Dangit, it just occurred to me that I’d been slowly collecting the Slovak dubs off the DeEd’s, because I don’t have the whole set myself. I had ESB and ROTJ. And with SW 2.7… I still don’t 😦
Actually, the mono track is almost or entirely from a single source–an OTA TV broadcast. I think h_h modified the Fox fanfare at some point, but that’s it. The mono track hasn’t been changed at all in a very long time–I’d be very surprised if the 2.7 track wasn’t bit-identical to the 2.5 track. I tried an ill-advised attempt to merge with non-Dolby 35mm captures at some point, but it thankfully never made it into this project. My only guess is that maybe you’re hearing the lossy core of the lossless track this time, due to a DTS-MA decoder issue in the playback software. DTS-MA lossless mono is a bit of an odd fish–lots of software decoders have issues with it, even though it’s perfectly within the specs. So you might have a decoder that works fine for DTS-MA multichannel and dual-mono, etc, but fails on true mono.
PM sent.
Of course, now I’m trying to come up with an album cover mashup for this restoration. Right now, assuming the name FTLFT sticks, I’m gonna try something using KMFDM’s Tohuvabohu, seems to be an obvious choice to put some stylized lightsaber duel in the artwork section, FTLFT up top, and… uh… something else along the bottom. EDIT: or if that doesn’t work, I’ll borrow mumbles_’ avatar.
Have to say I missed this whole thread for a bit–very nice, and I have to say the name FTLFT is growing on me.
I just wanted to add that once you’re certain which NTSC GOUT frames you’ll be missing from each film, syncing up subtitles would be a piece of cake. Every new Star Wars preservation deserves a global release.
Also, it seems odd that your Jedi example is of the one section of Despecialized still using GOUT footage. Coincidence?
I thought that was your work.
No, this project is strictly OOT. You could use this project as a basis for SE subtitles, but you’d need to alter the timing and lines, etc.
And MPC plays the MKV fine without any codec packs…
There’s been some discussion of that already (not sure which page, but it’s in the thread) – it’s clear there’s some sort of vocalization before “just”, but it’s not clear (to me, at least) that it’s a word. I take it as a sort of semivocalized sigh, like a less distinct version of what Leia does in ROTJ before she says “It’s not like that. He’s my brother.” But it could also be an indistinct word. There’s a lot of stuff like that in these films, actually. But basically if I’m not 100% sure it’s even a word, I’m not subtitling it.
On another topic, the new Pango-based subtitle rendering script is a go, and I’m rendering now. Since the goal is to look very similar to what we had before, it’s not worth releasing the new version until we accumulate a few more changes. Nevertheless it constitutes a major architectural change, so the next release will be 10.0, tentatively codenamed “Pango’s not a man, it’s a system”
EDIT: Found the link:
http://originaltrilogy.com/topic/Project-Threepio-Star-Wars-OOT-subtitles/id/13794/page/3
Basically, we had an “It’s just Luke”, a “No, just Luke”, and a “Heh, just Luke”. I’m inclined to the last one, but since the sentence works without anything there, it’s not terribly clear, and there’s some uncertainty about it, I just don’t subtitle the “Heh” at all.
Wait, where’d this whole 3D thing come from?
Don’t worry if you missed it. It’ll be back again in 30 years.
Oh, on the topic of title-safe areas, I suppose I should mention this now. Vertically, this project’s subtitles extend to about the 85% mark by the standard I’m using horizontally, which would usually indicate I’m getting a little close to the top and bottom edges of the frame. However, since most displays would have black bars above and below the frame, there’s zero risk of overscan eating up the top and bottom frame edges, even on the worst CRT’s, which is a risk on the left and right. Heck, even 21:9 displays would have small black bars along the top and bottom. So I think I simply have more leeway in the vertical direction, plus I just really like the subtitles at that position, so I’m inclined to leave vertical placement alone, and only really attempt any enforcement of the title-safe area horizontally.
EDIT: Actually just checked SMPTE ST 2046-1, and 90% is the new title-safe for HD, even though most video editors still define it as 80%, which was the old SD standard. So I still try to compress things down to 80%, because frankly that does still look better, but I’m not at all concerned with the vertical placement now.
Final word: looks like native subs are in for the next release, for German, French, Italian, Japanese, and Spanish, for international preservations that may or may not exist yet. If anyone knows about other international releases of the OOT with translated onscreen text, let me know–but I think most of the others either subtitled or dubbed over the crawls and alien dialogue. Or they’re SE releases, which isn’t really usable in this context.
Matching international subtitles look like they’re out, though. The only Star Wars international reference I have is for Italian, and the font is so large that matching other subtitles can cover the whole width of the screen, even if I cheat a little and compress the long subtitles a bit*. You’d really have to break the lines up into smaller chunks, and I’m afraid it still wouldn’t look very good even with that. Matching international Jedi subtitles are doable, at least using the references I have, but then you get matching subs for only one film of the trilogy, and that seems a little off to me. So at least for Project Threepio, matching subtitles will be an English-only phenomenon. Not that it won’t include all the tools and sources necessary for people to try this on their own, if they want.
* With the new script, I’m trying to be more careful about enforcing the so-called title-safe area, which isn’t as strictly necessary anymore, but still helps with aesthetics. When subtitles exceed 80% of the screen’s width, I get nervous and the script throws warnings, and when they exceed 90%, there’s a problem and the script errors out. I cheat by condensing any subtitle that exceeds the 80% threshold by up to 7.5%, which usually isn’t very noticeable. However, using the matching Italian Star Wars font, even with a full 7.5% compression, it still ran over the 80% threshold quite a bit, and the 90% threshold in one spot. It never actually ran off the screen, though, at least on the one language I tested (Italian). But it just wouldn’t have looked very good, in my opinion.
Ah, I see. Yeah, I wouldn’t like that either. Okay, I’m now inclined to do native subs for German (and other languages in the same situation), unless I find complications. On the subject of SDH (Hard of Hearing) subtitles, if anyone wants to make SDH subtitles for other languages, I’d be happy to include them. You could use the regular subtitles as a starting point, and use the English SDH subtitles for an example for the SDH cues. It could match the German dub verbatim. Of course, this wouldn’t make as much sense for languages with multiple dubs (e.g. Japanese), but even then there’s often a favorite.
Regarding native subs, don’t the Krieg der Sterne projects typically include German subtitles (equivalent to this project’s “native” subtitles)? I honestly don’t know. It seems that certainly the subs should be available from either Project Threepio or Krieg der Sterne preservations, it’s just a matter of where the best match is.
On this whole ImageMagick+Pango tangent I keep going on about, it’s looking increasingly likely that I’m going to be (again) ripping large parts of this project out by the roots and redoing them before the next version (likely version 10.0 if it actually works), so never say never about anything.
I’ve thought about that. I’m inclined not to, but could probably be convinced–I’d certainly be happy to help the maintainers of the internationalized versions create such files, if they’re interested. I do make “full” versions of the English subs for that purpose, and none of the others need changing.
Reasons against: subtitle file proliferation (which leads to overwhelmed/confused people), and at least in the case of German matching subs, lack of a theatrical reference for Star Wars, which I also use for the matching style in Empire. I’d hate to make matching subtitles that don’t actually match once a reference is found. Also, the German version is typically watched with the German dub, and I make no promises that my subs match dubs.
Well, I’ve gotten further in this particular stab at rewriting the subtitle rendering routine than I ever have before. The main sticking point seems to be that there’s a Windows-specific bug in ImageMagick+Pango, which means even if everything else is perfect (and we’re not quite there yet either), we’ll need to maintain two different rendering engines, which produce slightly different results, which is relevant in the sense that the SRT timings are optimized for the Windows method (the new method can occasionally be one frame off), etc, etc.
And, well, the script is slow as molasses. But it’s slow across all platforms, so there’s that.
Two steps forward, one step back. The newest ImageMagick fixes the ImageMagick+Pango text rendering bug, so we now have cross-platform parity. Unfortunately the newest ImageMagick also completely changes a few critical functions so all the scripts that worked previously are now broken to some degree. But equally broken across all platforms… I guess this will be good practice for the Perl 6 apocalypse.
I’d say that’s a safe assumption (as long as you don’t specify which year).
We’re not all the same.
Though we are like-minded, and shockingly handsome to boot.
PM sent.
With SD to HD, the biggest difference to me was the reduction in compression artifacts (many of the initial HD sources were just recycled SD masters, so the difference in detail wasn’t as big as it could have been on a lot of titles, yet they were still distinctly better). From what I’ve seen of 4K (streaming demos), the difference in the demos seems almost entirely due to a better-quality 4K stream–possibly due to better compression, fewer artifacts, etc, but also quite likely due to higher bitrates too. Maybe there’s something perceptible in the resolution itself, but there’s so much apples-to-oranges in the comparisons I’ve seen (e.g. their 2K stream absolutely never has the same bitrate and encoding as their 4K stream) that I’m not sure I’ll ever know if I can see the difference on the resolution alone, under normal viewing circumstances.
all you need is CCCP.
We all live in an octopus’s garden.
This film uses the original vision, which makes it easy to add alterations like effects, dialogue, and characters:
Buy the Blu-ray to see the results.
For more details, see our apologist collective.
I only heard discussions about the “Nooo” but never actually heard the change itself. I was completely baffled by the outrage–I really couldn’t understand what was so objectionable about making a change to an already thoroughly ruined film. It’s like Lucas took a dump on everyone’s kitchen tables, and then 14 years later people were suddenly outraged, but only because he didn’t wash his hands afterward. I still don’t see what the big deal about the “Nooo” is. Vader could’ve yelled “Put the bunny back in the box” in an awful fake southern drawl and it’s not like the previous two hours of the Special Edition would’ve suddenly gotten any more watchable.
It wasn’t until I was working on the Thai dub that I heard the Thai version. It was really weird–they had a different actor doing the voice, it had a different tone like it was spliced in from a totally different audio source, and it just made no sense at all in context. So having heard the Thai version (where I removed that line, of course, so nobody else ever has to hear it), I think they captured the essence of the English version perfectly, and now I have even less need to hear the English version.
PM sent.
Transcribing the dub into Project Threepio-style subtitles would have to be up to someone else familiar with the language (similar to the current situation with Slovak, Hindi, Tamil, and Navajo, where we have dubs without subs). However, if the complete audio happened to find its way over here, despecialized GOUT-synced audio would have quite a lot of value in its own right, and that task could be done by someone unfamiliar with the language…
EDIT: And depending on your definition of minority language, I think Cantonese probably qualifies as our first, not that I wouldn’t want more.