International Audio (including Voice-Over Translations) — Page 3

I've recently learned the following about the Japanese dubs:

Star Wars and Empire were both shown theatrically dubbed; Jedi was shown theatrically exclusively with subtitles.  Later, entirely new dubs were made for all three films, using famous Japanese voice actors, and these dubs were used for home video releases.  These video dubs have become the most familiar/popular versions of the Japanese dubs.  The Japanese GOUT discs featured both dubs.

As for the dubs themselves, the only unusual bit I've found is that Greedo is dubbed over in Japanese (Jabba is not).  In the video dub, a little electronic distortion is added to his voice, probably to make it sound more alien.

FWIW, Feallan has some Polish VHS dubs for the complete OOT (not synced to any reference at the moment) and I'm getting copies of the audio just in case we can't find anyone to work on them for a while.  If anyone here has the time and skill to sync them to GOUT, let me know.

CatBus said:

FWIW, Feallan has some Polish VHS dubs for the complete OOT (not synced to any reference at the moment) and I'm getting copies of the audio just in case we can't find anyone to work on them for a while.  If anyone here has the time and skill to sync them to GOUT, let me know.

I should add, if it helps pull in any volunteers, that these Polish dubs are lector-overdubbed as described earlier, so the original English dialogue is still present and can be used to help figure out sync with a reference track.

Not really relevant, but I wasn't sure, where to post these. I found original Polish Star Wars posters (1979, 1983, 1984)

http://imgur.com/a/nH1vR

They're so ugly. :D

Okay, it looks like I have GOUT-synced Polish audio for the entire trilogy.  I should have this available soon, so PM me for links if you're interested.

FWIW, I was sick to death of syncing audio to an exact-frame level of accuracy, so I decided to see what would happen if I just stretched the whole thing to fit and let the audio drift in and out of sync through the movie.  It turns out, at least for the VHS captures I was working with, it's certainly good enough for dubs.  Generally speaking, the audio on these is always within 0-2 frames of perfect sync.  Since at that level, you only notice sync problems by carefully watching the actors' lips and listening to the English audio, it's not really a big problem for dubs.  Polish is a little harder because the English audio is actually present in the background, but I think I could recommend this method for anyone else wanting to sync a VHS capture without a lot of time and effort.

Basically, the process is this: find a sync point near the beginning and end of the film (excluding the fanfare), where the waveforms line up nicely--a good pop, click, or bang usually does nicely.  Record the timestamps of those locations on the dub track and on the English track.  From this, you can create a stretch factor and offset (slope and intersection for the more geometrically minded).  Use the stretch factor to stretch the audio, then use the offset to either pad silence onto the beginning or chop a bit off.  Then volume-match the fanfare off an English track and paste it over the beginning of the dub track (the fanfare on dubs is often wrong, mistimed, or missing, so I don't bother to work with it).

That process gave me "good enough" sync on the first try for both Empire and Jedi.  For Star Wars, there was a bit halfway through (just when they come out of hyperspace), where the sync jumped to over 2 frames off.  So I just repeated the stretch/offset process for the movie starting at that point instead of the beginning, pasted that over, and it was good too.

I'd been calling this the "sloppy sync" method because I spent no effort on actually syncing anything but two or three points in the film, but I think the results are good enough to call it something else.  Maybe "easy sync"?

Anyway, it's so fast and easy that I'm now excited about the prospect of someone finding other dubs, because syncing them all seems like a realistic prospect now.

Sounds like what I tried to do with DBZ, and burned out hard on after 3 eps.

Okay, I also have American Spanish dubs for the whole trilogy, PM me if interested.  I originally got them as high-bitrate dual-channel mono lossy files, but I've converted them to normal-bitrate single-channel mono files to conserve space.

The audio for Star Wars is a bit muffled, but there may be a less-muffled version in the works, we'll see.

I have been contacted by someone with access to some Russian dubs.  Right now, I have the voiceover-style dub and another more typical dub of ROTJ, and I hope to have access to SW soon, and Empire within a month or so.

They sound good, but unless someone has any need to hear them right now, I'll wait to share until I get the Star Wars dubs (hopefully in time for the DeEd Blu-rays!)

I'm not sure of the history behind the newer non-voiceover Russian dub, and how popular it is with Russian fans.  I didn't know it even existed, and I don't know the status of similar dubs for the rest of the trilogy.

It turns out there was a miscommunication and I don't have a source for the Russian dub for Star Wars after all.  So I'll be uploading the two ROTJ dubs I do have, and just hope for more to land in my inbox someday.  PM me if you're interested.

Okay, I have the Russian 1989 non-voiceover dub for Star Wars, and I need some advice from the OT.com hive mind.

The audio quality, at least by our typical standards, is awful.  The issues are: a persistent, significantly wavering volume on high frequencies throughout the entire film, a severe echoing effect that seems to come and go, and just general low quality.  The actual dubbed voices are usually good quality with no significant issues, which is why I think many of the problems are baked into the original dub's mix.

Out of the box, I have a hard time listening to it, or imagining someone else happily doing so.  Dialog tends to be fine, most sound effects tend to be tolerable, but the music is just utterly trashed. So I'm engaged in an effort to replace parts of the dub with a copy of the English 85 mix wherever the dramatic change in audio quality is less jarring than the wavering/echoing issue.

I've had reasonable success with:

- The Fox fanfare

- The victory ceremony music through the end credits

- The sunset scene

I have problems with any scene with dialogue, because obviously I can't replace that. Basically it seems to only work if I can swap out the whole scene, otherwise the mid-scene transition is too jarring.

The opening crawl was rough, because it sounded horrible but had dubbed-over narration.  I found that the echoing was less of a cacophony in the right channel than the left, so I duplicated the right channel on both channels, effectively making the crawl mono.  It still sounds terrible, but less so.

My question is: Does anyone have other ideas for large spans with no dialogue that might work for replacement with the 85 mix?

Thanks to Harmy, I now have a much clearer recording.  Still has a bit of the high frequency waver, but everything else is much better and no crazy echo effect on the music.  Starting over ;)

In the process of working on the Russian dub (still working on it), I got sidetracked by an interesting contribution.  Someone had taken the 5.1 Ukrainian 2011 Blu-ray dub for Star Wars and chopped it up so that it roughly synced with the GOUT.

I downmixed it to 2.0, improved the sync a bit, and despecialized the more egregious problems using the 93 mix (sound effects for things that aren't happening onscreen, such as the Mos Eisley additions), and I think the result is surprisingly good.

I am not planning on despecializing any more Blu-ray dubs.  This one just happened to be mostly already done, it's a voiceover dub so the sync was easier to figure out, and Ukrainian happens to be a language on my "Top 5 Most Wanted" subtitling languages, so I'm hoping it may attract the attention of people who can help me there.

Anyway, PM me for the link if you're interested.

I'm just now putting the finishing touches on the Russian dub for Star Wars, and boy must this thing have an interesting history.  The original dub was (probably) in mono for broadcast TV by Studio Gorky in 1989.  The existing bootlegs of this original broadcast, as far as I can tell, all have a severe echoing which make it pretty all-around unpleasant to listen to.

However, when putting together the Special Editions, apparently there was some better-quality tape to go back to, because the SE dubs sound much better--and by better, I really mean "less bad".  There's a constant wavering in the high frequencies throughout the whole thing, which you get used to over time, but which occasionally causes the London Symphony Orchestra's brass section to sound a bit like a mariachi band.

In addition to some audible tape damage in a few areas, there were also apparently some severely damaged sections of tape, because parts are dubbed over with what appears to be, at least in certain cases, completely different actors and not-very-well-blended background noise.  Not only that, but when patching them together, it looks like they forgot to take into account PAL speedup, so the pitch jumps 4% for these sections.

Anyway, there was a lot to compensate for, in addition to despecializing and removing 1993 audio effects, and resyncing.  I can't say the result sounds great, but at least it doesn't sound worse, and it's probably more impressive if you know any Russian.  It's not ready quite yet, but feel free to PM me if you're interested.

Okay, we now also have a Russian voiceover-style dub for Star Wars, and the quality for this one is quite a bit better than the '89 dub mentioned in the last post.  So for Russian, that's a voiceover and non-voiceover for both SW and ROTJ.  Nothing for ESB yet, but that's likely to change.

...and rounding out the Russian audio, we now have a voiceover-style dub for ESB.  Still no "regular" dub, but we have a complete set of good-quality Russian voiceovers for the whole trilogy now.  That should definitely improve the popularity of our preservations.

Okay, we now have (more or less) complete audio for the trilogy in Ukrainian.  PM me for links if you're interested.

All are despecialized, but not fully.  Just the most major incongruous audio elements were replaced, whenever possible.  Some dialogue was despecialized when it was easy, but most was left alone.  These are voiceover dubs, so there is English AND Ukrainian dialogue playing simultaneously, which added to the some of the difficulties.  For the most part, they're pretty good, but you can hear a rough spot here and there.

By far, the easiest film to despecialize in this manner was Jedi.  Most of the major audio additions were not blended with old audio, and those that were, were usually not blended over dialogue.  The hardest scene in the entire trilogy was the conversation with the Emperor in Empire, and it's still the roughest-sounding bit in the trilogy.  In fact, there's one line there that's missing a translation altogether ("We have a new enemy... Luke Skywalker"), so that one is just in English.  I'm fishing around for a Ukrainian speaker to provide a decent dub for this line, just in case it works out.  If so, I'll blend it in and the Ukrainian audio will be truly complete.

I suspect regular non-voiceover dubs might be easier to despecialize because of no longer needing to lip-match the video so closely, but it was an interesting exercise anyway.  And it demonstrates that despecializing dubs is a viable option for Star Wars fans who didn't get a dub in their language prior to the Special Editions.

Awesome! Was it released recently? I tried to find in on the internet, and all I got was youtube clips from screenings.