Lucasfilm and George Lucas are given too much credit at times,
for some information that doesn’t seem to be verified.Take this for what you will.
Team Negative1
Welcome back!
Hard to tell for sure, that cover art isn’t something I’ve seen before and could pin it down if EditDroid came with unique new cover art, but I usually ignore such things.
That is so wrong. Yoda with a lightsaber.
Nice marmots, though.
FYI, one of the things I’ve been working on is improved “matching” subtitles. The idea behind it is that preservations used to reconstruct the theatrical subtitles using close-enough fonts, but now they increasingly look much closer to theatrical than any existing font (using film scans and hand-adjusted subtitle images). Also, the subtitle patch I put together for the ROTJ DeEd 2.0 WP showed that there was a value in having a very close font match outside Project Threepio’s “matching subtitles” concept, which I’ll be the first to admit is kind of a novelty feature.
So I took the font I thought matched the theatrical fonts best, made some adjustments, and now I feel I’ve made a font that more closely approximates the theatrical look than anything we’ve had before. Not good enough to replace the real thing by any stretch, but if you can’t use the real thing for whatever reason, this is a pretty good choice if I say so myself. That said, I haven’t really tested it for doing anything other than creating Project Threepio-style subtitles, so there may be issues with it I haven’t encountered.
You can read more about it here: http://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/893789
This is pretty low priority for me, so I’m not rushing out a new release of Project Threepio for it or anything. You can PM me if you’re interested.
It should be mentioned in all such discussion that not all Blu-ray players will play AVCHD-on-DVD media. Quite a lot will, including common major brands and generic no-names alike, but some don’t. For those, you’d need a proper burned Blu-ray disc or a standard DVD.
NTSC DVD is standard definition, MKV is high definition, AVCHD is high definition but highly compressed so that it can fit on a DVD9. Best quality is MKV, without question, although whether the others are good enough is up to you.
Your computer’s having trouble playing back DTS-MA audio. Install a codec pack, or install another player like MPC or VLC what can at least extract the core audio and play that back.
PM sent.
FWIW, I got tired of not having a good enough font match for the Star Wars subtitles, so I made a font. It’s derived from Franklin Gothic Demi Cond, but I modified the character widths, inter-character spacing, and a few of the characters themselves that didn’t match (lowercase “g” being most obvious).
The bad thing about being based on an existing font is that it’s still not perfect, and probably never will be. Kerning, character spacing, and character widths are still not quite right at an individual character level, but a complete line of characters takes up approximately the same amount of space as the theatrical subtitles (but of course this also varies a bit). Some subtler character differences are also still present – the theatrical font has a kind of boxy lowercase “e”, while mine is still more rounded like Franklin Gothic Demi Cond. But I got the g, y, r, question mark, comma, etc, so it’s certainly closer than it was before. It’s designed to work with Star Wars at regular weight, and Jedi with bold weight, since Jedi’s alien subs are thicker.
The good thing about being based on an existing font is that even if the spacing and kerning aren’t theatrical, they still look very good. Amateur specialty fonts constructed from scratch tend to have completely haphazard letter spacing, so I’d guess that’s not a simple thing for an amateur like me to do. Another good thing about being based on an existing font is that it’s complete. A font based on scans and vectorizations of theatrical subtitles would be limited to those characters. This one has a full Latin alphabet, plus Cyrillic and Greek for good measure. But this bring up another downside – accented versions of any modified characters are not modified. i.e. a lowercase y with umlauts is exactly like Franklin Gothic Demi Cond, while a lowercase y with no accent marks has been modified to more closely match theatrical.
Anyway, I’ll include this font with the inevitable next release of Project Threepio, but it could be a long time before that happens.
Plus Thai 😉
Nice, I got that same set at some weird used junk store for 5 bucks.
I paid full price – 21 years ago. Well, the thread title does only specify “latest”, not “recent”…
Don’t forget the weird-ass totally forgotten marketing tie-ins, as the Star Wars marketing blitz was huge. There was an Empire Strikes Back pop-up book I had that featured the “missing” Wampa attack on the stormtroopers scene. Yeah, that’s another common false memory – people remember this from long before there was ever a deleted scene viewable on home video, but it doesn’t mean they had to have either seen it in theatres or else they were clairvoyant – it just means they saw it elsewhere, like me.
There were so many alternate versions of the stories out there in non-film form, based on so many script variations, it’s much more likely in my opinion that what’s “missing” is the memory of the novelization/viewmaster/bubble gum wrapper/collectable card/limited edition Burger Chef drinking glasses versions of the story, with different scenes that simply weren’t in the movies at all, rather than totally different versions of the films that have had all tangible traces of them completely erased from an otherwise fairly well-preserved historical record of the films.
I don’t have them, but there’s a feature in Audacity called Autoduck which could make quick work of creating this from the isolated score and the regular soundtrack. Basically have the regular soundtrack as the “main” track, and the isolated score as the “voiceover” track. If you set the options to the right values, the isolated score can replace the main track wherever it’s not silent, but when it’s silent, the main track is untouched. Haven’t used this feature in a long time, so you’re probably more likely to get useful help from the Audacity tutorials than from me.
FWIW, FF/REW works fine if you burn it to Blu-ray.
PM’s sent. Remember that until the final Despecialized ROTJ 2.0 comes out (soon!), the translations of the alien subtitles might not line up exactly timing-wise with the burnt-in subtitles.
Yeah I meant the tractor beam line. And alright I will check out the 85 mix. Any major line differences I should know about in that version?
http://originaltrilogy.com/topic/Star-Wars-sound-mixes/id/15294
hairy_hen: Download links for your new audio, please!
Here’s something interesting:
http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/156826/picture:0
http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/156826/picture:1The new logos are definitely 100% accurate to ROTJ, since they come from a 1983 35mm print and yet, the v1.0 logos, taken from GOUT, have very different spacing and fonts.
Whoah. Well there was always the theory that the GOUT 77 crawl was a reconstruction rather than the real thing… I wonder if it could apply to other things as well – or if someone was lazy and just re-used the same Lucasfilm logo (and ALTA) scan three times, and it is “theatrical”, just for a different film.
The biggest issues with the workprint are that it’s missing some alien subtitles, and it contains a very obvious and fairly jarring special edition change. If you can’t get/make a modified workprint, go for v1 or wait for v2 proper. Image quality is a huge improvement in v2, but if the whole point of despecialized is to not have the special edition changes, the vanilla workprint really has an issue there.
Shows what I know. That’s the mix I never listen to.
I know the original mono track did but I would prefer a stereo one with its inclusion.
The 77 mono mix, 85 stereo mix, and 93 stereo mix all have it. For stereo I’d recommend 85.
PM sent.
I believe that’s the case with the Xbox 360. If I use the built in zoom feature to watch the GOUT on my widescreen TV, it actually shifts the subtitles up to a readable level. I don’t know how many players have a zoom feature like this, however.
Not quite what I wanted. I meant not zooming the video at all, and zooming just the subtitles in or out. I also have a player that can zoom video, so that’s not too uncommon.
Some players have a “subtitle shift” feature that gets subtitles back into a reasonable position, but I’ve always felt a “subtitle zoom” feature would be much handier–zoom in (or out) only on the subtitle overlay, but not on the movie itself. The correct size of subtitles depends on screen size and seating distance, so it goes without saying that disc authors will target the median, making people outside the median suffer. Whenever I get the chance, I try to let player manufacturers know subtitle zoom would be a good feature to add. Whether it’ll ever be implemented, who knows. On the software side, I suppose we could try to convince VLC and MPC-HC rather than your more conservative hardware manufacturers.
