Well then I’ll take this opportunity to plug my longstanding casting call for voice talent for creating new audio descriptive tracks:
http://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/879413
You don’t have to be Cate Blanchett or Sarah Vowell, but I’ll admit it would certainly help.
Okay, I’ve completed the whole Czech trilogy (first dub, early nineties) and they’ll be available in the usual places shortly. This is the first time I’ve effectively “despecialized” soundtracks that weren’t Special Edition tracks to begin with. But the tracks were so problematic that simply adjusting the sync offset wasn’t good enough. So it’s authentic in the sense that it’s all based entirely on OOT material, but it’s not the original badly-dubbed VHS experience, if that’s what you’re looking for. It’s patched together from multiple sources, spliced and diced and heavily adjusted. It how the early nineties release might have sounded if they’d done the sync right. Artistic license was taken, not every problem was fixed, yadda yadda.
I’d rate the Star Wars track as very good, the Jedi track as very good with one major hiccup (the aforementioned Emperor scene), and the Empire track is… eh, let’s just give that one a “most improved” award, shall we? It’s still pretty bad, but it’s watchable now IMO.
Hey, Just wonderin’ if maybe the thread title should be updated to reflect the 2.7 version instead of the 2.5? It seems like there’s some confusion as to what the current version is and, if I recall correctly, even thought the 2.6 and 2.7 updates were done by Towne32, it’s endorsed and approved by you. Harmy. Harmster. Harmy Harm Harm. Ok, back to my drinks.
Empire is still gonna be a little rough, but Jedi cleaned up surprisingly nicely, aside from that one Emperor scene.
It also occurred to me while editing these files that there’s always someone here who’s after a “clean” voices-only or voice-free soundtrack. Well, the quality of these original files isn’t great, but the sync is so bad that often you can hear the plain score+sound effects that happen when someone is talking. I suppose you could reconstruct a voice-free soundtrack if you had enough badly-synced dubs like this. I thought it was pretty weird how they didn’t dub C-3PO talking in alien languages at all in these dubs, and you just hear the score+sound effects of him waving his arms around, like he’s miming.
Oh, interesting. The 95 Star Wars track floating out there is definitely despecialized, I never really checked to see if the others were despecialized or original–could be either. But frankly if you like the 92 translation better, that’s the one for me. Someone else may want the original 95 track though.
So I’ll admit it–I don’t actually listen to the dubs in my collection. I’m a collector, I like to help others, but, well, I don’t actually know all of these languages so I don’t listen to them.
Which goes to explaining how the Czech dubs have been the way they are for so long. The Star Wars Czech dub is actually in very good shape–it has some clicks, pops, and it only falls noticeably out of sync a couple times. But the dubs for Empire and Jedi? Yeesh. Omlouvám se.
There are several Czech dubs–one early nineties dub, one mid-nineties dub, and a Blu-ray dub. The mid-nineties dub, although it was supposedly done in 1995, is AFAICT only available as despecialized SE dubs. So since I always favor authentic OOT dubs, and also because Harmy likes the early nineties translation best, the early nineties dub gets most favored dub status. But the audio quality (and here I’m mostly talking about Empire) is pretty poor. And worse yet, the sync is godawful (the overall good sync in Star Wars notwithstanding). Not only the sync in the edited-to-sync-to-the-GOUT files we’ve been working with, but in the original dub, the voices were just put in wildly inaccurate places, so you can choose to sync the voice or sound effects, but not both. And they’re so out of sync that trying to sync halfway between SFX and dialogue often doesn’t work, which sometimes works well for small differences.
A handful of Czech users have logged in to complain about the Czech dub, asking why we don’t use one of the later dubs. I always thought it was the audio quality they were complaining about. It turns out at least a good portion of it was the sync, and when I finally checked (thanks Tomalakis!), yuck, I wondered why we used these too.
I’ve been editing these audio files for the past few weeks and I finally finished my first pass on all three films. A little more finishing work still to go, but these new files are now much, much, MUCH better. They’re still mono VHS captures, of course, and because of how the voices and sound effects are synced differently, sometimes there’s still a fairly obvious problem (score, SFX or voices are noticeably off, because I chose to sync something else). But they’re now the exception rather than the rule, and they’re all pretty tolerable IMO.
I think the worst bit was that the score in the scene where Luke meets the Emperor was way off, so if you synced the elevator noises at the beginning, and the voices at the end, there was this long (over ten second) audio gap while Luke walked up to the Emperor. The original files worked around this by repeating the elevator noises a second time, which was pretty crappy. I patched in some Emperor-appropriate music from the isolated score, which is still pretty crappy (it’s not even pretending to be authentic) but at least you’re not hearing sounds for things that aren’t happening onscreen, and you’re not hearing dead silence. Actually there were a lot of bad things, and you can still hear some of them. But that was the thing I was least happy about. I’m gonna have nightmares about these files.
I’ll probably be making these available in the next week or so.
The Star Wars trilogy films are easily the three most popular films unavailable on home video today. So there will always be unscrupulous people trying to cash in on the chasm between supply and demand, and unfortunately Despecialized makes it easy. The best leverage we have against unscrupulous dealers is to make sure all Star Wars fans know about Despecialized, and that it’s free – erode the demand for these bootlegs, in other words. Other than that, we’re just putting out fires on eBay until Star Wars enters the public domain and we can get a real commercial release – and none of us will live to see that day.
to a marketing firm, they pretend the transition between KB, MB, GB, TB, etc. happens at 1,000 increments rather than 1,024
I don’t mean to pick on yoda-sama in particular, but I do want to point something out. The prefixes Mega, Giga, etc, are ambiguous when referring to memory or storage capacities. These prefixes have meant increments of 1,000 or 1,000,000 for a very long time, and some electronics makers sort of co-opted the prefixes to mean 1,024 and 1,048,576. Today JEDEC uses the term Gigabyte to mean 1,000,000 bytes, while the IEC uses the same term to mean 1,048,576. So no matter which way you use the term, you are correct and a major international engineering consortium will back you up on your claim.
Which means that the term is infuriatingly meaningless when applied to memory or storage capacities, but neither usage is wrong. If you want to be unambiguous, you really have no option but to use different prefixes specifically designed for binary values–Mebi, Gibi, etc, which absolutely positively mean 1,024 and 1,048,576 and can mean nothing else. This is why you will sometimes see “MiB” and “GiB”. Those aren’t alternate abbreviations for MB and GB–they’re a completely different, and better, unit to be using for such things.
The past few days have been, to me, the definition of how Democrats always, always, always fall for it.
For the past decade or so, Republicans have made a habit of getting the name of the Democratic Party wrong, just for yuks. Democrats then spend half their available airtime/screentime/op-ed space explaining what the name of their party is, and their available space for talking about actual policy issues is diminished. Trump spends a surprising proportion of the primary talking about the size of his penis. Democrats then go into a tizzy about who was talking about what idiotic things in the Republican Party debates, instead of, you know, meaningful issues. Now we’re talking about crowd sizes instead of the DOJ switching sides on the Voting Rights Act, or any other major issue of the day.
Yeah, I get it. Getting the name of a major political party wrong makes you look like an idiot. Talking about your penis size makes you look like an idiot. Having a loud and public on-camera argument with reality makes you look like an idiot.
But you know what else makes you look like an idiot? When you’ve got actual important things to talk about and you let your opposition sideline your entire message with this nonsense. Ultimately, it does not matter what the names of our political parties are, or how big our respective body parts are, or if we’re really bad at counting people. But if we can spend four years talking about stuff that doesn’t matter when so much critical stuff is happening all around us, we are really, really done for.
I don’t remember any Presedential debate that ONLY discussed the size of anyone’s “member”. What was it you were watching?
“surprising proportion” != “the entire thing beginning to end”
As for other comments, I’m just venting. I can’t believe all the crap going on and most people are just talking about golden showers and crowd sizes. Maybe it’ll stop, but jeeze. And yes, getting the name of the Democratic Party wrong was actually a Republican party media dictate. If you were speaking to the media, you were supposed to get the name wrong. Instead it’d sound like you were talking about some defunct Turkish political party from the 20’s, but it was well worth it to wind up the Democrats who can’t stand it when someone on the Internet is wrong.
The past few days have been, to me, the definition of how Democrats always, always, always fall for it.
For the past decade or so, Republicans have made a habit of getting the name of the Democratic Party wrong, just for yuks. Democrats then spend half their available airtime/screentime/op-ed space explaining what the name of their party is, and their available space for talking about actual policy issues is diminished. Trump spends a surprising proportion of the primary talking about the size of his penis. Democrats then go into a tizzy about who was talking about what idiotic things in the Republican Party debates, instead of, you know, meaningful issues. Now we’re talking about crowd sizes instead of the DOJ switching sides on the Voting Rights Act, or any other major issue of the day.
Yeah, I get it. Getting the name of a major political party wrong makes you look like an idiot. Talking about your penis size makes you look like an idiot. Having a loud and public on-camera argument with reality makes you look like an idiot.
But you know what else makes you look like an idiot? When you’ve got actual important things to talk about and you let your opposition sideline your entire message with this nonsense. Ultimately, it does not matter what the names of our political parties are, or how big our respective body parts are, or if we’re really bad at counting people. But if we can spend four years talking about stuff that doesn’t matter when so much critical stuff is happening all around us, we are really, really done for.
I’ll PM you with a link to the latest files in case there’s a difference between them and what you saw (I don’t think there is, but just to be sure). You can then PM me back with a link to the updated files, or if it’s just a few lines, just send the corrections. The Dutch subs are direct from the GOUT, which generally have been decent but not without problems.
PM sent, and it’s never a problem.
One another note about the czech dub. One member named pittrek replied to my original post and send me both czech dub versions for every Harmy’s mkv file and I must say that they fits perfectly, so far I didnt noticed any desync…however that’s not the case for the dub syncs included in the actual mkvs. Some parts are so horribly out of sync that it is practically unwatchable. Especially in ROTJ (Yoda closes his mouth, then you hear him talking…i noticed that one part of Endor battle is about 2 sec desync…etc).
So i would strongly recommend to ask pittrek if he would be willing to include his dub syncs to the mkvs or in some other way made them public, because it would be shame (for czech viewers) to not include them.Actually I’m finding lots of sync problems in both versions of the dub (I don’t usually pay much attention to lip sync because that can simply be off in dubs, but the lip sync is way off IMO and the sound effects are off quite a bit too). I think I’m going to try to sort this out once and for all and get a solid sync, starting with pittrek’s sources.
and do you mean the pittreks syncs? really? sound effects are off? thats strange i really didnt encounter any desync, but so far i was mainly checking bits where you can clearly match the sound like shots, clanking, saber clashes, button push etc. mouth dont fit 100% with any dub…i was also mainly focusing on the second dub version. i will check the first one more thoroughly too
Yes, but I’m referring to the pre-95 dubs, so maybe the 95 ones are synced better.
One another note about the czech dub. One member named pittrek replied to my original post and send me both czech dub versions for every Harmy’s mkv file and I must say that they fits perfectly, so far I didnt noticed any desync…however that’s not the case for the dub syncs included in the actual mkvs. Some parts are so horribly out of sync that it is practically unwatchable. Especially in ROTJ (Yoda closes his mouth, then you hear him talking…i noticed that one part of Endor battle is about 2 sec desync…etc).
So i would strongly recommend to ask pittrek if he would be willing to include his dub syncs to the mkvs or in some other way made them public, because it would be shame (for czech viewers) to not include them.
Actually I’m finding lots of sync problems in both versions of the dub (I don’t usually pay much attention to lip sync because that can simply be off in dubs, but the lip sync is way off IMO and the sound effects are off quite a bit too). I think I’m going to try to sort this out once and for all and get a solid sync, starting with pittrek’s sources.
If anyone can confirm and fix these issues in the current dub, I can handle getting them in the right places. I might also be able to do this, but I’m a little busy ATM.
I keep a copy around mostly as a cautionary tale for family members considering watching a prequel. The upside of the kids only having watched the OOT and the Disney films is obvious – but the downside is that they really don’t know how bad some parts of the Star Wars catalog can get, and could naively end up watching ROTS if they’re not careful. Show them the Holiday Special, assure them all of the prequels are much, much worse, and now they’re pretty safe without any of the pain and scarring. It’s a prequel vaccine, basically. A little cowpox to prevent smallpox.
I’m still getting used to having 3PO blink at me. I can almost sleep at night.
He honestly does that in the 80’s cartoon series, it is creepy and weird.
This will be cited as proof he’d originally intended it to be that way all along.
@Faithwyn
So, you’re telling me they can fix the colors of this scene, but not Obi-wan’s creepy leering at Luke?
To be fair, on the Blu-ray, Obi-Wan’s eyes blink now.
There’s a one-frame difference in the current ESB video. There are also always minor ADR issues, such as when the take used for the video isn’t the same as the take used for the audio (or even when they’re not saying the same words in both takes, which does happen in Empire). Also, some PC playback software has a decoder delay for certain codecs. I’ve seen the exact same track encoded as DTS-MA and AC3 be both out of sync and in sync, respectively. Use a hardware player to be sure.
So after ESB 2.5 comes out, are you going to start work on the 1080p Despecialized trilogy?
He’s used up all his vacation and sick leave, so he really doesn’t have any choice but to get right back to work.
No, I will be the pattern of all patience; I will say nothing.
– Puggo, from King Lear, Act III, Scene 2
I’m not an audiophile, but I found the sound effects for the 5.1 to be amazing while the music cues and dialogue were sometimes too soft. Is that fair or am I crazy?
I’m guessing that’s the stereo mixdown h_h was warning about. 5.1 mixes mixed down to 2.0/2.1 get softer than if they’re played back on a native surround system. I think there’s even some cases where you could hear this on a surround system, if your TV doesn’t do 5.1 passthru on optical, so it mixes down to stereo, then your receiver mixes it back up again.
But basically, the advice holds: if you’ve got a stereo system, listen to the stereo mix. It’ll be clearer due to lack of mixdown.
I don’t know if this project is still being assisted by any active forum members, but I just completed a minor revision of the Latino Spanish dub. Negative1 would typically get a lossless copy from me for this project, but I’m not sure what username to contact anymore for things like this. Let me know. It’s not uploaded quite yet, but will be soon.
I’ve decided to update my “official” copy of the Latino Star Wars dub using the new VHS capture, and I’ll be providing updates in the usual places. Do not expect a miraculous change. The only audio changed at all is the ~1 minute Han-Greedo scene (VHS source), everything else is identical (35mm source). The new audio, like the old audio, is still a VHS capture, this time from a tape so old that other parts of it were completely unusable, but with this bit fortunately surviving.
So, getting rid of the muffling and general lo-fi sound during this scene was never really in the cards. However, I do feel that the new audio blends slightly better with the surrounding audio now (mostly EQ and noise floor differences), and is definitely better… just not as much better as I’d like it to be. Maybe we’ll get another 35mm reel with the Latino dub someday. Until then, this version may have to suffice.