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CatBus

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Join date
18-Aug-2011
Last activity
26-Dec-2025
Posts
5,986

Post History

Post
#893636
Topic
Despecialized vs my memory
Time

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.

Post
#893608
Topic
Info Wanted: Isolated Scores with film audio in un-scored scenes for Despecialized?
Time

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.

Post
#893206
Topic
Harmy's RETURN OF THE JEDI Despecialized Edition HD - V3.1
Time

Harmy said:

Here’s something interesting:
http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/156826/picture:0
http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/156826/picture:1

The 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.

Post
#893204
Topic
Despecialized: RotJ v1.0 or v2?
Time

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.

Post
#892957
Topic
Harmy's RETURN OF THE JEDI Despecialized Edition HD - V3.1
Time

Wazzles said:

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.

Post
#892945
Topic
Harmy's RETURN OF THE JEDI Despecialized Edition HD - V3.1
Time

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.

Post
#892871
Topic
Harmy's RETURN OF THE JEDI Despecialized Edition HD - V3.1
Time

DVD subtitles look bad because the subtitle spec only allows 3 colors + fully transparent, which means smooth curves and diagonals are impossible (plus the low res). The only way to have decent-looking subtitles on a DVD is to burn them in or player-generate them from an outside source. Blu-ray subtitles mostly look pretty good in my experience, except when they just upscale the old DVD subtitles (e.g. the Matrix), and that’s always pretty awful looking.

Post
#892775
Topic
Harmy's RETURN OF THE JEDI Despecialized Edition HD - V3.1
Time

For the next DeEd ROTJ 2.0, I believe Harmy will be using film print references for both the appearance and timing of the alien subtitles (I used the same reference for timing for Project Threepio 9.0). For 1.x and the workprint, he kinda matched the film print appearance (close font match), but used DVD timing and a non-theatrical fade-in/out effect. The official releases use subtitle image overlays (not burned-in) on the disc, which look nothing like theatrical, either in appearance or timing. Player-generated subtitles are extremely rare, almost all discs just use graphical overlays.

Post
#892278
Topic
Rate 'The Last Jedi' (NO SPOILERS) (was: Rate TFA (NO SPOILERS))
Time

Looks like I delayed watching TFA for so long this thread isn’t about rating TFA anymore? Oh, well, on the OP’s 100-point scale, with high and low markers:

The Third Man: 100
ESB: 80
SW: 75
ESB:SE: 70
ROTJ: 60
SW:SE: 60
TFA: 55
ROTJ:SE: 40
Holiday Special: 20
TPM: 8
AOTC: 6
ROTS: 3
Battlefield Earth: 1

At least for me, ratings for TFA are subject to change over time as the newness wears off, expectations change, etc. Certainly the best new thing in the Star Wars universe in 30 years, but 55 is pretty average.