Project Threepio (Star Wars OOT subtitles) — Page 90

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Project files have been updated to version 13.0 (codename: “Endurance”), and the first post has been updated. Please PM me for temporary download links until the files are available at some more permanent locations.

Project Threepio has now been providing subtitles for the Star Wars Original Unaltered Trilogy for more than ten years!

Rough summary of changes from 12.3 to 13.0:

• Added new language: Afghan Persian (Dari)
• Changed language code for Iranian Persian from fas to pes, to better distinguish between various forms of Persian
• Added Canadian French subtitles for ROTJ (thanks to schorman13). Under normal circumstances, I don’t add subtitles that aren’t trilogy-complete to Project Threepio, but it appears at the moment that there are official Canadian French subtitles available only for ROTJ, and I prefer for there not to be any reason for anyone to feel obligated to ever watch a Special Edition, if I can help it.
• Improved Dutch subtitles (thanks to frater)
• Added Urdu and Polish titles-only subtitles to accompany dubs (the Urdu subtitles are to accompany the Hindi dubs)
• Modified Indonesian titles-only subtitles to accompany complete dubs
• PGS subtitles now have limited support for cropped video (i.e. video where the black bars have been removed). Some background: graphical subtitles are designed to work only with a 1.78:1 video frame, and their behavior with video cropped to a different aspect ratio is not defined. Playback software can deal with the aspect ratio mismatch in different ways, potentially resulting in a variety of non-optimal results. Project Threepio’s scripts now allow you to alter subtitles so that they look normal during playback with cropped video, but that process works only for specific playback software. The best solution for cropped video is still to re-encode the video with black bars, expanding the aspect ratio to the expected 1.78:1.
• Hypothetical 24.000fps preservations are now fully supported in all included scripts and documentation, although all included subtitles are 23.976fps, as always
• The render script can now use Python’s Pillow module for improved speed (but it is still extremely slow by any reasonable measure)
• Improved cross-platform compatibility for all scripts (this was so badly broken before that it could be considered a new feature)
• Fixed some bugs in the render script, and re-rendered all subtitles
• Improved the algorithm that estimates the position of “unshifted” subtitles in various scripts
• Reorganized some files (most noticeably, the sup folder has been renamed the pgs folder, and native subtitles have been renamed localized subtitles)
• Pre-rendered PGS subtitles are now included for all pre-1997 film variations except the 70mm cut of Empire (if needed, 70mm subtitles can be created using the provided instructions). Be warned, this means the total size of Project Threepio is much larger than earlier versions.
• Pre-rendered 720p subtitles are no longer included with the project files. 720p subtitles are still supported and can be created using the provided instructions.

Building on some things I mentioned earlier, adding Nastaliq scripts (Urdu and Afghan Persian) was a little more difficult than your average new script. Other scripts have varying levels of conformity to a consistent baseline and character height. Chinese characters (at least in Noto Sans CJK) are the best at this. Given even a fairly small sample of characters, it’s pretty easy to gauge exactly where they should be placed, and know exactly how much vertical space they will take. Latin characters are slightly more complicated, with descenders going below the baseline, and accents sometimes exceeding the normal max height. Until now, the scripts that played around most in that arena were Burmese and Thai – but still, pretty tame, relatively speaking.

Nastaliq threw all that out the window. There are huge vertical variances, with a baseline that’s more theoretical than ever before. So it takes up quite a lot of vertical space, but it also threw a wrench into a lot of my old processes.

For example: dual subtitles. If you want dual English and Chinese subtitles, no problem. The Chinese subtitles get shifted down into the black bars, the English subtitles stay where they are, and everything just works. But if you wanted to make dual English and Afghan Persian subtitles, the Nastaliq subtitles take up so much vertical space that, even pushed down as far into the black bars as possible, they will still overlap the English subtitles. So, in that case, I shift the English subtitles up into the top black bars, and then you can have two sets of subtitles going with no overlap.

Another case was “unshifted” subtitles. There are cases where, for example, if you’re dealing with a Star Wars preservation with no burnt-in subtitles, you will no longer want subtitles for the alien dialog to be shifted to the top of the screen. So “unshifting” these subtitles requires calculating where these subtitles should now be placed, and the existing formulas broke hard for Nastaliq. And to be honest, they were also a little broken for Thai and Burmese as well. Now, they all work great.

Anyway, that’s just an example of how adding a new language isn’t always a simple matter of plugging in a new SRT file and loading a new font. Localization is hard!

Thank you for your continued work on this project (over ten years, wow!). I always enjoy reading your updates, since these are issues I never would have considered.

Thanks Neverargreat, it’s always good to hear from people following the project!

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