CatBus

PM sent.

Thanks! With that and the other change you helped out with, we’ll have lots of big changes, but hardly any that are related to, you know, languages and stuff. I’m pretty sure the next release will be codenamed “Overengineering Strikes Back”

In an attempt to avoid cross-posting, here’s an update on my subtitle font, which had a recent breakthrough of sorts–I figured out how to round the corners on the letters:

http://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/910886

I finally solved the “rounded corners” problem with the custom matching subtitle font. Click the image below for a higher-res version:

Top is the custom font, bottom is from 35mm elements (DeEd 2.5). FWIW, the blur on the font matches a little better in practice–I scaled the top image down from 1080p to 720p in Photoshop, and I think it applied a sharpening filter.

Since, at least for my purposes, people will not be seeing subtitles containing the exact same text placed right next to each other, nor will they really even be seeing the alien subtitle text in this font at all, I think this is more than good enough. You really don’t see the transition between the theatrical subtitles and the font-generated ones at all anymore, even if you’re trying pretty hard, so fans of the matching fonts will be in for a nice surprise in 9.1, which is still a while away yet, due to other major changes.

No sooner do I post that than I start messing with characters in the Private Use Area of my dev font. Basically if a character is consistently different, as in the periods in Jedi being flatter than the periods in Star Wars, I can see some value in making a custom alternate form of the character. And I guess you could also make them for the damaged characters like I mentioned earlier… but they’d only really have value for re-creating the theatrical subtitles, which we already have in high-quality graphical form, so IMO using PUA characters is a convoluted way of getting to the same result. The flatter periods have value in creating new text using the subtitle font, damaged forms not so much.

Also, FWIW, after reviewing it for a bit, it looks to me like the character spacing in Jedi is very regular, and easily reproduced fairly closely with a font. Star Wars looks to be a lot more haphazard, and may always be a manual job to match convincingly. For my purposes, I’ll just match Jedi and that’s good enough for me.

Oh absolutely there’s little adjustments everywhere in any PC font. I hope to be able to handle everything except rounded corners and the general boxiness of letters like “o” in my custom font (still in active development, getting badly broken daily). But there’s limits. I mean, you can’t really reproduce damage on individual letters (e.g. the “u” in “he may only take your ship”) without reserving special characters for various damaged forms. But we can always do better that what’s just available in general-purpose fonts.

Hmm. I’m not so sure, after checking out some of the letters that don’t appear in this subtitle (N is the big one–it’s actually kinda crappy in the theatrical font, and I can see why nobody wanted to reproduce it digitally), and y and v both have the “too deep valley” problem that all of the close fonts I’ve found share. Nevertheless, it’s still handy for piecing together a Frankenfont.

Harmy said:

Perhaps that is because Star Wars preservations are the only media you watch where you have any strong preconceptions about what the correct look is.

And/or they’re the only media even remotely close to the theatrical colors 😉

Nice looking results–I forget how Trade Gothic deals with J, N, g, and ?. FWIW, ROTJ style seems to be pretty much the same as SW style, but I got thrown off by Despecialized’s narrower take on the font. Compared to ROTJ, SW seems to have more blur, a glow effect from light bleed around the subtitle, the ellipsis is different (probably not font so much as how they laid out the periods), and the apostrophe seems to be placed slightly higher. Other than that, it’s pretty dead-on.

I’ve found your typical flatbed works great. Your cheaper feed-through type scanners may not like it very much 😉

astromags said:

I agree with what you’re saying about the “colorized look” These were my exact thoughts when I first viewed the despecialized version. Not as distacting as bad CGI everywhere but I wish the color was a little more natural looking. maybe in V3.0?

It’s the “Technicolor film look”. Not colorized, so much as Wizard of Oz. In 3.0, Harmy’s mentioned he’ll do multiple color grades: a better-corrected Technicolor film grade, a grade to match the look of non-Technicolor film prints, and I think maybe a third one that just aims for the balanced neutral look rather than one of the theatrical film looks.

You get all the advantages of the higher bitrate while viewing it “digitally” too. If you want lower-bitrate, look into the AVCHD version.

jzilli said:

For sanity, I verified the MKV checksum. Is anyone seeing this sync issue?

Nope.

Often it’s not a matter of hardware. Most software just decodes the lossy core of the DTSMA track, but if you have something special that may be trying to decode the lossless file, it could be making a mess of it. Which is why I asked you to see if an AC3 track synced OK. The 93 English AC3 track is within a few milliseconds of in sync with the 5.1 DTS-MA track. If the decoder isn’t the problem, they should have the exact same sync issues.

jzilli said:

First of all, Harmy, v2.5 looks spectacular. Well done! Thank you so much

Is it just me, or is the audio out of sync? I think the audio is behind the video a bit. I notice this whenever a human is talking, but also at the beginning of the opening crawl (“STAR WARS” is noticeably displayed before the audio comes in). I’ve only tested the MKV with the 5.1 audio - I can test the other audio tracks and the AVCHD when I get home tonight. I’ve tested on two different PC’s, using Plex and Kodi.

Some software players have trouble decoding DTS-HD fast enough, and it ends up lagging behind the video. I haven’t noticed anything. Try an AC3 track, which is less decoder-intensive.

The Aluminum Falcon said:

Thank you for the share!

Not sure if this has been discussed before, but, when muxing the MKV with TSMuxer, I found, to create a functional BD ISO, I needed to set, under “General track options,” “Do not change SEI and VUI data” rather than the default “Insert SEI and VUI data if absent.”

Has anyone else trying to burn had this experience?

I encountered a similar instance with HAL 9000’s fan edits of the Star Wars prequel; it’s apparently something to do with how the original MKV is encoded.

Yep, although I re-encoded it, because I didn’t know about any silly quick fixes…

TV’s Frink said:

Why I never.

I thought you didn’t even.

PM sent.

Also, to keep you updated on the status, Project Threepio has been a 720p native project from the start, and 1080p subtitles were created by just upscaling the 720p ones. I’ve decided to finally switch that around–the next version will be 1080p native and the 720p subtitles will be downscales. The visible difference will be minor, but it will look a little better, and just going through the exercise has helped me find quite a few subtle bugs. It will take some time, though, as it involves re-rendering every subtitle.

quin82 said:

CatBus said:

In my case, it’s probably both.

Is it the same problem with spleen/torrents for you?

No torrents worked great in this case, so I have it now. But my Internet service is dismal under ideal conditions, no question about that, and there is likely some throttling on top of that.

In my case, it’s probably both.

bishabosha said:

Wario64I said:

uloz.to too slow

I downloaded the 22GB version in 4 hours from uloz.to, average 2MB/s is that slow?

I averaged 0.00016Mbps. Apparently mileage varies, even especially on the Internet.

Bobocop said:

Wario64I said:

uloz.to too slow

If you had started at uloz right away, you’d have it by now 😉

Maybe not. I started the moment it was announced, and if I hadn’t switched to the torrent, I’d still be downloading from uloz right now.

Podes said:

Thanks for reply. The other Region 4 Gout DVDS are in Spain spanish no?

Oh yes. As far as I know, the only ways you could get the Latino dubs for the other films was to record a TV broadcast, or snag a 35mm print. Luckily, we’ve done both 😉

Harmy’s always tried to make his encodes Blu-ray compliant in the past. I suspect the creation on non-compliant streams will be left to the re-encoders out there.

Another NFO mistake, I’m afraid, unless Harmy used a different track than I’ve got. Castellano tracks are from the GOUT, with a little weirdness on the track for Star Wars which is available as a fixed separate download–not sure how it happened exactly, but the Castellano and Latino mixes got merged for a while on that one, possibly a bad early GOUT pressing.