CatBus

Lord Haseo said:

The Prequels are more “offensive” than the Holiday Special but at least they’re somewhat watchable.

The Holiday Special improves with moderate drinking, which is a significant point in its favor. I don’t think anyone has yet been able to determine a suitable amount of alcohol required to watch a prequel, but it’s possible you’d need to jump straight to heroin. Or arsenic.

Trooperman37 said:

I would think:
-Star Wars (original cut)
-Empire Strikes Back (original cut)
-Return of the Jedi (original cut)
-Caravan of Courage
-Battle for Endor
-The Force Awakens

If you wanted to do an alternate-quality marathon, you could try:
-The Phantom Menace
-Attack of the Clones
-Revenge of the Sith
-The Holiday Special

Each set you’ll notice has its own flavor. Namely, one set is good and another is not so good, or rather, bad.

Your first set puts the best movies first, while your second set puts the best movie last. While I can appreciate the concept of a “worst of the worst” Star Wars marathon, you’ve got to put that sort of marathon in order of quality so that you can bail out at any point, knowing it would have only gotten worse if you’d kept watching.

So I’d recommend going straight chronological on that one too, so that you have the chance to hear Leia sing, but have the option to quit before the marathon hits rock bottom with ROTS.

PM sent.

If you want the best results, you’ll want to do a black drop shadow on almost-white text, and then blur the results a very tiny amount, and it’ll look just like the real thing. Good luck!

If you have Project Threepio, you’ve already got the fonts. In version 10, there’s a file in the resources folder called fonts.zip, and inside that there’s a file called P3POSWMatching.ttf and another called P3POROTJMatching.ttf. Some earlier versions of Project Threepio had these files too, maybe not in inside the zip file.

It’s not any existing digital font, although it’s certainly in the News Gothic/Franklin Gothic/Trade Gothic family, demibold or thereabouts. My own re-creation of the fonts is included with the project files, although it’s a reconstruction and not a perfect match.

Lots of HD broadcasts still have noise around the edges (it’s not noise, actually, it’s an alternate data channel stupidly embedded in the image), but it’s a tiny fraction of the screen. Broadcasts have certain defined values for title-safe and action-safe areas (how close you can put stuff to the edges of the screen). For HD it’s SMPTE ST 2046-1, and for SD it’s SMPTE RP 8. It’s not a matter of some crazy content creator deciding to put in unnecessary space around the edges, it’s a defined industry standard that some people simply follow more religiously than others. Not only that, but some broadcasters require that their HD content have extra-large SD-sized space on the edges. Heck, most content creation tools still use the SD-sized values. Why? Because some viewers are watching HD content on a 30-year-old CRT SDTV, and they get calls at the station when critical text is cut off. Add extra space and the phones stop ringing. There are still tons of old SD CRT’s actively in use in the world, and they are built to outlast us all. Skew the demographics to the 75+ crowd and you’ll see where there’s a perfect storm of old CRT’s, cable TV, low tech literacy, and irate phone calls.

Not all content follows these rules. Games for example like to make use of every available pixel. And that’s why most TV’s allow you to change overscan on a per-input basis. Turn it off for Blu-rays, games, and PC inputs, leave it on for the cable box. I hate that it’s on by default too, but I see why they do it. I’m just glad it’s so easy to turn off.

dahmage said:

So what new things are you going to tackle with all this new free time 😉

A serious answer is that most of my work requires some work from others before I can start. For Project Threepio, that means native speakers correcting translations or creating entirely new ones (there’s a few of these supposedly in the works, but I don’t have a timeframe).

However, I do have a few projects unrelated to Project Threepio, also waiting for victimsvolunteers. Are you fluent in Japanese? Does translating a couple hours of strange Japanese audio dialogue into English text sound like a fun time? Contact me. Or maybe you have an awesome radio voice, experience in radio or audio recording, and have an ability to talk for several hours without getting crazy dry mouth, or making any mistakes? (i.e. are you Sarah Vowell?) Ditto.

yhwx said:

What are all those scripts for?

Well, some are mostly internal use unless you want to edit or add subtitle files yourself. The most commonly-used ones would be to resync the subtitles against a non-GOUT-synced source (i.e. Puggo or Negative1), or to alter the existing subtitles to go with a preservation without burnt-in alien subs, resize them if you have a big projector screen and the default size is too big, etc. It’s all in the README.

EDIT: Although it’s not frequently used as such, this is designed as a “supply-side” project–the idea being that the people who make preservations use this project to ensure their preservations have global reach–and for everyone else, the “consumer-side”, it just works out of the box. So it tends to have lots of fiddly technical options, for the preservation-makers. I don’t really expect your average person to make much use of them.

Project files have been updated to version 10.0 (codename: “Pango’s not a man, it’s a system”), first post has been updated, please PM me for temporary download links until the files are available at some more permanent locations.

Rough summary of changes from 9.2 to 10.0:

• Created a new subtitle rendering script, using ImageMagick+Pango, which fixes a lot of the shortcomings and kludges inherent in the previous process. Also removed a load of scripts and utilities (the aforementioned kludges) that are no longer necessary. The results are designed to closely resemble subtitles created with the old process, so the end result is not much different.
• Fixed Hungarian typos and character-substitution issues (thanks to B2D2)
• Improved French translation for Star Wars (thanks to MalàStrana)
• On Windows, the subtitle rendering script requires ImageMagick 7, so I ported over all scripts to ImageMagick 7 and made that a requirement.
• The remaining Perl utility scripts have been migrated to Python, fixing some minor bugs in the process. Python scripts have been pre-compiled into Windows executables, to remove the Python runtime requirement on Windows. This change was not intended as an editorial comment on the relative merits of Perl vs Python – I’ve simply never really been that good with Perl, that’s all. Also, I found out Python was named after Monty Python, so that pretty much settled it as far as I was concerned.
• Native subtitles are now provided for German, French, Italian, Japanese, and Spanish, to accompany preservations of the international theatrical versions with translated title/crawl/alien subtitles, although some of these preservations may not yet exist.
• Reconstructed 35mm alien subtitles are now provided in French, for both Star Wars and Jedi (thanks to marvins and Yotsuba)
• I am no longer attempting to create a single unified “international” matching font, even though all of the fonts for Jedi seem to be derived from the same Lucasfilm-provided font. There are just too many minor differences. Star Wars appears to have used a subtitle font chosen at the whim of the international distributor, so the differences from country to country are obvious.
• BiDi subtitles (e.g. Arabic) used to exist in a dual environment, where subtitles were edited in one SRT format, but then those subtitles were converted to another “compat” SRT format using a somewhat dubious conversion script, and those converted SRT subtitles were the ones actually used for rendering and playback. This dual environment still exists, but graphical subtitles are now generated directly from the edited subtitles (hooray for Pango!), so they are free of potential conversion-related errors. The conversion utility has also been rewritten to be a bit more coherent, so that the “compat” SRT files are also less likely to have conversion-related errors than before, although that’s still a risk.
• Added a few more troubleshooting-type entries in the README file. For example, “What to do if the SRT files aren’t working properly” offers more advice than just “use the SUP files instead”, although that advice is still offered 😉

The new rendering script is a very big deal, albeit pretty much entirely behind the scenes. The old system was based on a utility called easySUP and a customized version of DirectVobSub/VSFilter, both of which are discontinued and had lots of problems, including really bad BiDi support, reported bugs with Indic scripts, limited formatting options, no OpenType font support, and no cross-platform support. Some of these things I was able to work around using scripts and hacks (I was quite proud of my customized VSFilter DLL, but I’m happy to see it go), some I couldn’t, and for some I didn’t know enough about Arabic or Indic scripts to even be sure how I could know if it was working correctly. On top of this, I’d never scripted this part at all before, so it was a manual process–I had to babysit every single subtitle file I rendered.

Now we’re using Pango, a modern text renderer without any known limitations that would hamper Project Threepio’s further language expansion – and it’s scripted, so I can render subtitles while I sleep (and wake, and sleep again… it’s a very slow process). That’s not to say there might not still be bugs, but it should now be much more possible to fix them properly, and to have a bit more confidence in the results.

Someone threw a Hentai party and I missed the whole thing? Typical.

towne32 said:

Needing to wait a week before being allowed to post. (not friendly to new users, but I would argue that they and we would be better off if they lurked and read other posts for a week anyway)

Of the suggestions, this is the only one that seems off to me. No images, sure, no links, great, but no posts? Not sure about this one.

Keep in mind that many of the people in my thread are the “good” sort of hit-and-run account. Someone who is totally down with our preservations, community goals, etc, but sees no need to join the forum per se, except that they need to ask one question about Project Threepio, so they make an account, post, get their answer, and we never hear from them again. Add to this the fact that many of the posters do not communicate in English very well (which may be the number one reason they weren’t already on the forum), and it wouldn’t take many roadblocks to make this process too hard for them. Heck, I even had to save one of my Russian counterparts from a temp-ban here once because his command of English just makes him sound like a bot hijacked his account.

Most of the suggestions here are pretty neutral in this scenario, though, so I’d say go for them. Waiting a week for any posting at all might really be too much if you really have no intent to join the forum long-term, and you’re pasting all of the forum messages into Google Translate and trying to make sense of the results.

Just download the project, they’re in the SUP format only. I’ll PM a link.

VLC may add this ability, I’m hoping. They have other issues I’m hoping they also address in 3.0, to have feature parity with MPC.

Yup, to clarify, only the SUP files included with Project Threepio support positioning, and they are the recommended format for that and other reasons. If you just got the SRT files, such as are included with some preservations, I’d recommend downloading the whole project. The SRT’s will do in a pinch, but it’s really not the best way to go.

I’ll PM a link if you haven’t found it yet.

EDIT: SUP files are supported by all software players I’ve tried, if you mux them into the video (instructions for this are included in the README). Without muxing–i.e. just specifying an external subtitle file, like you do with an SRT–I’d recommend MPC-HC.

Stinky-Dinkins said:

Then you’ll need to DL ImgBurn. Again, it tries to DL shit and horseanus onto your PC if you allow it.

I tried to tell the Enumclaw Police Department that’s where those photos came from, but they didn’t believe me.

PM sent.

psychic squidward said:

get the limited edition 2006 dvds or get the depecialized edition

To clarify, though – the original 1977 Star Wars has never been available through an official home video release. The 2006 DVDs have the 77 video, but with 93 audio, and any release with 77 audio has 81 video.

Which is yet another reason why Despecialized is your best option.

Density said:

CatBus said:

Of course it’s more important. The best official release is (arguably) the GOUT. In spite of twenty years of fruitless rumors to the contrary, this is unlikely to change within our lifetimes.

Unless you have terminal cancer and are going to be dead within the next year or two, I’d take that bet.

Since a two year deadline is just taking advantage of your optimism, let’s stretch that out to ten years to at least add some interest. If originaltrilogy.com's still around then (June 9th, 2026 – mark your calendars!), I promise not to say I told you so more than a couple times. And if I lose, well, I’ll be too happy to care. Unless they re-re-release the THX Laserdisc masters on 4K Blu-ray, or release a new Disney “slightly less Special Edition” where Han shoots first but the dionaga still blinks, which I’m hoping everyone agrees wouldn’t count as new OOT releases, the former not really being “new” and the latter not really being the OOT.

Regarding GOUT quality, that’s why I wrote arguably. While many would say it is the best just going off resolution, because color can be corrected, JSC is clearly another contender for the title because DVNR smearing can’t.

yotsuya said:

Well, it means that TFA is inferior for viewing in other languages compared to the first 6 films on DVD and bluray.

Agreed.

I personally like to turn of the subtitles or be able to change their placement.

That wasn’t an option theatrically, so there’s no reason to expect it on DVD or Blu-ray. It’s only useful in the sense that you can make your own edit of the film, and it’s a side-effect of one of the strategies they could employ to make better localized versions (but not at all a requirement for other, IMO better, strategies like seamless branching). Making life easier on fan editors isn’t really a scenario I expect studios to consider when they release a film. Watching TFA without alien subtitles is not really different than watching TPM without Jar-Jar. It might be nice, some might even prefer it, but it simply isn’t the same as the film that was shown in theatres anywhere in the world.

I’ve seen a few reasonably recent US releases (not Disney, though) with burnt-in English subtitles for any theatrically subtitled bits – I’m not sure how unusual that really is. I’d imagine releases in other language markets, even within Region A, might get different treatment, but I have no proof of this. It’s also possible a second set of soft subtitles in addition to the burnt-in subs is how these films are treated internationally. Certainly that’s how the SDH subtitles work in these instances.

Just thinking out loud – not providing justification – but burnt-in subtitles might make multi-format distribution easier. Forget the Blu-rays, consider streaming services. Each service has its own (often partially-baked) subtitling implementation, and it’s doubtful any of them would be able to resemble the theatrical appearance through soft-subs. So you give the streaming services burnt-in subs on your video, and now they’re good to go. Same for DVDs, which, believe it or not, are still as popular a format as Blu-rays. DVD subtitling sucks, and you simply have to use burnt-in subtitles if you want them to look even half decent. That’s not to say they couldn’t use two different digital masters – one with burnt-in subs and one without – but I’m saying that there’s a pretty clear need for the master with the burnt-in subs, and someone would have had to convince a PHB at Disney not to just go ahead and use that one for the Blu-rays too.

Also, doing it “right” (burnt-in, but on a per-language branch, handling localized crawls as well) would have involved a lot of seamless branching. IIRC Disney pushed seamless branching to its limits not as a localization tool, but as a copy protection scheme, and they ended up with lots of upset customers and returned discs. Maybe they talked about localization, heard the words “seamless branching”, and bailed.

Of course it’s more important. The best official release is (arguably) the GOUT. In spite of twenty years of fruitless rumors to the contrary, this is unlikely to change within our lifetimes.

Despecialized preserves the original films better than the GOUT did, therefore it’s more important than the GOUT. Despecialized is also not a figment of our imagination, therefore it’s more important than the Disney release rumor of the week.

slumberdore said:

CatBus said:

The yell was in the 70mm, 16mm, and 8mm mixes, but wasn’t on the 35mm mix or any home video mix until the SE.

I just checked the 70mm in-theater recording and the Yoda yell is not there.

Whoah. So that’s a 16mm mix difference that’s NOT also on 70mm. I was assuming 16mm differences were a subset of 70mm, but it appears there’s some Venn diagram complexity here. It also means the yell wouldn’t have been heard in a normal theatrical setting at all, but may have been heard in hospital/military venues where 16mms were shown, at home, or possibly in some odd broadcaster version.

Darth Lucas said:

towne32 said:

The 70mm prints were sent out earlier and they did some last minute newer/better shots of the ships present at the end in time for the 35mm but not the 70mm, as I understand it. The 16mm prints also lack them.

Hmm. I knew about that, but it just seemed like he was referring to more than just that one bit. Well I guess we’ll find out if we ever come across a 70mm print with some more different effects.

The 8mm digest print has some alternate visuals (and audio), matching what people have reported about the 70mm prints, so it’s probably a reduction of that version. It’s on the Spleen: Puggo Edition.

cinemacapman said:

It would also (to me at least) make sense that Yoda makes some sort of natural verbal reaction to Luke aiming the blaster at him. As far as a possible difference between the 35mm and 70mm prints…I can’t say for certain what I heard in each because I saw TESB several times in both print formats.

Just lump it in with the grappling hook false memory, you’re in good company. Be happy you saw the 70mm prints so many times, they still present us with a preservation challenge!

towne32 said:

That was apparently present in the 70mm mix (and therefore the 16mm). Since you were expecting it, maybe it was present in a home video release at some point in time, but not the theatrical 35mm audio.

The yell was in the 70mm, 16mm, and 8mm mixes, but wasn’t on the 35mm mix or any home video mix until the SE. It’s possible a broadcaster could have gotten a source with it before then, though.