Monty Python and the Holy Grail -- 1975 theatrical (on hiatus - lots of info) — Page 5

Well, "happening" is a relative term ;)  If you know someone fluent in English and Japanese, this project could get out of neutral.  It's kinda been stuck there a while.

EDIT: Brian on Blu looks great next to the DVD, but don't look too carefully at it.  It's got some serious problems, but it's the best we have at the moment.

No, I had two really good leads, but both were not as good as I had originally thought...

So basically this project is "parked" waiting for either a) a translator or b) me to give up on finding out what they are saying in Japanese during certain scenes. I'm pretty patient though, and it's not like I don't have other things to do.

I'll get the audio and subtitle template uploaded for you soon.

Okay the links are up and have been shared.  Sadako has a lot of projects going on, and this could be pretty time-consuming, so we may not have updates for a while--but progress is actually happening, so that's news!

So for those not already aware of this, this project redefines the term “slow burn”. Yeah, it’s still happening, yeah, exactly one demo disc has been sent out to our crack QA team–long, long, ago–and no, the “Japanese re-translation for the entire film” project is still very much stalled, and holding up the final product, because I have arbitrarily deemed it a necessary component.

But, in other news, the new 40th Anniversary Blu-ray now includes a lossless English (dual) mono track. Since I’d originally used a hand-synced Laserdisc track, I think using the lossless mono off the Blu-ray will result in better audio sync and overall quality, only using the Laserdisc audio for the scene that got changed.

I’ll probably take the opportunity to re-encode the video as well, using better settings that may not yield that much better quality, but will almost certainly result in smaller size. I am considering downscaling everything to 720p this time, because 1080p gives you hardly any, if any, extra detail on a film like this, and at the sort of size I’m thinking of (BD25), 720p will look better than 1080p at the same bitrate, or even a lower bitrate. Avisynth and x264 gurus feel free to post suggestions.

And then, after all that’s done, we’ll keep waiting 😉

Also, Silverwook, I find your new avatar to be distressing.

Yeah, absolutely feel free to ask around. After having listened to the full Japanese track a few times, and seeing how they replaced big chunks of it with English audio for the Blu-ray, I’m very curious about what was in it that was so objectionable.

EDIT: Oh, and I think it still qualifies as a pretty shameless double-dip. I wouldn’t re-buy just for listening to the lossless audio–only for working with it. I think there’s some other pretty minor differences too, none worth it IMO.

FWIW, AnyDVD doesn’t know what to do with the new disc yet, so it’ll be a while before I can get the new audio. However, since the video is identical, I can still work on redoing the video encode. Now that I know my way around both AviSynth and x264 a little better than when I did my first attempt, I can work on that using the old disc.

To edit out the extraneous scene: Loop(0,58991,59801)
To resize to 720p: ResampleHQ(width=1280,height=720,kernel=“spline36”,chroma_kernel=“spline36”,dither=true)

This, plus a probably better set of x264 parameters, produces an image that looks to me exactly as good as my earlier 1080p encode, at just under 2/3 the size (old one averaged 24.159 Mbps, new one 15.625 Mbps). I’m pretty pleased. I’ll just resize the subs next, port all of the audio tracks over, and then wait until I can access the lossless BD-audio (and for a Japanese translator, of course).

If it is only a few scenes that require Japanese translation, I can do it.

Oh, I’m afraid it’s the whole damn movie. And to add to that, there’s this whole voiceover narrator business going on in the Japanese dub that makes it even wordier. Not to mention that the dubbing crew keep going straight through to the end of the credits, seemingly going out of character and just having a big party as far as I can tell (which is one of the main reasons I want to know what they’re saying…).

It’s a big job–I’d love the help, but I don’t want to mislead you.

EDIT: Actually there is a “small” job hidden in there. The Japanese track has a rough patch right where the Castle Anthrax extension happens. Two big pops as the soundtrack stops and restarts roughly at that point. What I don’t know is how safe it is to erase those pops–i.e. would totally muting them out be worse than leaving them as-is, or if there’s a middle ground. Heck, considering a lot of the dialogue is repeated in that scene, you may even be able to do a plausible-sounding paste-over job using the same words from a few seconds earlier. Not knowing Japanese, I’m leaving it alone until someone tells me it’s safe to mess with.

Yeah, I think that’s been partially quoted in this thread before. It’s pretty clear from this and other sources that they see the extended cut as an improvement, and that we won’t be seeing any more official releases of the theatrical cut, so here we are.

Here’s a question TheHutt might be able to help with: Does anyone know if there was a French or Portuguese dub of the theatrical version–and if so, is it different in any other way from the dub for the extended version? And finally, do you have a copy?

Similar for other languages too (e.g. German), I guess – the US Blu-ray only has French, Portuguese, and a badly butchered Japanese track. Japanese is the only non-English track I’ve re-created, the others I just chopped at the transition.

“I’m not dead yet” bump.

Found another possible Japanese translator, will get the files over to them and see how it goes.

The current audio track I’m using features the lossless Blu-ray audio for everything except the Castle Anthrax transition, where I switch over to your previous (analogue?) capture. There is a very slight reduction in quality there, but it’s only noticeable when you listen with the volume cranked to unreasonable levels. Other than that I’d say it’s already seamless.

But if you want to try a digital capture for what amounts to less than 10 seconds of audio and little-to-no audible improvement, I’m game.

Sounds like a plan to me! And if it’s rotty, well, the audio we’ve already go is already pretty perfect.