it seems it would be possible (perhaps even fairly simple) to mux the "matching" subtitles into the film. If this were a DVD, it would just be a matter of encoding the film to a file while including said muxed subtitles; but this project involves PGS files, which from what I'm reading requires an AVISynth plugin to be able to properly use, and even then people still recommend using AVISynth to burn them in, which defeats the purpose of the whole idea.

I know Handbrake has a nightly build that supposedly supports PGS, but I tried that (with a different film on bluray ) and it doesn't really work.

I've been ripping my parents' movie library to put on their NAS, and my inability to work with Bluray subtitles led me to start using Subtitle Edit, which OCRs them and writes them to SRT.

But I agree that DVD subtitles do look jagged-y, and not as good as the theatrical burned-in subs for SW and ROTJ.

A huge thank you indeed... Harmy saved Star Wars. Thank the maker.

Mux in the .ass and the .ttf - use \be or \blur - you can do more than you'd think. =P

So I've calibrated my screen the best I can, looked through the comparison pictures, and the thing that stands out the most, colorwise, is the reddish haze in the final scene. It's plainly apparent even in the comparison shots, where it is even redder than the GOUT! I've seen Mike Verta's color correction and his 35mm source, and the atmosphere is nowhere near as red as 2.1.

It's difficult to get the colors corrected from the DVD or Blu-ray (I've tried for weeks), but it is possible, especially if the movie is being corrected scene by scene.

yoda-sama said:

BTW, has anyone checked if that dark spot on the opening Star Destroyer is present on the GOUT?

My guess is that the dark spot anomaly was probably introduced or possibly made more visible when the sequence was recomposited. (except for the starfield, it looks like the original elements were still used) It can also be seen in the '97SE transfers but not in any original sources, if it's not visible in the original due to generation loss caused by the optical compositing or because it's not actually there at all is hard to tell.

yoda-sama said:

Interesting.  Which original sources did you compare with?

A faded 35mm scan scratched to hell and pan&scan video, to my tired eyes it isn't present. Team -1 might be able to give you a more definitive answer.