CatBus

There’s courtesy to the customers and there’s courtesy to the creators. Courtesy to the creators means not needlessly flooding the market with lower-quality knockoffs, so much so that it’s hard to tell you’re not getting the real thing. We get quite enough of that already (mostly from Lucasfilm, but I digress). It’s not like customers can’t take the real thing and re-encode it for themselves.

* cough * are subtitles a consideration?

Pants matter. We judge you by your pants. As well we should.

RDPlissken said:

Star Wars 35mm: POUT

😛

Certainly better than POOT.

Wazzles said:

He could go with “Team Puggo’s Despecialized Grindhouse: The Ridiculousness Revisted”.

It was already ridiculous the first time it got visted.

Dek Rollins said:

I’m still not sure why people noticed the title being “wrong” while not realizing that it’s the same as Empire. If you’re inspecting the crawls that closely, wouldn’t you have at least thought about the idea that one other film might also have used that font?

Personally, I prefer the Empire font. I don’t think I’d want Jedi to have it though; all the crawls being slightly different like that gives each film more character.

I don’t need them to be the same, but I think consistency is a good goal to have–and in choosing a font for TFA, Abrams definitely made the best choice for consistency. Assuming the prequels can all DIAF, and that Star Wars doesn’t have an episode title in the crawl to begin with, we’re really only talking about two precendent-setting films: one with Univers and one with News Gothic. There is no minority or majority, it’s a 50/50 split. So you’re either flipping a coin, or you’re weighing the merits of Empire versus Jedi. Given that, I’d have picked the Empire font too. And, having gone with that, it’s now the font used in two of the four Star Wars films, a clear plurality.

Density said:

God I just hope that an official release comes soon.

That hope, and the rumors supporting it, will be twenty years old soon. They grow up so fast.

It looks like in at least one case, international theatrical subtitles made it onto a Laserdisc release (French ROTJ). I doubt this would have happened for Star Wars, but it’s possible it may have happened for one of the international laserdisc releases for which we don’t have a theatrical subtitle reference for ROTJ.

So if anyone happens to have a Spanish or Japanese laserdisc of ROTJ, I’d be interested to know what the alien subtitles look like. For Spanish, I imagine the subtitles will be approximately the same font/style as the English subtitles. For Japanese, I have no idea. If it turns out to be theatrical, I’d like a screencap of each subtitle. You could try Star Wars too, but I’m thinking 16mm prints are our best bet there.

The commentary was ripped from Laserdisc as a commentary-only track (no other audio), and can be merged into whichever audio mix you like. But that initial rip, how it came about, and if there were errors in the ripping process, or different versions for different LD pressings, I just don’t know. I think schorman did made the initial audio rip, but I’m not sure.

TV’s Frink said:

IM NOT SUPPOSED TO KNOW A POWER SOCKET FROM A COMPUTER TERMINAL

GETS ME EVERY TIME

http://originaltrilogy.com/topic/Star-Wars-without-Artoo-What-would-the-saga-be-like-if-there-was-no-Artoo/id/14932

I’ve transcribed the 16mm subtitles. Could anyone check if they look OK? Some of the subtitles are hard to read, and I don’t know French. Also, does anyone know if the tractor beam controls (around 1h23m) were subtitled in the French theatrical release?

Tu pars en voyage, Solo ?

Trop tard. Fallait payer en temps voulu.

Jabba a mis ta tête à prix, on te recherche
dans toute la galaxie pour te descendre.

Je vais toucher la prime !

Donne-le-moi et j’oublierai que je t’ai vu.

Jabba en a marre de toi.

Il n’aime pas que les passeurs…

…jettent la camelote par-dessus bord.

Jabba se contentera peut-être
de confisquer ton engin.

Je m’en charge !

Ça fait des années que j’attends ce moment.

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.

FrankT said:

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.