At the moment, I am re-timing the alien subtitles to match theatrical timing.
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The problem is that if I release the re-timed project before any preservations actually use theatrical timing for the alien subtitles, then Project Threepio’s timing will just seem off, sometimes badly so.
On a hunch, I checked my new subtitle timing against dark_jedi’s ROTJ V3 DVD preservation, and sure enough, it’s a match. So I was wrong–apparently we’ve had enough clues about subtitle timing for some time now, ROTJ Despecialized v1 just didn’t use them. I don’t know if the V3 timing is frame-accurate or not (that point’s not important to me), but it’s certainly theatrical give or take a frame or two.
So I guess I could release the project with updated timing and it wouldn’t fail to sync up with the alien subs on every ROTJ preservation out there, just not ROTJ DeEd v1. The odd thing is that this project originally got its timing from the V3 DVD’s, and I later changed it to match the DeEd’s as the version 2’s started coming out.
Anyway, the project isn’t in any state to release just yet anyway, but maybe I don’t have to wait for Harmy after all.