CatBus

bubu54 said:

REPORT-SW-v2.5
01:16:41
Between minutes 01:16:40 and 01:19:48, in the trash compactor scene, the track sound in Spanish (Castilian) turn on into Spanish Latino, can you fix it? Thanks for your work.

The fixed audio is already available as a separate download. See the frst post of Project Threepio, and go to the tehPARADOX link, and you’ll find it, or PM me.

PM sent.

moviefreakedmind said:

Hey Harmy, could we please get a little update on what you’ve been working on so far since the release of the workprint?

Way to derail the thread…

Well, Han’s “even I get boarded sometimes, do you think I had a choice?” line has the same problem, more or less, but the super-close-up camera angle at that moment kinda makes the different acoustics more plausible.

PM sent.

My first test of the new matching subtitles has been pretty successful, sample below (click for full size).

Things I worked on:

• The font, which is mostly Franklin Gothic Demi Cond, but you’ll see on the lowercase “g” and the question mark that I’ve modified it to look more like the theatrical font.
• The drop shadow, which is now scripted with Perl and ImageMagick (of course, one trick pony…) to look more like the solid black drop shadow of the films than the semitransparent drop shadow generated by easySUP.
• The border, which isn’t theatrical at all but is pretty much necessary if you want to read the subtitles against a white background (think Hoth). Instead of the thin black solid outline you can see in the example in the first post, it’s a thin faint semitransparent border along the northwest edge of the letters to provide some definition – much less obtrusive IMO, but still necessary.
• The blur, which you can only really see in the larger version. I blurred up the subtitles very slightly so that they appear to be part of the film itself, rather than much sharper than the rest of the film. I think this makes it look much more seamless.

I may decide to do more things, but I’m actually very happy with how this test run looks.

Please note that none of these changes are going into the regular subtitles–just the ones that are supposed to look like the burnt-in theatrical ones. In particular, don’t panic about the blur, it’s not going anywhere else.

TV’s Frink said:

Any of us men who think we always know what women will do are kidding ourselves.

Oh, now you tell me. Thanks a lot.

Also, FWIW I encountered a similar situation. Close to best friend, not a lot of other friends should that friendship get awkward, a few decades later and we’ve got kids and a mortgage. It sometimes does work out. But I stand by my initial assessment – get your own personal crap in order first, and that can do nothing but improve the odds of success (in addition to improving your odds of being able to handle it well if it doesn’t go your way). Desperation/hitting bottom/depression are great reasons to reach out to people, but not the best reasons for people to reach back out of anything but sympathy, and that’s not exactly what you’re angling for here.

TV’s Frink said:

Interesting. How do you rate the other six movies?

It’s not a rating, it’s a username.

That’s Grand Duke of the Ring to you, mister!

yoda-sama said:

I don’t see how a Blu-ray player connected over HDMI to a TV is supposed to look dramatically different than a PC hooked up the exact same way, I think your calibration comment is moot in this instance.

If your TV is calibrated for rec.709 for your Blu-ray player, but it isn’t calibrated for RGB for your PC, then it very much will look different, and the Blu-ray will be better. Since most calibrators only calibrate for rec.709 anyway, it’s very non-moot.

My TV is calibrated for rec. 709 input, not RGB (and frankly, so are most people’s, if they’re calibrated at all). Plus optical discs are a better archival format, and it plays back more reliably across all hardware players (some players have odd MKV limits, like they only play one audio track, or they won’t do DTS-MA if it’s on an MKV). Oh yeah, and it’s a good gifting format for less technically inclined (or if you have kids). And the box looks nice on the shelf.

Other than looking better, lasting longer, being more reliable, working better for friends and family, and the bling factor, I admit there’s not much reason.

DTS-MA audio format. You’ll need a codec pack or a different media player (MPC-HC, VLC) which can decode at least the core audio.

Noah182 said:

Since you seem to know a lot about the audio, do you perhaps know if there is a list of this kind for Empire? I liked the standard audio on the MKV a lot, but I wonder what the alternate versions were.

The audio options narrow as the trilogy progresses. For Empire, 1980 stereo audio (and upmixed 6-channel surround) is the way to go. 93 audio is more or less the same (identical dialogue), very good quality, but it’s missing a sound effect for the snowspeeder crash which can only really be considered an error. There was also a very different 1980 70mm audio mix which we don’t have in any usable quality, and it went with a different cut of the video anyway so it wouldn’t really be right with the 35mm cut of the video. The 1980 mono mix was a relatively recent discovery, at least to me, and it features some alternate C-3PO lines which are interesting. But really, 1980 stereo or upmix is the winner.

For Jedi, there’s 83 stereo and upmixed 6-channel, and 93 stereo. They are all dialogue-identical, but 93 is definitely a different (and widely considered good) mix. We don’t know for certain if the 70mm mix had any unique dialogue or effects, or if there was even a mono mix at all, but I think the consensus is there wasn’t. So for Jedi, 83 or 93 are both fine, and there’s no difference in dialogue between them.

nightstalkerpoet said:

Does anyone else get the feeling Team Negative1 is under new leadership?

Pete Townshend said:

Meet the new boss…

The Death Star translation was fixed in 9.0, but I’ll include the Bantha fix in the next version – thanks!

team_negative1 said:

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.

Tobar said:

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 😉