CatBus

For the OT, ask yourself this question: is what you’re looking for exactly what people saw in the theaters, projection prints with dirt/scratches/burn marks included, or are you looking for what a respectful Blu-ray release would have looked like, going back to original negatives and getting a high-res scan that actually shows a little more detail than would have been visible in the theatre, but still using all-original elements.

If it’s the latter, I’d recommend Harmy’s Despecialized for all three. SW 2.7 is the one I’d recommend, although it’s still far from perfect. I can see why people would prefer Silver Screen even if they’re looking for the respectful Blu-ray treatment, so it’s worth a look, but it’s not for me. For ROTJ, 2.5 is easily the best presentation IMO. ESB 2.0 is nearly as good as ROTJ 2.5, but not quite. A few warts that will hopefully be fixed soon in ESB 2.5. Yes, they technically include SE elements, but at this point it’s nearly impossible to find them unless you’re a much, much pickier fan than me.

There are lots of original audio options. Star Wars in 1977 had three different soundtracks (6-channel, stereo, and mono), which had different content (although the 6-channel and stereo were very, very similar). All of them are “original” (and I’m ignoring the fold-down options because that confuses matters even more). Lots of people here like mono best, because it’s what most theatres were equipped to play in 77. I prefer the 6-channel reconstruction because, again, it’s what a respectful Blu-ray release would have sounded like. 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). The 6-channel option you get with Despecialized is essentially just a tasteful upmix of the original stereo mix. Jedi only had stereo and 6-channel, and again our 6-channel option is essentially a tasteful upmix or the original stereo, since we don’t have any references for the 6-channel (but we think it’s content-identical).

The 2006 bonus DVD were the theatrical video, as far as anyone’s able to say with certainty (there’s a few dubious quibbles). The main gripe is that they just suck, quality-wise. Also the audio isn’t theatrical at all, which is most relevant for Star Wars and Empire, since there are content differences between the mixes they used and the theatrical mixes (they used the 93 remixes for all three films).

You’re not supposed to play the RARs directly, you’re supposed to extract the media files inside the RARs (typically MKV files). A RAR is like a ZIP file, it’s just a container for other files. I’m guessing that because the Star Wars RAR filename includes the MKV extension, VLC can figure out more about the contents of Star Wars RAR than it can with Empire, and I guess that means it can play the RARs directly. But you don’t need to do it that way.

Vietnamese subtitles were added relatively recently, so older versions of Despecialized don’t have them (such as Empire). You can download the current version of Project Threepio (also on TehParadox, see first post) and add them yourself.

I definitely would want some checking done with the Vietnamese subs. These are random SE fansubs I found on the Internet, that I modified to match Harmy’s versions. They could have major problems (from the original or my conversion), for which I apologize. If you have corrected text or even complete corrected SRT files, you can PM me.

Swift S. Lawliet said:

clutchins said:

Swift S. Lawliet said:

I have some other suggestions:

1. I think the English mono tracks for Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back should be LPCM 1.0 instead of DTS-HD Master Audio since there is little difference in quality and/or size and LPCM has increased compatibility compared to DTS-HD Master Audio.

2. I also think that the English 35mm Stereo mixes should be Dolby TrueHD instead of DTS-HD Master Audio so that there can be surround matrixing similar to the LaserDisc audio.
   Dolby TrueHD has this Dolby Pro Logic capability but for DTS-HD Master Audio, I’m not sure.
   There was apparently something called DTS Stereo which was used on some LaserDiscs and theatrical releases but I’m not sure if it can be used in the modernized DTS and DTS-HD codecs.
   I also think that the alternative English LaserDisc mixes should also be in Dolby TrueHD, if it is still allowed in the 48MBps bitrate limit of Blu-ray.

3. What do you think of the isolated score being in LPCM 2.0? Already posted about it but barely anyone replied to it.

I second this

Wait. I also forgot:

4. I think the 5.1 mixes should be in 6.1 or 7.1 instead (most likely 6.1)
   I actually talked to hairy_hen about this, he said he probably couldn’t perfectly test this as he only has a 5.1 system and is not entirely sure on how good it would sound.

I’m not sure of the value of this. If the whole point of the 5.1 mix is to approximate the theatrical 6-channel mix, wouldn’t adding extra channels move it further from that goal? It’s already a little bit off because 5.1 doesn’t quite equal 4.2–but there’s no home video 4.2 standard, so 5.1 is about as close as you can get. I suppose you could do 6.1 and have the two rear channels duplicate the center rear (effectively 4.1), but that seems a lot of effort (and duplicated audio data) for a dubious return, and you could accomplish more-or-less the same with a phantom center in 5.1 if that was your goal. It’d upmix to sound exactly like that on 6.1 systems anyway.

Now if the point was to make an entirely new and spiffy 6.1 or 7.1 mix, without any attempt to be authentic to the original, maybe that’d be fine.

cybrsage said:

yoda-sama said:

My God… it is the coming of the Frinkpocalypse…

I heard he was tapped to be Trump’s Internet Czar…

That’s not what Trump meant by “I’d tap that!”

That’s OK. That applies to any dub, any language, any time.

For my purposes (meaning: to sync to the GOUT), all I need is audio in the best possible quality. No video required, no sync of any sort required, no commercials edited out, etc. I’m willing to wait for the whole trilogy, though, it’s not like I don’t have plenty else to do in the meantime.

If, however, there are subtitles to cover things like the crawl or alien dialogue that they opted not to dub over, then I’d need that text. Screenshots or transcriptions are fine, video isn’t required.

The only copy I know of is on the newsgroups (still? i dunno), and don’t ask me for any help regarding newsgroups

simps said:

So, those “theatrical versions” were only made for those GOUT DVDs from 2006? They weren’t the “original” dubs that were released to theaters?

No, from what I can remember, they are at least supposed to be the same as the original theatrical dubs. My guess is that if they took the original dub and laid it over revised audio, it would be pretty easy to check. Just check the Star Wars cell block shoot-out scene for the sound of shattering glass. If that sound effect isn’t there, that is probably the original dub straight through. If shattering glass is there, then they took the original dub and laid it over revised audio.

I’m excluding SE dubs from this discussion because I know nothing about them.

The Japanese GOUT discs have two dubs apiece for SW and ESB, and one for ROTJ. All of these are preserved, I believe, on a.b.starwars. That would be the theatrical and home video (VHS/Laserdisc) dubs for SW and ESB, and the home video dub for ROTJ, in two-channel Dolby Digital form. The home video versions of these are available in the Despecialized Editions. I typically don’t keep more than one dub around per language, so I no longer have the theatrical dubs.

I don’t know how many iterations of the home video dub there are–I don’t think the actual dub was ever done more than once, but there were other audio revisions for SW in 85 & 93, and ESB and ROTJ in 93, at least in the English releases. That means if you include the same dub overlaid on different soundtrack as a different dub, you get potentially four SW dubs, three ESB dubs, and two ROTJ dubs, not including SE dubs.

FWIW, the English 93 audio revisions for ESB and ROTJ had no significant content changes other than a missing sound effect in ESB, so it may not be worth collecting this particular variant.

I don’t know anything about a TV dub that’s different in any way from the home video dub. I guess it’s possible there are variations where the broadcaster dubbed over the crawl, etc.

By the way, I have trouble following all the different interconnected projects, but what’s the color correction strategy for Poita/DeEdvWhatever? Is it DrDre utilities, color references, old skool, winging it, or some combination of the above? Does Harmy correct what he gets from Poita, or does he consider what he gets from Poita to be already a color reference? That sort of thing.

Once we have a dub, our next job is to track down someone with a good grasp of Tagalog to convert them to subtitles, then we can get dubs and subtitles at once.

Regarding software, for rendering the graphical ones, I’ve gone through many pieces of software and decided I’m just too particular and wrote my own. It’s a Python script included in the project files (which in turn relies on ImageMagick, Pango, and some font files). It’s pretty customized to this project’s needs and I don’t know how well it would work for other projects.

Regarding Tagalog, just capture what you can and wait for the missing parts to get filled in later. I can wait a long time.

This is a general appeal for help. I’m working on Turkish dubs for the trilogy, and the only major problem is that the (1997SE?) sources I’m using have been re-edited to match the 2011SE. This isn’t a big deal except for the Emperor scene in ESB, which is significantly different between the 1997SE and the 2011SE. Of the three sources I’ve found, two just use English audio for that scene, and one uses a not-very-seamlessly edited mix of Turkish and English, and it’s in lower quality than the others too.

So, if anyone knows where I can find an unedited and complete version of the Emperor scene in Turkish, that would be really helpful. Just that scene, I’ve got everything else covered. I’m pretty crap at searching some of the darker recesses of the Internet, but also I’d be happy with YouTube at this point.

If you get another shot at the Tagalog dub, let me know – I’m still interested. FWIW I’m not interested in working with prequel of sequel dubs, just the OT. This project is about making these specific lost films available to a worldwide audience – if it’s possible to buy, rent, or stream a film, then I believe you should just buy, rent, or stream it.

PM sent.

Regarding other dubs, the official Hong Kong DVDs and Blu-rays definitely don’t have a Cantonese dub (we have them; they don’t), I think Blu-ray.com just has some bad data on the Blu. There may very well be a Cantonese dub for television (lots of languages have these, not just Tagalog), and knowing how common bootlegs are over there, there may be a very official-looking DVD with the Cantonese dub that you can buy in Hong Kong, just not the kind you can buy in regular stores in the US. If you find that or the Tagalog dub, I’d love to hear them. I don’t care much if they’re well-done, they’re for accessibility–some of our other dubs are… interesting… too. If there’s one person out there who doesn’t know English very well, but knows Tagalog, that’s enough reason to have it.

My version is included in Project Threepio.

It’s probably better to do a targeted request to someone who knows how to do this. Making real theatrical-quality international crawls is very difficult, and only three projects that I know about have done it: our German, French, and Italian teams. It’s not something a lot of people know how to do, or at least not well.

Part of the difficulty you might run into is that the German, Italian, and French teams are using the actual international crawls as their guide, so they know exactly where to break lines, how much spacing between lines, appearance of letters, etc. Our Turkish translation is just words–we’d need to do layout/appearance issues by hand and by guesswork. Even then, we don’t know if it would exactly match the appearance of what the original crawls would have looked like–if they were even translated originally–many languages did not translate the crawl and simply subtitled it.

It’s called “Project Threepio”, just search for it. Feel free to mail me corrections if you have any.

Here is the text from the subtitle file. If you’re interested in how it renders out graphically, Project Threepio is on MySpleen. Keep in mind the is subtitles that accompany the existing English crawl, not a Turkish crawl.

Uzun zaman önce
çok, çok uzak bir galakside…

YILDIZ
SAVAŞLARI

İç savaş dönemi.

Asiler gizli üslerinden
yaptıkları saldırıyla…

…kötüler İmparatorluğuna karşı
ilk zaferlerini kazandılar.

Çarpışmalar esnasında
İttifakın casusları…

…İmparatorluğun korkunç silahı…

…bir gezegeni yok edecek güçteki
zırhlı uzay istasyonu…

…ÖLÜM YILDIZI’nın planlarını
çalmayı başardılar.

İmparatorluk casusları tarafından
takip edilen…

…Prenses Leia uzay gemisiyle
kendi gezegenine doğru kaçmaktadır.

Prenses bu planlar sayesinde
halkını kurtarabilir…

…ve galaksiyi özgürlüğüne
kavuşturabilir…

Also, it turns out some of those alternate ESB audio sources also have better dynamic range than the one I’m using right now, so thanks, this will work out great.

For the subtitles, I’ll just use our existing Turkish subtitles, which are as you described. I think I’ll either use a voiceover-free Empire soundtrack, or erase the voiceover from the one I have now–the quality sounds incongruous to me, and seems like a broadcaster-added overdub.

Don’t worry, I’m a professional. I never mess up 😉

Okay, I now have the Turkish Special Edition audio, and will post results in the international audio thread once I’ve got something worth listening to. One thing is weird–Empire voices over the crawl but neither of the other films do, so the next Project Threepio will contain Turkish “titles” subs for SW and Jedi. Also, Empire is way more dynamically compressed than the others, so I wonder if the three films were done by different companies, derived from different sources, and/or if the crawl section of the Empire dub was tacked on by a broadcaster or something. Any info on this is helpful. Heck, if the crawl voiceover is terrible, I can always remove it and replace it with subtitles!

You know, I love straying offtopic as much as the next guy, but the point of this is that my kid will barely come out from under his covers (I hope he doesn’t hear about this or it’s gonna be a long four years), and it’s really distressing as a parent to see your kid in this state, and I’d really rather not check back on this thread for potentially useful updates just to see more joking around about it. Please keep it over in the Offtopic forum, for my sake.

Again, it will take time, it is not a simple conversion. I may contact you if I have trouble downloading. Turkish is not my strong suit, and my Internet connection is dreadful.

Also, my entire focus right now is trying to help my nine-year-old boy process and deal with recent world events. Everything else waits.

Yes we can edit them to match the original versions, but it takes time.

Please remove any links to copyrighted materials from your post, it’s against forum rules.

I’ll let you know if I run into any troubles. In the meantime, we have Turkish subtitles.