CatBus

Let me know when you’re close to needing subtitles. I’m very close to a point where I wouldn’t mind releasing a new version. Not many changes relevant to Empire yet, but you may as well include the latest & greatest. I do have a few people still out checking various translations, so a little more waiting would yield more fixes.

TV’s Frink said:

CatBus said:

CowboyNeal.

Googling that was of no help.

I aim to baffle.

It’s a Slashdot reference. A million idiots would race there to post a message on a new item that said “First post”. When Slashdot ran polls, they would usually have a nonsense answer in the poll called “CowboyNeal”, which would usually win.

CowboyNeal.

I think Darth Mallwalker covered that in the bug reports thread (page 1 or 2)–there was a GOUT sync issue, two frames toward the end, but I think it was in a workprint, not the final version.

It’s the shot with the red sky in the background, when Luke’s out with the binoculars. I believe Harmy rotoscoped Luke’s SE head onto a GOUT upscale for the rest of the shot (the sky was replaced). Although Luke’s head should be more in focus than the rest of the shot, I think the differing sources exaggerate the effect.

Oh, I’ve lost track of the specifics honestly, but yes, other tracks have gotten fixes too. Not to mention totally new dub options like Thai and Navajo. Getting updated versions of any dubs you plan on using couldn’t hurt.

That’s fine. I just don’t want the old tracks included on new releases when there are better options. Leaving them out entirely is fine too, because people can always go get the latest & greatest, as you said.

So, I don’t know if this has already been addressed, but if this does have a future release pending, it’d be nice to have better dubs & subtitles than what’s available on 2.5. The broken Castilian track alone causes more grief with 2.5 than anything. PM me if you need links.

Dre’s tool should make short work of matching dissimilar sources. It is awesome.

Sa da tay!

poita said:

he contacted me, we chatted like grown-ups and we sorted it out, and got on with working.

That’s not how the Internet is supposed to work.

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.