Monty Python and the Holy Grail -- 1975 theatrical (on hiatus - lots of info) — Page 6

That’s okay. You got a good analogue capture which served as the basis for this project’s audio. That’s plenty.

At this point the project’s still officially on ice (and it’s been stalled for some time), having both a small conservatively-defined scope (due to me not being much of a video editor) and a crazy-ass ill-defined scope (due to me being a language geek).

On the A/V end, here’s the small scope as of now:

• Video is simply the Blu-ray video with the extra bits removed at the Anthrax extension. No logos or extras of any sort. Audio is the lossless mono from the Blu-ray, except for the Anthrax transition, which is from a Laserdisc capture. At the moment the encode is 720p because honestly the video quality barely warrants that, and I am able to get a fairly high-quality encode that still fits on a BD25 that way.
• Extra tracks include all of the Blu-ray alternate dubs and subs (chopped at the Anthrax transition), plus a German subtitle track and lossless Japanese audio taken from Laserdisc (the Japanese track is absolutely butchered on the Blu-ray)

On the pain-in-the-ass one last feature that just will not make up its mind to live or die front, we’ve got:

• I want to translate the entire Japanese dub back into English, like they already did with the taunting and shrubbery scenes. While most of the dub may be a fairly straightforward job, there are bits in there that I just must know what the heck is going on, because it simply cannot be a straight-up translation. There appears to be some sort of cocktail party or something going on in the closing “credits” for example, and a chatty narrator who talks over dialogue-free scenes.
• The Japanese audio has a loud pop right at the Anthrax transition that unfortunately is right on top of dialogue, so I can’t edit it out very easily. However, with the help of someone who knows Japanese, I may be more likely to be able to do something to repair it.

The latter two require some sort of Japanese translator, and I recently managed to have suckered someone into at least considering it. We’ll see how this goes. So far I’ve waited years for the Japanese stuff alone, and I’m willing to wait a few more.

Oh, we’ve had a few nibbles, including by the person who handled Project Threepio’s Japanese subtitles. But frankly it’s a big job. I understand there’s serious dialect/intonation and vocabulary issues (casual Japanese may be insufficient), and it’s over an hour of dialogue to translate on top of that. Crossover between hardcore Python fans (those who would commit to this level of work for this little payoff) and people with advanced Japanese linguistic skills (not just anime fans) may not be as big as you’d think.

And I probably don’t advertise as much as I probably should and have certainly missed some opportunities due to that.

The audio glitch we could probably have resolved by now if I hadn’t scared away so many potential helpers with the translation portion. I’ll try to finesse that a little better this time 😉

We don’t have a Japanese re-translation… however, I have had my first report from my intrepid translator, and here’s what we have:

For the “end credits” dialogue, it is not an out-of-characater cocktail party/cast party/luau like I thought it might be. Well, it probably is the cast having some fun, but here’s what’s going on (protecting those who’d rather just wait for the whole translation from spoilers):

They are all pretending to be theatre patrons, confused about what just happened to the film they were just watching. They’re doing things like suggesting maybe there was some sort of power failure, wondering if they should tell someone, and eventually the theatre owner comes in to clear them out.

At least that’s what we have now. No actual text so far at all, he just gave it a listen because I mentioned that part to him. And of course I’m typing what he said, so I may have already gotten some detail or two wrong just by playing telephone.

I have the 1981 Laserdisc which is the theatrical version I believe.

Turns out I didn’t subscribe to this thread so I had no idea it had been necrobumped 😉

It’s still on seemingly perpetual hold, and the status reported here is still accurate. The complete Japanese retranslation gig wasn’t ever really in the cards for the translator I found, but fixing the loud pop in the Japanese audio may still be something he’s willing to help with (in short, the pop overlaps dialogue, so if it’s fixable at all, I’ll need the help of someone who actually understands that dialogue). I’ll give it another go since I work with the guy. Wish me luck at being just the right amount of annoying.

Thank you SilverWook for the digital Zoot capture. I have downloaded it and made a zillion backup copies (well, three). Assuming no problems, I’ll splice that into the lossless Blu-ray sourced track.

I may… sigh… give up on the complete Japanese retranslation idea (will I never know what that Japanese narrator is saying when nobody’s talking?!?), but that pop is still IMO very worth holding things up for (the Blu-ray butchers the Japanese audio, so this preservation covers both the theatrical video AND Japanese audio, which are both otherwise unavailable in HD). All of this would probably wait on the next Project Threepio release, which is more of my focus right now and Japanese is coincidentally kicking my ass there too, and I also have a whole lot less free time these days than I did in prior years. So, it’s slow, but not forgotten.

Not sure if there’s a track out there without the pop, but the Japanese track is actually from the US Laserdisc track you sent, not the Blu. Basically the Japanese track only covered the theatrical bits, so when they inserted the Anthrax extension, the audio track popped at both transitions. The Blu is generally unusable as they just decided to patch over giant random segments with English audio. This was as far as I know a cut made very late in production, so it’s possible the Japanese track actually had the pop theatrically. But it’s REALLY loud – startlingly loud – and not the sort of thing I want in the definitive Japanese audio release if I can help it.

This part features a lot of repeated dialogue (at least in English it does), “bad, bad, Zoot”, “oh, she is a bad…” so it’s possible I can just patch in a section of dialogue to cover up the popped syllable with a clean version. I’ve actually done this before with good results in another context, but I knew the language so I could tell if it sounded wrong. I could even probably do it for a language I didn’t know, where I felt I had a good handle on where words started and stopped, and what the basic sounds of the language were, but I’m not even that far with Japanese.