Info: - Greedo & Jabba subtitles, theatrical placement and fonts - — Page 6

Okay, last thread spam regarding fonts I haven’t even released yet. But seriously, they’re coming.

The final deal is that I did a separate font for Star Wars and Jedi, as I felt the small differences were better handled that way. The Jedi font produces results that are extremely close to the actual theatrical subs. Star Wars theatrical subs, on the other hand, have inconsistent letter-forms and inconsistent spacing (the size of the hole in the lowercase “e” seems all over the map, as does the width of the character itself, for example), so I just had to pick what I felt looks nice and run with it. I did use the Private Use Area of the fonts to handle characters that were variable based on some predictable factor (different spacing around punctuation depending on neighboring characters), but I didn’t do anything to handle characters that changed unpredictably, and the default characters that aren’t in the Private Use Area use sane values that still look nice under any circumstances, just not always theatrically accurate. I didn’t use kerning tables at all because my subtitling software, like lots of software, ignores them.

Also, the references I’m using for Star Wars aren’t quite as nice as the ones I used for Jedi (they were 35mm scans registered over the Blu-ray frames for placement and proportions, but the Jedi reference was made by Harmy, and the Star Wars one by me). As such, letter and spacing proportions on my Star Wars reference were likely a little off, so I was very conservative with changes for that font. I might go back and try to do a better match once I get a better reference.

Either way, the Star Wars font produces results that are easily distinguished from the theatrical subs in a side-by-side comparison, but seem pretty plausible for my purposes, where side-by-side isn’t an issue. The Jedi font looks great for any purpose though, IMO.

Very much looking forward to your fonts, CatBus. Can you post a preview, or are you still tweaking?

Still tweaking (dammit!). Last preview is that Jabba sample I linked to a couple posts above. I’m now dimming/yellowing my matching font render per some other discussions, but so far I’ve gone [1] day without needing to modify the fonts themselves.

There’s also the issue that apparently the subtitles in Mike Verta’s scan look totally different than the subtitles in -1’s Silver Screen Edition, and I’m not entirely sure why at the moment. Verta’s looks like the subtitles in SW DeEd v2.5, -1’s look more like the subtitles in ROTJ DeEd v2.5, in that they’re thicker/chunkier. I’ve been basing my Star Wars fonts on -1’s scans.

Yes (Blu-ray) – and while the image registration may not have been perfect (it’s hard and I’m new to it), it certainly wasn’t bad enough to cause that sort of distortion. In fact, I don’t think any sort of image registration problem could result in subtitles that are significantly thicker but have more or less the same placement and take up more or less the same amount of room.

But yes, all of my subtitle scans were stretched out horizontally to match the Blu-ray proportions.

I can’t see how it would be de-warping, since the subtitles are the only thing distorted in this manner, nothing else.

Well, I know the -1 scan has some light leakage, which couldn’t really do a lot more than blur the edges but might effectively give you an extra pixel all around. And SSE is based on a dupe print, which is two generations of duplication after Verta’s print. So I’m thinking it’s the duplication, which means the thickness of the subtitles depends on when and where you saw it… ugh. Like the soundtrack! 😉

It’s definitely not the same print, however this was handled. Mike may have provided -1 with a non-Technicolor source. But also this is weird because although -1’s print was Spanish, the particular section had been spliced out and replaced with the scene from an English language print. I know because I synced the Spanish soundtrack and this part was English. So whatever -1 had was good enough to use audio-wise, and must have had pretty bad visual damage if he sought other sources – the Spanish had nothing to do with it.

Well, it appears due to blind luck, the same font that works for the SSE when bolded works reasonably well for Mike’s Technicolor scan at a normal weight. So maybe this will work out after all.

Using the same font for Technicolor and Eastman isn’t going to do anyone any favors, it’ll either look really off for one or kinda off for both, so it looks like we’re making a new font.

I’ve gone [0] days without needing to modify the fonts.

Okay, thanks to Harmy, I have a great sample image of the Technicolor subs, so now I’ve got a third font to match that, example below:

Top is Project Threepio font-generated, bottom is theatrical. So that’s three fonts now: Jedi, Star Wars Default (meaning Eastman, et al), and Star Wars Technicolor. Just doing some QA tests to make sure there’s no obvious mistakes.

Already fixed problems in the above with v, r, o, and d, but you get the drift.

Nevermind, the above image was a reconstruction. This whole Technicolor/Eastman distinction appears to be nonexistent. Technicolor matches Eastman, one font will do, all is well in the world. But I did a lovely job reconstructing the reconstruction, don’t you think?

CatBus said:

Nevermind, the above image was a reconstruction. This whole Technicolor/Eastman distinction appears to be nonexistent. Technicolor matches Eastman, one font will do, all is well in the world. But I did a lovely job reconstructing the reconstruction, don’t you think?

Looks really good! Will this be included in the next version of project threepio?

CatBus said:

Nevermind, the above image was a reconstruction. This whole Technicolor/Eastman distinction appears to be nonexistent. Technicolor matches Eastman, one font will do, all is well in the world. But I did a lovely job reconstructing the reconstruction, don’t you think?

I was wondering why there would be a difference. Good catch, btw. Can’t wait to make new subtitles with this font!

Actually, no. The way I’m handling matching subs from this point forward is I’m only matching theatrical prints–so if a preservation deviates far enough from the theatrical appearance, then the matching subs won’t quite match. In this case, the screenshot was of a reconstruction that did not match the theatrical prints as well as a font I’d already done earlier. But that font will be included.

Can you share what you’ve used as a base font and what program you use to modify it?

Oh absolutely. I swear I’m within a week of everything being done. For editing, I have been using FontForge. The original base font was Franklin Gothic Demi Cond.

Okay, the fonts are now available as part of the just-released Project Threepio v9.1. There will always be room for improvement, and I’ll probably make some small adjustments over time. Nothing is ever final.

One judgment call I made about Star Wars was that our most widely-available subtitle reference, -1’s Silver Screen Edition, has some pretty noticeable light bleed, adding to the glow of the subtitles, and slightly increasing how thick they appear. I opted to reconstruct a subtitle reference that attempts to create the actual edges of the characters without that glow, and match that reference with the font – so with any undertaking like that, there’s room for error. So while the Star Wars font is designed to work at Normal weight, people trying to match the Silver Screen Edition may have better luck with Bold weight.

CatBus said:

Okay, the fonts are now available as part of the just-released Project Threepio v9.1. There will always be room for improvement, and I’ll probably make some small adjustments over time. Nothing is ever final.

One judgment call I made about Star Wars was that our most widely-available subtitle reference, -1’s Silver Screen Edition, has some pretty noticeable light bleed, adding to the glow of the subtitles, and slightly increasing how thick they appear. I opted to reconstruct a subtitle reference that attempts to create the actual edges of the characters without that glow, and match that reference with the font – so with any undertaking like that, there’s room for error. So while the Star Wars font is designed to work at Normal weight, people trying to match the Silver Screen Edition may have better luck with Bold weight.

Will these be on the spleen? If not, whereabouts can I get them?

It’s making its way onto all the standard locations for Project Threepio right now, but it can sometimes take a few days to get to some of them (I rely on volunteers with better network connections than me). I’ll send you a PM.