CatBus

Leonardo, I know this is an oddly-phrased question, but here you go. In the event I decide to make use of your resources (images, custom font) for the European theatrical print subtitles, would it be okay if I make and distribute modified versions, assuming I give you credit in my project thread? I want to ask now, even though I’m not that interested in diving in just yet, so that if I don’t get around to it for a couple years, I’ve still got your permission to proceed.

Yes, I’ve thought about it, but currently it’s pushed way to the back of my head and it’s going to stay there for a while 😉

I’m not really done with the English subs – I’m just at a decent point for pausing and sharing what I’ve got so far. I have a fantastic reference for Jedi, so I’m happy there, but I’m not entirely happy with my reference for Star Wars. What this means is that as far as matching fonts go, I feel comfortable improving Jedi indefinitely, but Star Wars is likely to reach a point where the shortcomings in the references make it hard for me to be sure I’m actually making it any better.

I’ve got to start with the reference and work from there. I just briefly looked over at that thread, and it looked pretty interesting, but… the images were useful to some degree, but not actually great, they didn’t include every subtitled line AFAICT, and it wasn’t 100% clear if all the European theatrical releases used this font, or just one, or some. Without something else, it would be a lot more work, for a lot worse results, and possibly just plain wrong for some oddball release that used a different font than the others. Not saying I won’t give it a try at some point, but at the moment I’m happy to sit back and relax a bit 😉

EDIT: Just found the slideshow with all the lines. One of them got cut off a bit at the edges but it doesn’t look bad. Also, lack of an equivalent Jedi reference kinda bugs me about this, and I only really have text/line-break references in Italian.

I was shocked at how much I enjoyed Rat Race. I thought it was a very respectable homage to movies like Cannonball Run, etc, if such films can be considered respectable.

It’s making its way onto all the standard locations for Project Threepio right now, but it can sometimes take a few days to get to some of them (I rely on volunteers with better network connections than me). I’ll send you a PM.

Okay, the fonts are now available as part of the just-released Project Threepio v9.1. There will always be room for improvement, and I’ll probably make some small adjustments over time. Nothing is ever final.

One judgment call I made about Star Wars was that our most widely-available subtitle reference, -1’s Silver Screen Edition, has some pretty noticeable light bleed, adding to the glow of the subtitles, and slightly increasing how thick they appear. I opted to reconstruct a subtitle reference that attempts to create the actual edges of the characters without that glow, and match that reference with the font – so with any undertaking like that, there’s room for error. So while the Star Wars font is designed to work at Normal weight, people trying to match the Silver Screen Edition may have better luck with Bold weight.

Project files have been updated to version 9.1 (codename: “Overengineering Strikes Back”), first post has been updated, please PM me for temporary download links until the files are available at some more permanent locations.

• The change that may take the most time to adjust to is that I switched all the language codes from ISO 639-1 (two letters) to ISO 639-3 (three letters). Why? I’d initially thought there would be no way on Earth I’d ever add support for a language outside the 180-odd language codes covered by ISO 639-1, but it seems I may have been wrong. This change lays the groundwork for future language support, but there’s nothing in this release that requires it. Yet 😉
• Added titles-only support for the Navajo dub of Star Wars, and included a modified version of MuxMan that allows you to create DVDs using the correct language code for Navajo. However, I am not adding Navajo to my list of supported languages, since there are still no complete Navajo subtitles for any of the films
• Similarly, added titles-only support for the currently incomplete Hindi dubs (thanks to Anuj)
• Improved European Portuguese translations (thanks to stormpack)
• Improved Turkish translation for Jedi (thanks to aserdaryakut)
• Improved Castilian translations (thanks to Hostmaster and carlosmon)
• Improved Greek translation for Star Wars (thanks to sf999)
• Fixed typo in Japanese translation for Star Wars (thanks to DevilWing)
• “Matching” subtitles have been reworked to much more closely resemble theatrical alien subtitles. Example screenshots in the first post have been updated.
• As part of the matching subtitle project, included newly-created fonts that, at the right size and weight, closely resemble the theatrical alien subtitles (on English-language prints, at least)
• Added new utilities, subtitles and procedures to better support preservations without burnt-in alien subtitles
• Added new utilities and procedures to allow users to scale graphical subtitles (33%-110%) to a size more appropriate for their display, while maintaining all of the formatting and positioning niceties (i.e. for large projection screens – thanks to Harmy for the inspiration and the large-screen testing) An example screenshot has been added to the first post.
• Project Threepio is now 1080p-native, with 720p subtitles available as downscales, rather than the reverse. A side-effect of this change is that the 1080p files are a lot smaller, and the whole project archive is noticeably smaller (although it’s still quite large), as my previous upscaling script had a bug that needlessly inflated the file sizes.

Project Threepio’s matching subtitles are now designed to match theatrical prints rather than specific preservations. Because of this, they do not match Star Wars Despecialized 2.5 as well as they used to, but future Despecialized releases, including towne32’s color adjusted Despecialized Edition, will match better because they’ll be more theatrically accurate.

Up until now, supporting preservations without burnt-in subtitles has really worked well only for non-English subtitles. You just shifted the subtitles back down to the bottom of the frame, and you were done. But because English subtitles are missing the alien text, assuming they’ll be burnt-in, the past solution was to re-render new English subtitles from an alternate SRT file. However, that wasn’t really good enough – the alien subtitles rendered in this fashion wouldn’t look anywhere near as nice as the burnt-in subtitles, as they wouldn’t be the right font, and so on. Even if you used the new improved matching subtitles, it wouldn’t be good enough.

So in this version, I’ve added a new kind of graphical-only subtitle: “alien”, which subtitle only the alien dialogue, and look almost exactly like the theatrical alien subtitles (they’re graphical-only because they’re based on 35mm scans, not rendered from a font). In addition to these graphical subs, there’s a new script called submerge, which merges native (or matching) subtitles with alien subtitles to produce subtitles that cover every line of dialogue, while retaining the closest possible theatrical fidelity for the sections with subtitled alien dialogue.

The results are really, really good. A sub-free preservation could use the “alien” subtitles as the default track, then use merged subtitles for people who want to watch with English subtitles – and while the results can’t ever be quite as perfect as with burnt-in subtitles, they’d be awfully close. Theoretically, this same method could be used to create theatrically accurate alien subtitles in other languages, using scans of international prints. You could even use the new Project Threepio Matching fonts to produce credible imitations of the threatrical subtitles in some other languages.

Well, Harmy could easily make the 3.0 MKV 1080p, but the AVCHD 720p. In fact, that’d make a lot of sense, since the AVCHD encode is so bitrate-limited that 720p might even look nicer. So 3.0 being 1080p might just mean business as usual for people who want 720p-on-DVD. I wouldn’t panic until it happens. And if it happens, good-quality re-encodes will certainly appear (as will bad ones, as usual).

EDIT: Damn I type slow.

Oh absolutely. I swear I’m within a week of everything being done. For editing, I have been using FontForge. The original base font was Franklin Gothic Demi Cond.

towne32 said:

Catbus: So… I should go back to the BD+new subs?

That’s my opinion, yeah. Still recolor them to be not as bright.

Actually now I’ve recently seen evidence that, regarding subtitles, the Technicolor prints more or less exactly match SSE. So I think that the thicker subtitles are more accurate than the ones in 2.5. The ones I provided earlier are a little rough around the edges, and I’ll be working on better versions, but for now I think they’re the best we’ve got.

Actually, no. The way I’m handling matching subs from this point forward is I’m only matching theatrical prints–so if a preservation deviates far enough from the theatrical appearance, then the matching subs won’t quite match. In this case, the screenshot was of a reconstruction that did not match the theatrical prints as well as a font I’d already done earlier. But that font will be included.

Nevermind, the above image was a reconstruction. This whole Technicolor/Eastman distinction appears to be nonexistent. Technicolor matches Eastman, one font will do, all is well in the world. But I did a lovely job reconstructing the reconstruction, don’t you think?

Already fixed problems in the above with v, r, o, and d, but you get the drift.

Okay, thanks to Harmy, I have a great sample image of the Technicolor subs, so now I’ve got a third font to match that, example below:

Top is Project Threepio font-generated, bottom is theatrical. So that’s three fonts now: Jedi, Star Wars Default (meaning Eastman, et al), and Star Wars Technicolor. Just doing some QA tests to make sure there’s no obvious mistakes.

Hiss!

TV’s Frink said:

CatBus said:

TV’s Frink said:

What the heck is film zero?

Star Wars. It doesn’t have an episode number. I guess (null) would have been better.

I get your point, and the point you’ll probably make in response to what I’m about to say, but it’s a little weird to not assign a number to one movie in a list full of movies with numbers.

Naw, you won’t see my next point coming. It’s like a panther. Rrrowwr.

When you assign an episode number to Star Wars, you assign it a chronology with respect to the other films. When Empire came out as Episode V, it was obvious to much of the Star Wars loving world that the previous movie had been Episode I, and that there were many exciting adventures that had passed in the intervening time between the films, some of which were alluded to in Empire (Ord Mantell). The next year, Star Wars was assigned the episode number IV, which dashed the hopes of those missing episodes ever coming into being.

So while I’d personally call Star Wars Episode I, because that’s what it really was until 1981, that would confuse matters even more, because it conflicts with the episode number of a later movie that would be horrible to confuse with or even associate with Star Wars. So if you assign it IV, you lose some of the magic and wonder of the pre-1981 film, if you assign it I, you confuse young people who think there’s a Star Wars film that already has that number. So the solution is not to assign it a number at all, because it doesn’t have one.

The essential problem with including it in a list of movies with numbers is that it simply doesn’t have a number, not that you must give it a number to make it fit.

Well, you’re still sticking with (adjusted) Technicolor timing so I’d say don’t mix-and-match.

Using the same font for Technicolor and Eastman isn’t going to do anyone any favors, it’ll either look really off for one or kinda off for both, so it looks like we’re making a new font.

I’ve gone [0] days without needing to modify the fonts.

I’ve pretty much come to the conclusion that the subs on Tech prints were different than typical prints, probably due to the fact that typical prints are one or two generations down the duplication chain from Technicolor, and each step on the way makes the letters look thicker.

So, in my opinion, you should first decide, am I aiming for Technicolor or Eastman? If Technicolor, use the subs Harmy already made for 2.5. If Eastman, use the subs I provided. I won’t be making any adjustments to those subs, aside from color, any time soon.

Well, it appears due to blind luck, the same font that works for the SSE when bolded works reasonably well for Mike’s Technicolor scan at a normal weight. So maybe this will work out after all.

It’s definitely not the same print, however this was handled. Mike may have provided -1 with a non-Technicolor source. But also this is weird because although -1’s print was Spanish, the particular section had been spliced out and replaced with the scene from an English language print. I know because I synced the Spanish soundtrack and this part was English. So whatever -1 had was good enough to use audio-wise, and must have had pretty bad visual damage if he sought other sources – the Spanish had nothing to do with it.

I can’t see how it would be de-warping, since the subtitles are the only thing distorted in this manner, nothing else.

Well, I know the -1 scan has some light leakage, which couldn’t really do a lot more than blur the edges but might effectively give you an extra pixel all around. And SSE is based on a dupe print, which is two generations of duplication after Verta’s print. So I’m thinking it’s the duplication, which means the thickness of the subtitles depends on when and where you saw it… ugh. Like the soundtrack! 😉

Yes (Blu-ray) – and while the image registration may not have been perfect (it’s hard and I’m new to it), it certainly wasn’t bad enough to cause that sort of distortion. In fact, I don’t think any sort of image registration problem could result in subtitles that are significantly thicker but have more or less the same placement and take up more or less the same amount of room.

But yes, all of my subtitle scans were stretched out horizontally to match the Blu-ray proportions.

There’s also the issue that apparently the subtitles in Mike Verta’s scan look totally different than the subtitles in -1’s Silver Screen Edition, and I’m not entirely sure why at the moment. Verta’s looks like the subtitles in SW DeEd v2.5, -1’s look more like the subtitles in ROTJ DeEd v2.5, in that they’re thicker/chunkier. I’ve been basing my Star Wars fonts on -1’s scans.

That looks TOTALLY different than the Silver Screen Edition! SSE has some light bleed issues, sure, but I really don’t feel like that could account for all of it. Weeeird.

EDIT: If we’re going off Verta’s scan, I think the 2.5 subs are worth keeping. I think the issue of how these scans look so different (in the chunkiness/thickness of the subtitles) needs to be resolved before we start replacing the subtitles. The SEE scan more closely resembles the 35mm scan used for Jedi. Maybe the subtitles get thicker which each duplication step?