Digital Source for the '77 Stereo Mix — Page 6

Found the link: http://originaltrilogy.com/forum/topic.cfm/Preserving-German-Original-Trilogy/post/549753/#TopicPost549753

He doesn't specify the language(s), but it'd be odd to say English and German voices not being in sync was "weird" (I'd take that as a given).  I assumed he was talking about PAL English and NTSC English, because that makes Laserschwert's statement most logical (and Lucasfilm's behavior least logical, which works for my predefined biases)

I believe he's talking about taking the PAL GOUT German audio tracks and putting them in sync with the NTSC GOUT video. ("BTW to have the German tracks be in sync with Harmy's video track...") He says that Empire and ROTJ are pretty easy to resync but that the German track for the original Star Wars is more difficult and that the dialogue isn't really in sync with the rest of the sound. 

This makes sense considering the sound was remixed for the Definitive/Faces collection and I guess that the sound mixer putting together the new mix for the German release didn't get the dialogue track quite in sync with the other Effects/Music tracks. 

In any case, I don't think he's talking about the English track at all, and thus it would be safe to take the PAL ROTJ English track, slow it down 25fps to 23.98 fps and use it as a reference for the editing of the digital track.

That certainly would be easiest.  Anyone happen to have that track?

Teeceezy said:

Found that track on a.b.starwars. I heard somewhere (Save Star Wars?) that the PAL GOUT was struck from the NTSC master, but I am not entirely sure. If that is the case the audio will sync with the NTSC synced audio and I will know if there is a difference.

The NTSC masters  for A New Hope and Empire were converted to PAL. Jedi, however uses a different master for both regions.

I think Jedi is a native PAL master, but I could be wrong. In any case, the reason the PAL version is used in restorations is because of its higher quality. 

Since you seem to be syncing non-theatrical mixes too, it's worth mentioning that although hairy_hen is working on fixing up the '77 stereo track, I doubt he has similar plans for the '85 and '93 mixes for Star Wars.

CatBus said:

Since you seem to be syncing non-theatrical mixes too, it's worth mentioning that although hairy_hen is working on fixing up the '77 stereo track, I doubt he has similar plans for the '85 and '93 mixes for Star Wars.

Do you know if h_h plans to fix the '80 and '83 digital stereo tracks as well?

I hope so!

I have no special knowledge, other than what he's posted publically.  The way I interpret what he's posted is:

- His current priority is cleaning up the '77 digital stereo mix, hopefully in time for Harmy's next release.

- He will continue to work on various projects if for nothing else than to practice his skills (i.e. he's not packing it in after this).

In the no-evidence speculation department, I would personally expect his next projects to be 2.0 versions of his ESB/ROTJ 5.1 purist mixes, because I believe he's said they have occasional phase problems, and ROTJ also has the sync problem--as well as any other tweaks he might have in mind.  I think as far as stereo tracks go, the '77 digital stereo one was a bit of a special case, because it was already so close to perfect but for a few very noticeable problems, and was leaps and bounds better than previous 77 stereo tracks.  I find the ESB and ROTJ digital stereo tracks to be more incremental improvements, and teeceezy's tracks are unlikely to contain any glaring audible problems like the current 77 digital stereo track.

Or you could just ask him ;)

According to that Laserschwert link at the top of this page, you need to trim 36ms off the beginning of the PAL ROTJ track (after slowdown) to sync with our preservations (Harmy, etc).  You probably already discovered this, but I wanted to point it out.