Monty Python and the Holy Grail -- 1975 theatrical (on hiatus - lots of info) — Page 4

Actually if you detect any noise issues, maybe I'd still like to use it, and replace just "bad areas" from other sources.  Just let me know where the bad areas are if you notice any.

The reason is that I suspect the "sync drift" (if there is any: lose a frame here, gain a frame there, etc) will follow the exact same pattern for all tracks from a single source.  If I figure out and compensate for the pattern once, I'll just repeat that process two more times.  If we bring in a track from an entirely different source, the pattern may be different.  I may be overthinking things (not all sources are as ill-treated as Star Wars), but I just want to be sure.

So I have a question about the original Japanese-back-to-English track.  I'm only familiar with the DVD/Blu-ray, where it only shows two scenes (holy sake cup & bonsai).  Does the Laserdisc show any more than that, or is that the full extent there as well?  I'd like to stay faithful to the Laserdisc translations wherever possible.

Just to keep people updated, I have the Laserdisc tracks, but it will take me a while before I can do anything with them.  My plans are to make them into true single-channel mono tracks (plays from the center speaker instead of the fronts on a surround system), sync them, and probably encode them all as DTS-MA lossless tracks with a 192k core, even though, to be honest, I don't think these soundtracks really benefit from being lossless.  But why not, you know?

Then send the Japanese track off to a translator friend and make another subtitle track, and then... done!

I'll leave the extras to someone else.  I'm strictly doing "just the movie", in a Blu-Ray friendly format.

Also, damn this audio is difficult.  The Black Knight scene needed to be resynced every few SECONDS...

Yeah, it's not a problem so much as very slow going.  I practiced LD audio sync with Star Wars, but I guess the upside of having the GOUT just be a re-release of a laserdisc master means you usually don't have to resync more than once every 10 minutes or so.  A full quality film restoration puts extra frames all over the place.

I can do it, not to worry.

Okay, I've got the English mono track synced!  I was also able to clean up a handful of very minor issues, like that pop you heard when Arthur reaches for the Holy Hand Grenade.

So, just to recap, here are the key differences from the Blu-Ray:

DONE:

Cut Anthrax scene extension

Default track is lossless mono (single-channel DTS-MA with 192kbps core)

German subtitles

PLANNED:

Original Criterion mono commentary track (lossless?)

Original Criterion mono Japanese dub (lossless?)

Full Japanese-back-to-English subtitles

I imagine this will be slow going again.  Luckily I believe I'll be able to sync both remaining audio tracks with a single pass because they're from the same source.

This is interesting...

The PITCH of the commentary on the Blu-ray is 4% lower than the pitch on the Laserdisc, which I take to mean that the Laserdisc commentary was originally PAL.  But the quiet soundtrack underneath the two commentaries is the same pitch, meaning it was mixed in later.

So, what to do?  I believe the Blu-ray pitch is probably correct.  I may try to just pitch-correct the bits of dialogue that are missing from the Blu Ray (from around the video edit) and merge them into the Blu-ray commentary.  It's just a commentary track so I can live with that.  Other suggestions welcome.

EDIT: Nevermind, the Criterion commentary covers the Anthrax extension so I'd have to edit it anyway.  So basically unless I hear otherwise I'm merging the Blu Ray two-channel mono track back down to proper single-channel mono, pasting over the transition around the cut, and leaving it lossy (no Laserdisc material used).  Japanese track, here I come...

I'm most of the way through the Japanese track now, at least enough to give some more info on it.  Technically the Blu-ray used the exact same dub as the LD, but they mysteriously swapped out occasional sections and put English voices back in, with subtitles.  We'll get to why in a second.  Nevertheless it was good that the dubs were largely the same because it would have been hell to try to sync the LD track if they weren't.

First, the LD dub isn't all Japanese either.  For most singing parts, it's still in English too (Robin's minstrels, the entire Camelot scene, etc).  So for that, we will still need to have "forced" subtitles on the Japanese track.  I haven't checked the French and Portuguese dubs to see if forced subs are required for those yet.  So that's a pretty small extra job I forgot about.  If someone wants to check these other BD dubs to see if they contain subtitled English parts, that would save me some time.

It looks like they swapped in English whenever the LD Japanese dialogue dropped a line they thought was important (such as "We found a witch, may we burn her?") or when the LD dub had alternate music that maybe someone didn't like (reading the writing in the cave).  Oddly, the new Japanese Anthrax scene has different background music, perhaps to cover up a few lines of narration they didn't like.  I'm not sure what the narrator says in that scene, but it sounds incredibly over-the-top cheesy and I can't wait for the translation.  And then there's scenes where I just can't explain at all why they reverted back to English (the whole of Scene 24), but nevertheless they did.

Anyway, the synced LD track sounds mostly great with a few glitches, some of which I can't entirely cover up--for example, there's a distinct glitch right when the Castle Anthrax cutover to the additional footage happens.  I'll do my best, and the result will be lossless mono.  Huge thanks to Silverwook on this--I definitely could not have done this without you--and I hope to hear back from my Japanese counterpart in the next couple weeks for the fun subtitle work.

Okay, one more update before a fairly long pause.  All of the audio work is done, forced subs are done, and now it's just down to the Japanese-back-to-English translation.  I've got a friend in Japan right now trying to get a friend of hers to help, and we'll see how that goes.  I have a few other options if this particular translator doesn't pan out.

What I'm working on is a template for her to use, i.e. mostly just the English subs with appropriate timing, so that, for the most part, she can just type in the new text and not worry about timing.  However, I'm "pre-translating" the sections that have already been translated as home video extras (French castle, Knights of Ni).

And here's where some judgment calls come in.  Both the Criterion LD and the BD have translations for the French taunting scene, but they are slightly different.  I believe that the LD is more of a straightforward translation, while the BD occasionally tries to be funnier (of course, I could be wrong about this), and also the BD seems to translate a lot more fleeting minor background lines, which could get annoying if done for the whole movie.

So here's what I'm doing: when the LD and the BD are different, I opt for the LD translation.  Where the BD provides the only translation, I use that.  Then, for words and phrases that also appear elsewhere in the film, I pre-translate those for consistency.  i.e. "Holy Grail" -> "sacred wine glass", "shrubbery" -> "bonsai", "Run away!" -> "Escape!", etc.  Not because that's actually what is said in these other scenes, but just as a sort of guideline for the translator to fill in the gaps while maintaining some degree of consistency between the three different translations.

Could be.  I'll ask the translator to assess the two translations and I'll make a call based on that.

My suspicions about the "added humor" are based on Bedevere's plan to "absorb" the Frenchmen, which I suspect is due to a Japanese word with multiple meanings, one of which is more correct and the other is funnier.  But then it could also be that in the 80's, it was not assumed that your average person in the US market would even know what "sake" was, so they went for a more universal "wine".  We'll see.

Okay my second shot at finding a translator is looking like it's going to fizzle (not entirely sure yet, but certainly not looking good).  It's looking like a possibility I'm not going to find anyone to do the Japanese-back-to-English translation.  For anyone who thinks they may know a potential translator, I've got a really long MP3 file and an SRT template we can give them.

Otherwise, if we can't find anyone, I'll just put together what I've got right now (which is very nice after all), and send it to my QA group, who I've determined will be SilverWook whether he likes it or not.

Hi Catbus, I'm working on a Holy Grail project myself and I wondered if you could help me.

I remember reading a while ago that the bluray is missing a few frames, I think they actually took out a teeny tiny shot of Graham Chapman turning to ask for his line or something. Some snippets here and there.

However, now that I actually have to work on this and I have the material, I can't for the life of me find the actual article and/or forum discussion where I read that thing. I've searched high and low on bluray review sites. I should've bookmarked it and now I feel like an ass. I fear I may be embarking on a wild goose chase (too many animals in this post already) in search of the missing frames.

So I thought I'd ask somebody who knows the movie and has actually sat down to compare sources. Have you heard of this? Is it true? Did I dream all of it? Why did Mrs. Niggerbaiter explode all of a sudden? Why did you say Burma?

Ditto here, I don't recall ever seeing anything like that in any version I saw, but I could certainly be wrong if it was fleeting enough.