CatBus

yaboykevin01 said:

CatBus said:

yaboykevin01 said:

What is the difference between the 5.1 1980 mix and the 2.0 1980 mix? Are there any content differences, or are they just mixed through more channels?

Also, does the 16mm mono track differ from those two in any way?

And unlike Jedi, we know that there are content differences from the six-channel mix, but the six-channel mix didn’t apply to this cut of the film.

Which cut of the film does the six-channel mix apply to? And where can I find a list of differences between the original stereo and the six-channel mix?

The six-channel mix goes with the 70mm cut of the film. The 35mm cut only had stereo (and mono in the 16mm reductions). I’m not sure there’s a complete catalog of audio changes, but if you search for differences between the 70mm version of Empire and the 35mm version of Empire, some audio differences are included in the mix. You can also watch Puggo’s 8mm digest to see and hear many of them.

mkmossop said:

Anyone know if there’s a plan to do Episodes V and VI? For some reason I got it in my mind that this was all three episodes and was disappointed to see it was only Episode IV (I am still very grateful for just this one though).

Empire and Jedi have already been done, and IMO are already in much better condition than Star Wars. They have separate discussion threads in this forum. A newer version of Empire is currently in the works.

yaboykevin01 said:

What is the difference between the 5.1 1980 mix and the 2.0 1980 mix? Are there any content differences, or are they just mixed through more channels?

Also, does the 16mm mono track differ from those two in any way?

IIRC, the 5.1 1980 mix is just the matrixed stereo upmixed to 5.1, with some of the LFE channel from other sources like the Blu-rays where they still seem decent. In other words, it’s a nice, tasteful upmix of the stereo mix. Unlike Star Wars, it is NOT an attempt to reproduce the original six-channel mix. And unlike Jedi, we know that there are content differences from the six-channel mix, but the six-channel mix didn’t apply to this cut of the film. So no content differences, just more channels, technically not theatrical but not actively revisionist in any way.

The 16mm track is way different. C-3PO gets some different lines (ones that later showed up in the Special Editions), and the mixing is occasionally a bit different too.

whaleman said:

Harmy said:

Chewtobacca’s NTSC DVD5 is now available through tehp.

Video: NTSC DVD-5
Audio: AC-3 5.1 at 448kbps (hairy_hen’s latest mix)
GOUT chapter-stops

Thanks as always, Chewtobacca!

Hey guys, a question about the Chewtobacca DVD5 of RotJ 2.5. Does this contain a menu or just the movie itself? I burned the files and it plays in my dvd player but it goes straight into the movie…awesome quality by the way:) Just wanted to know if there is a menu that I am missing out on by burning it wrong? Thanks guys and keep up the AWESOME work!!

It’s just the movie.

FWIW, Czech subs are a much better match for the Slovak dub than Slovenian, if you have to choose a mismatched language with hopes of intelligibility.

Heh, Slovenian and Slovak are different (but related) languages, language code slv and slk respectively. The difference between dialects and languages is always a fuzzy area and often has a little politics mixed in for spice.

Slavic languages have varying degrees of mutual intelligibility, and I don’t particularly care to delve into what qualifies as a distinct language versus a dialect. If it gets a different language code, I call it another language. Besides, writing systems throw a whole different spanner into the mix–Serbian and Croatian are the same language when spoken, but Croatian is written exclusively in Latin characters, while Serbian can use Cyrillic or Latin. Same with Urdu and Hindi–they’re mutually intelligible dialects when spoken, but they use totally different alphabets when written and are indecipherable to each other. So what’s the same language for a dub may be two different languages for subtitles!

In more practical news, I have been trying to rope pittrek into making me some Slovak subtitles. No luck yet.

yaboykevin01 said:

CatBus said:

No video preservation that I know of has the full 70mm audio, since no preservation has the 70mm video. Even then, we’d be talking mono tracks from in-theatre recordings or reconstructed from the 8mm digest. It’d be pretty ugly, although maybe possible if you wanted mismatched audio badly enough.

Didn’t morgands1 preserve a tape recording of The Empire Strikes Back from a 70mm showing in 1980?

EDIT: A recording of the audio, not the video.

That’s what I meant by a mono in-theatre recording. Yes, it’s technically possible, but it’s a pretty odd request. The 35mm video was never shown with 70mm audio, so it wouldn’t be so much a preservation as a fan-edit. And the result wouldn’t sound very good either, so I suppose that’s why nobody’s jumped on it: i.e. it’s a custom version of Empire that’s not the least bit authentic and also sounds bad.

No video preservation that I know of has the full 70mm audio, since no preservation has the 70mm video. Even then, we’d be talking mono tracks from in-theatre recordings or reconstructed from the 8mm digest. It’d be pretty ugly, although maybe possible if you wanted mismatched audio badly enough.

Check the first post of Project Threepio, for a link to tehParadox. That’ll get you pointed in the right direction.

FWIW, I’ve gotten radio silence from RonSolo for quite a while, so I’m assuming we’re in a holding pattern waiting for another victimvolunteer to be our voice talent.

Everything’s NTSC now.

I try to post info on dubs here:

http://originaltrilogy.com/topic/International-Audio-including-Voice-Over-Translations/id/14451

…and the descriptive audio thread is here:

http://originaltrilogy.com/topic/Star-Wars-films-with-audio-description-Can-anyone-help-out/id/4933

But to answer the question more specifically, I think the only dubs added would be incomplete dubs for Hindi and Tamil, and the Slovak dub has also been improved. There’s also an incomplete Turkish dub I haven’t released yet because all I need is one stupid little bit of audio and then it will be complete. Argh. Incomplete dubs, BTW, are because the source material comes from torrents that apparently weren’t very carefully edited and were missing chunks. I’ve got someone checking a Turkish Star Wars fan forum for me, fingers crossed.

As for descriptive audio–check the relevant thread. I’ve written the scripts using the Special Edition descriptive tracks as a reference and all I need is voice talent for the voiceover. Please tell me one of you is Cate Blanchett. Then I just splice and dice and we’ve got descriptive audio tracks. The descriptive track for Star Wars needs work, so it’d be included in the package.

I’m not interested in “despecializing” the SE descriptive tracks because the voiceover makes despecialization even trickier, and the quality is so poor that even if I pulled it off, it wouldn’t sound very good. Part of the joy of Star Wars is the impressive score, and it would be particularly galling not to let that shine through on a track for the blind.

Thanks to lusho720, we have a new source for the Han-Greedo scene. It’s also an old VHS capture with some muffling, but the quality is good, considering. In its current state, it’s not much different than what we have now, but I think it may respond better to attempts to un-muffle the audio, because it hasn’t already been processed like the other track. We’ll see.

If anyone has any experience un-muffling old VHS tapes, let me know. I’m brand new to this.

EDIT: I think this will result in a marginal improvement. I was able to do a spectrum analysis on the 35mm audio and equivalent section of VHS audio, generate a custom EQ to match, and it comes out still pretty muffled but without the boomy bass of the original VHS section (the 35mm track is a little treble-heavy due to lack of Dolby NR, and that hasn’t changed). So compared with the way it was before, the quality still drops but the EQ matches better. I think that’s a good thing. I’ll give it some more time for listening and correction attempts before I make the call to upload it or not.

I can take care of this.

All subs with “-titles” in the filename just subtitle onscreen text that isn’t dubbed over. It can include the crawl, alien dialogue, and the text on those tractor beam controls in Star Wars. The point of them is so that you can watch with a dub and not have to be able to either read English text, or have an internationalized copy of the trilogy with a translated crawl and alien subs (such as our Krieg der Sterne preservation).

The Hindi dub is a little special in that I don’t actually know if the dub covers the alien dialogue. The copy of the dub I have (from a torrent) is missing many parts, including all of the alien dialogue, and these parts are in English until I can find a more complete source. I don’t plan on providing subtitles for the other gaps because I know those are supposed to be dubbed.

Yeah, Hindi’s a bit of a mess, but we’re working on it. I don’t consider a language “supported” unless it’s got full subtitles for the whole trilogy. Hindi subtitles are just a few lines to cover the Greedo/Jabba dialogue, when you’re watching with the dub. And even then, some lines are translated by someone who knows the language and some are Google Translate by-products. I’m working on fixing that last part right now.

So, as for showing up as the default track, I’m updating my MKV instructions so that none of the subs are on by default (change the “default track” flag for all subtitle tracks from “determine automatically” to “no”). As for not showing up at all, you won’t see them unless you watch the Greedo scene or the Jabba scenes–there’s no subtitles to see in any other scenes.

If you live in an area with a big Hindi-speaking population, you can help! First off, the dubs–if any broadcaster shows the trilogy with the Hindi dub, record it (audio only is fine). I can use this to fill the gaps in the Hindi audio and make them complete. Even friends with old VHS tapes could help here. Secondly, the subtitles–I’ve got someone who I think is onboard only for translating a few alien dialogue lines, but can’t commit to translating the whole deal. However, translating everything is a much, much easier job when a dub exists (i.e. for the most part, you just need to transcribe the dub, not make a new translation), so you may be able to rope someone into doing this, using our English template files and the incomplete dubs.

As far as I know there’s no limit for MKV. DVD and Blu-ray are each limited to 32 subtitle tracks, so for those formats, you’ll need to prioritize which ones you really want. I’ve given some suggestions for how to do this in the README file, but really it’s subjective based on what your target is (i.e. I prioritize based on number of speakers, but if you’re targeting Europe, you may want to skip Korean and include Finnish). Some tools might complain when you go over 32 due to this limit, but I haven’t seen anything indicating it’s a problem inherent in MKV or even M2TS.

No, what Frink’s saying is that if User A requests something from anyone reading the thread, and User B sends them a PM, User B posting in the thread that they sent a PM serves the function of preventing users C-Z from feeling they also need to send PM’s to User A. The post in the thread isn’t actually for User A to read, it’s for Users C-Z.

I’m afraid I use this a lot in my thread as getting multiple–and possibly different–responses to a single request could be very confusing for non-native English speakers. Probably my case differs a bit from the MySpleen case, but the basic premise is the same. It’s not an easy problem to solve.

Just finished Breaking Blue by Timothy Egan, and it was pretty good. It’s historical with a true crime/police procedural/character study flavor. Basically the story of the investigation of a very, very old murder case. There’s not much suspense (although there is the occasional surprise)–you know exactly who did it pretty much all along. It’s a question of digging through scant evidence, old/dying witnesses, and fighting the “blue wall” going back decades.

So it’s not your typical murder mystery or true crime story. It would appeal more to people who read books about historical events. I thought the main investigator was a great example of someone who was a good decent person, who did good work and did the right thing, and nevertheless came off as a pretty big pain in the ass. But that you pretty much have to be a big pain in the ass to break the blue wall.

Also, some software players don’t like DTS-MA tracks, so you may need to select an alternate Dolby Digital track.

Williarob said:

CatBus said:

No, synced is a timing thing. All GOUT-synced audio will work with any GOUT-synced video, so people’s lips match up with the words coming out of their mouths, etc. Silver Screen isn’t GOUT-synced, so you are a little more limited in your audio options (or you add dark frames for the missing video to make it GOUT-synced, either way).

…

Just to clarify: Star Wars Silver Screen Edition v1.0 is not GOUT sync’d but v1.6 is.

Glad to hear. Do you know if filling in the gaps was accomplished with GOUT frames or black frames, or some other method?

Faithwyn said:

The same applies to Catbus’s subtitles, which I believe I could
add up to around 30!

Edit: Wow! I’m late on this one, I’ll let Cat field these! LOL!!!

Aw, shucks 😉 Also, FWIW, the subtitles in Project Threepio are GOUT-synced, but the project includes utilities that allow people to resync them to other sources. Subtitles are easier to resync than audio, so it can be fully automated.

yaboykevin01 said:

I think I understand about the sync thing. It’s synced to GOUT, but not to, say, the 2004 DVD because of additional scenes like the Jabba scene, which would throw off the whole thing. Sound effects and takes of lines are different according to the track, but it would still line up with when they happen in the movie. Is that right?

No, it’s even more specific. Let’s say the GOUT has 170,000 frames (made up number alert). Then let’s say Silver screen has 169,880 frames. It’s the same movie, same version, same cut, same scenes, but one simply runs a bit longer than the other because of extra frames at reel changes. And the audio from one won’t work with video from the other. It only takes two frames for audio to be annoyingly out-of-sync, and they’d be off by a lot more than that. It would be like an 80’s Hong Kong dub, except where the sound effects don’t line up either.

yaboykevin01 said:

I’ve seen some comparisons of the stereo and mono before. Do you know exactly what the differences between the 6-channel and the stereo were?

They’re extremely similar. I know there’s a kind of spitting sound Luke makes in the part where he says Han’s going to get himself killed. It’s in the 6-channel but not the stereo.

Empire had three original mixes, the 35mm stereo, the 16mm mono, and the 70mm 6-channel. The 70mm version was a different video cut, and we don’t have a good preservation of that (there’s an 8mm digest which has bits of it, if you want your mind blown).

Do you know which versions (official home release or fan preservation) use each TESB mix? I’m inclined to believe the Grindhouse would use the 35mm stereo, insofar as it also uses the 35mm video. Assuming the 70mm 6-channel audio is lost along with the video, is there a good place to find the 16mm mono track?

It’s included with Despecialized, originally from Puggo. You are correct that Grindhouse uses 35mm stereo. Never say never on the 70mm cut, but yeah, nothing good-quality has surfaced. The 8mm digest is the best we really have, and it’s barely worth mentioning.

No, synced is a timing thing. All GOUT-synced audio will work with any GOUT-synced video, so people’s lips match up with the words coming out of their mouths, etc. Silver Screen isn’t GOUT-synced, so you are a little more limited in your audio options (or you add dark frames for the missing video to make it GOUT-synced, either way).

They don’t sync because projection prints are often missing a frame or two at the ends of reels. Also the GOUT may very well have included more frames than any theatrical print would have included. Either way, the audio for one won’t line up with the video from the other.

All of Harmy’s versions are GOUT-synced, so you’ve got the widest range of audio options. Film scan-based preservations can’t really be GOUT-synced unless you add the extra frames from another source (or blank frames) at the reel ends. There are lots and lots of GOUT-synced audio tracks, not just the tracks from the GOUT.