Project Threepio (Star Wars OOT subtitles) — Page 7

The original project files contain a _REAME.html file explaining all the technical stuff... I'm assuming what you downloaded was SRT files only?  If you want selectable subtitles on an AVCHD, I'd recommend getting the full project files for the SUP files and the instructions.

TK421138 said:

Catbus, I just wanted to take a moment and say thank you for this fantastic project. You did on hell od a job and your read me was written so well that, though I was nervous I might actually screw something up, I was able to mux in subs like a pro. I can't tell you how happy my deaf friend was when I presented him with these discs and told him that they had subtitles. He sent me a text saying that these were the nicest, easy to read subs he's seen on a dvd EVER. Plus, now I can enjoy Star Wars while my partner is asleep without having to turn up the volume too loud. So there you go, two lives touched by your dedication.

That is great to hear.  The thing that got me started on this project was making good SDH subs for a deaf friend of mine, so I'm very pleased to hear more deaf viewers like it too.  I really spent more time on those SDH subs than anything else.  Also, good to hear feedback about the README file, I tried to make it pretty easy to follow and I'm glad to hear it worked out.

One thing I do feel the need to point out, and this is not a poke at you or a complaint, merely made me chuckle a bit. When you watch Star Wars with the subs but the mono track enabled, when the Stormtroopers are checking the doors of Mos Eisley and they say "The door's secure, move on etc.." the subs still read "the door is locked." I know you can't have a mono sub and a stereo sub, just thought it was worth mentioning.

This is, as you pointed out, fairly unavoidable due to subtle variations in the sound mixes, I opted for matching stereo/70mm because it's the most popular option and the default on most preservations.

...BUT, you'll notice that there IS in fact a mono SRT file in the project files for fans of the mono mix, it just hasn't been pre-made into a SUP file.  It's a little more involved to make the SUP files, but the process is described in the README.  And there's even a mono SDH file in there too!

Greedo: "He may only take your ship."

Solo: "Over my dead body." says the script

"From my dead body." says Harrison

You might have it in place already, just thought I would mention it. Looking forward to apply your awesome sub-work...

Yep, I still hear "over" too.  Although honestly it's more like " 'fer my dead body."  C'mon, Harrison, enunciate!

EDIT: Definitely "over".  If you are kind of hoarse after, say, a long day of shooting, the "o" can come out unvoiced, and the "v", if also unvoiced, sounds like an "f".  He finally got his voice back on the "er".

CatBus said:

Yep, I still hear "over" too.  Although honestly it's more like " 'fer my dead body."  C'mon, Harrison, enunciate!

Ha ha... I guess I'm beaten then, the script and you two against me. Can someone please set me straight about Ford's "Sit down sweetheart, we're taking off." vs. "Silence sweetheart..." in ESB?

Well, you already know my take on that one, so are you fishing for a second (third) opinion?

CatBus said:

Well, you already know my take on that one, so are you fishing for a second (third) opinion?

Yes, sort of. ;) I was happy with your answer and take on it, but was expecting to hear more of it from others, not necessarily in order to get a satisfying answer in the style of you are correct or you are wrong, I was just hopeful we would get others takes on these tough to hear lines... find it fascinating.

Also, after another listen to the Greedo vs Han I completely agree, it's definitely "over" with a sort of absent 'o'.

If I spelled it like it sounded again, I'd say he said "siyyown sweetheart".

He was drunk.

But I see where msycamore gets "silence" from.  If you blend the words, the first word can be "siyyowns".

CatBus said:

If I spelled it like it sounded again, I'd say he said "siyyown sweetheart".

He was drunk.

But I see where msycamore gets "silence" from.  If you blend the words, the first word can be "siyyowns".

Thanks for getting back to me regarding that line, it's funny how certain misheard lines of dialogue in movies tends to stuck even when it doesn't fit, this is one of those for me, I'm just glad to hear your takes on it. :)

World domination map updated, more to come soon.

On second thought, I'm ditching the world domination map entirely.  It was useful back when there were more areas without coverage, but now a simple list of languages is a far more useful and accurate way of describing coverage.  There is still an update pending.

A question for everyone: Harmy just released his first ESB test clip, and I've had the chance to listen to some Hoth dialogue over and over and over...

Luke's line: Echo Station Five-Seven. We’re on our way.

Sure sounds to me like he's really saying: Echo Station Fox-Seven. We’re on our way.

Some Googling indicates I'm not the first to feel that way, but most people hear it as Five-Seven.  What's your take?  Again, I don't care what name the script says or what the EU has standardized on, I care what Mark Hamill actually said, even if it was a flub.  However this is the sort of thing that I'm not certain enough to change without some independent verification.

EDIT: Oh yeah, the new languages will be Korean and Indonesian, but it's taking a while because I've got a native speaker actually going through and verifying the Indonesian.  Harmy's got the files for Star Wars, I'm waiting on the rest of the trilogy.

EDIT 2: The alternate way to hear Luke's line is that the dipthong for "i" is really drawn out, so it's "Echo Station Fahvs Seven".  Which is plausible and why I've leaving it alone unless I hear some good convincing outside input.

Nevermind.  Looking at his lips, it's clearly a "V" and not an "X", so it's Five-Seven.

Agree with you that it sounds almost like he says, "Echo Station Fox-Seven" but when I'm looking at the film and hearing the line I'm convinced it is "Echo Station Five-Seven." May be due to it being ADR because when you read his lips it's definitely Five not Fox... checked 35mm Dolby Stereo, 70mm Stereo and 16mm Mono, same impression from all three.

Just to update everyone on the status of version 6...

I've been working on resolving some compatibility issues with SUP files generated from BDSup2Sub (discussion here), and that's taken care of now. If you see these compatibility issues yourselves, there's an easy solution for 720p subs and a very painful solution for DVD subs, both described in detail in the discussion link.

I've also been getting a lesson on the vagaries of how different DVD players can do totally different things with the exact same streams, and have concluded that if you're making a DVD project, and you don't control every single DVD player it's going to be played back on, don't bother with matching subs.  DVD players in widescreen 16:9 mode seem to do the right thing, but DVD players in 4:3 letterbox mode are not predictable, and they can effectively shift the subtitles out of the frame, making matching subtitles fairly useless, not to mention making all subtitles not CIH-safe (not that someone with a CIH system would use a DVD player in 4:3 letterbox mode, but still...).

Anyway, it's being worked on, and version 6 will be not only closer to universal language support, but also closer to universal playback device support.  So we'll have quantity on our side, even if some of the unverified subs are probably lacking in quality. 

Just got verification that the Polish subs are pretty awful, which I kinda suspected anyway.  They may still be better than nothing, but maybe not much better ;)

Anyway, I have a volunteer offering to make them better, so hooray for that!

EDIT: FWIW, I'm also suspicious of Arabic, Croatian, Bulgarian, and at least for some of the films, Turkish. I suspect Romanian and Chinese are excellent.  Then again, I could be wrong about the whole lot.  The problem with using random fansubs as a source is that I don't know how fluent the author was in either the language in question or in English, and if they were even trying to translate from English, or maybe just transcribing a dub.  All I've got is Google Translate telling me that they are more-or-less in the approximate ballpark.

Project files have been updated to version 6.0 (original post has been updated as well). Please PM me for the temporary download links until the files are available in a more permanent location.

The goal of this release was to get in one last push for global coverage before Harmy's big Star Wars Despecialized 2.5 release--not only by adding new languages, but also by trying to ensure playback compatibility across the widest possible range of devices. Quite a lot of the effort behind this release was just to get subtitles working better on ancient DVD players attached to CRTs, for example.

Some of the updates in this version are not trilogy-complete (Indonesian and Polish), and once these updates are completed for the entire trilogy, I plan to release another updated version (probably not anytime soon). However, I considered some of the other completed updates to be important enough to release the project in its current state without waiting for the pending updates.

Rough summary of changes:

- Added two new languages: Korean (unverified) and Indonesian (verified--Star Wars only, updates pending for other two films). We're (mostly) up to 26 languages now!

- Added Mandarin/traditional, as used in Taiwan (unverified)--I know there are official versions of these, and Cantonese too, on the Region 3 Taiwanese GOUT, so I hope to be able to update these with verified (scaled) subtitles later as well. Now that we're venturing into multiple writing systems and dialects within the same macrolanguage, calculating an exact number of languages supported by this project depends on how you define a distinct language, and I don't want to get into that business. So, as of this bullet point, I'm no longer keeping an exact count of supported languages. We've got around a couple dozen, and that's good enough for me.

- Major improvements to Polish subtitles. Promoted Polish status from "unverified" to "verified" (Star Wars only, updates pending for other two films). Thanks, Feallan!

- Fixed numerous minor punctuation problems in English subs, and even fixed some actual text errors in Jedi. I'm so embarrassed that I'm still finding English text errors...

- Fixed the framerate problem with 720p Thai subs.

- Gave up on trying to right-align double-dialogue in Arabic. It never worked quite right anyway (my rendering software barely supports RTL scripts as it is), so now it's center-aligned.

- Used a better scaling algorithm (hqx) to scale graphical-only subtitles (Japanese and Thai) from SD to 720p. I felt that the old upscaled subtitles didn't look bad per se, but were distractingly anachronistic--more like the onscreen text you'd see playing Super Mario Bros. in 1985 than watching a Blu-ray in 2013. The new ones are still neither as nice nor as flexible as the rendered subs for other languages, but until I can find volunteers to transcribe these subtitles into text files, these new upscales should be adequate for most purposes.

- Fixed a problem in 720p subs that would cause them to display improperly in VLC (they would appear for only one frame).

- Fixed a problem in DVD subs that would cause them to display improperly on some older hardware players (they would shake between scanlines). The fix for this issue requires that the DVD subtitle file sizes be nearly twice as large as those from earlier versions.

- Instructions for converting subtitles to other formats have been updated to ensure better compatibility with more authoring software and playback devices.

- Repositioned all DVD subtitles slightly so that they display nicely regardless of whether the player is in widescreen (16:9) or letterbox (4:3) mode (i.e. in letterbox mode, each line of a subtitle is now either entirely in or entirely out of the frame). This is relevant only for hardware DVD players--software players and Blu-ray players always use widescreen mode for anamorphic DVDs and just pad the top and bottom of the image for 4:3 displays. Subtitles in letterbox mode are not CIH-safe. Due to this widescreen/letterbox business and some other DVD arcana, I am now recommending against using matching subs on DVD projects.

With so much focus on issues of quantity (number of languages, number of playback devices), I hope more focus can be given to issues of quality in Project Threepio. I can personally vouch for the quality of only the English subtitles. Even the verified subtitles, while certainly good translations overall, may have occasional errors and inaccuracies. The unverified subtitles may vary anywhere from quite good to merely intelligible.

I'd love to get more community feedback on the quality of our non-English subtitles. With the release of a major Star Wars preservation which includes these subtitles, that may just start to happen.

I've emailed some sub files to you!