Nothing quite like a good thread resurrection, but there's actually something to report on this front, so it's not your typical necrobump.
A while back, in Harmy's ESB thread, there was a discussion about descriptive audio tracks. It turns out, Harmy had official (British TV?) descriptive audio for the Special Editions of ESB and Jedi (not sure which versions of the SE, or if they're the ones previously mentioned, but not sure I care). Rather than continuing to clutter up his thread with updates on this, I figured I'd move it on over here where it seems to belong.
The thing is that this audio isn't really that usable in the traditional sense (unless you want to watch the Special Editions, I suppose). Even if you could despecialize it convincingly, the quality isn't great, they use some pretty nasty ducking, and the voiceover mixing levels seem a little out of whack to boot. However, there is some value in these--the script of the descriptive audio. I'm pretty certain we're all pretty much amateurs in this game, so having a pre-made script is better than winging it without a sense of what really needs to be described. Descriptive audio is weird--florid but curt--and it's hard to write like that. It helps to have something written by people who do this professionally.
So right now I'm transcribing the descriptive audio into a text script file. I am also despecializing as I go, replacing some British idioms (some of them sound very bad to a US listener!), and making occasional corrections for things that are simply wrong, but more-or-less keeping most things the same.
When done, we will have scripts that our golden-voiced member (Barry White was unavailable, so I'll try to get Mavimao instead) could read.
Then, we could splice-and-dice the audio into a GOUT-timed mono track of audio description only, which could then be blended with whatever audio we like, however we like. I'd make a stereo track myself, trying to use minimally-intrusive ducking. But if someone wants to do a 5.1 track, or something like that, it would be totally doable.
Anyway, that's the plan right now at least. There's always the possibility of some unforeseen roadblock, but the main obstacle really seems to be it's simply going to be a lot of work. No, I have no completed scripts yet.
EDIT: I suppose I should add that, if this works, we could do the same for Star Wars, but it's a much lower priority, since we have decent GOUT-synced audio already. The Star Wars audio has issues (low quality, 81 crawl, non-theatrical audio during asteroid scene, volume changes and pitch warbles). I'm cleaning up the worst parts of this audio up by just patching in '77 stereo audio from a good source, but the best option for the long term would be to re-record the overdub and overlay it over completely new audio, just like the plan for the other two films.