CatBus

joefavs said:

Harmy said:

Great news - these new mixes will be awesome additions to v2.5.

Wait a minute, is this to say that 2.0 will have the same DD tracks from 1.0 instead of the DTS-HD of the other 2.X releases? If so, and if indeed the new audio will be ready in a matter of weeks, I think I’d prefer to wait. Though I may be biased, since I finally got a receiver that can handle 5.1 DTS-HD for Christmas. I guess I can hold off on burning the MKV and mux in the new audio if hairy-hen makes it available on its own.

I’ve provided Harmy with DTS-HD lossless versions of the old 5.1 mix… not that hairy_hen’s new mix won’t be better.

moviefreakedmind said:

CatBus said:

“Because it makes good business sense” has been a valid argument since 1997. If anything, that argument is actually becoming less valid as time goes on, as the proportion of the Star Wars fanbase that has actually seen the Star Wars trilogy that started it all decreases.

It will always make good business sense. There always has been and always will be a market for the unaltered films. Things we infinitely smaller followings have received releases in the past. The producer’s cut of Halloween 6 was released on bluray recently as the selling point for the Halloween box set, and in 2013 the original mixes of ZZ Top’s studio albums were released on CD for the first time since before they had been altered with new percussion in the late 1980s. There really is a market for almost everything, but especially Star Wars. Despecialized Edition has proven that there is a market for the OT. Whether the fact that there is money to be made will motivate Lucasfilm to them releasing the films is yet to be seen, however.

Not sure we’re in disagreement. The original ZZ Top mixes may still have a market now, but it would have made more business sense to do it twenty years ago. If they held out another fifty years, would it have still made business sense then? I think our different attitudes come from our differing expectations of an official OOT release. If I’m reading you correctly, you seem to think it could happen in 5-10 years, while I tend to think the most likely official OOT release scenario is for the OOT copyrights to expire (still a hundred years out or more), so that some public domain media outfit like Laserlight will release it as a cheapo vintage classics collection. The length of the wait does impact the size of the audience, if the wait is long enough. I’m not saying an OOT release won’t make business sense even then, just that it’ll make considerably less sense than it would have a century earlier.

Darth Lucas said:

I’m sure all of us would love for Mike to clear some things up himself.

I prefer the enigmatic Mike.

PM sent.

PM’s sent. Yes, the plan is that the next version will be available through channels other than MySpleen and PM’s. However, there will still be no direct link in the first post, as that could run afoul of forum rules here.

35mm is no good for what I’m doing, sorry. Slight cropping differences change the relative size and position of the font I use from preservation to preservation, so I need a DeEd 2.0 screencap. No worries, though. Once I have the image, it’ll take all of a few minutes to make the match.

If he’s done in the next few weeks, and that’s still not early enough for 2.0, are you at a point yet where you can get that screencap of the subtitles? That’s all I’m waiting for for Project Threepio 9.0.

PM sent.

No, all of the Despecialized Editions have been 720p, and will continue to be until the 3.x series.

Oh, thank goodness you’re still with us and working on things. A shiny new fully patched-up 83 stereo mix and a new 5.1 mix, sounds great!

Flexicon9 said:

WTF

I had no plans to see the film either, but I’ll likely end up going with my kid sometime, assuming it’s still in theatres by the time we get around to it. I’m probably a little more enthusiastic than Mike, though.

Just got confirmation that the Hebrew subtitles are good, my first confirmation of an RTL script. This probably means the Arabic subtitles are also good, since they are also from an official source and presented me with similar RTL difficulties. Farsi is based on a fansub, so that could be good or bad.

FWIW, VLC currently has a problem displaying certain character sequences in SRT files for RTL languages. This will be fixed in VLC 3.0, but can be worked around using SUP files and/or MPC-HC, which don’t have the issue.

EDIT: I guess I should also mention I also got confirmation that the Simplified Mandarin subtitles are good, which is another sign that Operation Eyestrain yielded good results.

REPORT-SW-v2.5

00:04:54
Reflection of red lights on R2 is clipped

00:04:58
Large red light to left of C-3PO is clipped

00:05:10
Red lights at end of corridor are clipped, reflections on R2 are, too, to a lesser degree

00:05:18
Large red light to left of C-3PO is clipped

00:40:35
Noticeable color shift during wipe

01:16:42-01:22:27
The red highlights (faces, hair) in the trash compactor seem really odd, like they were pushed past clipping and then scaled back again. Possibly due to clipped source, You_Too’s de-purpling correction, then re-purpling to match the reference

01:40:08
144053
PAL/NTSC sync issue: contains extra frame not in NTSC GOUT

DuracellEnergizer said:

CatBus said:

Then, around the Special Editions, people started pushing the “A New Hope” name hard, and also episode numbers.

I thought the use of episode numbers only really started catching on when TPM was released, becoming firmly entrenched once AOTC arrived.

You’re probably right. So, my timeline looks a little like this:

“Star Wars” near-exclusive: 1977-1995 (~18 years)
“Star Wars” or “A New Hope”: 1995-2000 (~5 years)
“Star Wars”, “A New Hope”, or “Episode IV”: 2000-present (~15 years)

If this is more-or-less accurate, we’ve only really recently hit the milestone where people have been calling Star Wars something other than “Star Wars” longer than they were calling it simply “Star Wars”.

PM sent.

PM’s sent.

TV’s Frink said:

CatBus said:

I should add that saying Star Wars is much easier than saying “Star Wars: The original one from '77”, and gets the point across just as well.

But that’s the problem, it doesn’t. 99% of the time (and slightly less of the time here but still a larger percentage of the time) it doesn’t clarify which Star Wars you are talking about.

I support calling it Star Wars to make a point, but I don’t do it because it takes too long to clarify.

You must talk to the wrong people 😉

PM sent.

In almost all circumstances, I call it Star Wars, mostly because that was the name of the movie the first several times I saw it, and it was the name of the movie during the period when it took the world by storm and saturation-bombed commercial media, and it was the name of the movie when it won all its accolades. For at least four very intense Star Wars-centric years, that’s the only name the entire planet used for it, and that’s a lot of people you need to convince to change what they’ve been doing for years.

I never saw the film with its altered name in the theatres, and only saw it that way on home video. Because of that, I never stopped calling it Star Wars. Similarly, I never started called Raiders of the Lost Ark “Indiana Jones and the …” just because it said that on the box. Besides, for the first fifteen years or so of home video, “Star Wars” was always still printed in much bigger type than “A New Hope”, unlike “Empire” and “Jedi”, which were printed much bigger than “Star Wars”. If you look at the boxes from the time, you’ll see it. The world still considered it Star Wars, and the marketing folks weren’t about to lose a sale by confusing people. I really never even head of anyone calling it “A New Hope” until maybe 1995. As far as I know, “Star Wars” was the only name anyone called the film until around then.

Then, around the Special Editions, people started pushing the “A New Hope” name hard, and also episode numbers. The focus on episode numbers always bugged me, because through much of my childhood, I’d considered Star Wars to be Episode I, since Empire came out as Episode V, and Star Wars had no episode number, I just naturally assumed we skipped three episodes between Star Wars and Empire.

I have no problem calling the Special Edition version “A New Hope”. As far as I’m concerned, the Special Editions are completely different films and I’m happy to be able to use a different name for one of them to avoid tainting the original name.

I should add that saying Star Wars is much easier than saying “Star Wars: The original one from '77”, and gets the point across just as well.

Yay!

PM’s sent. Lrod, I sent you the regular English subs–if you wanted the “patch” to show the missing alien subtitles in the ROTJ 2.x workprint, the link for that is posted in the ROTJ thread.

The changes for v9.0 (codenamed: “Aaand We’re Done!”), off the top of my head, will be re-timing ROTJ to match theatrical alien subtitles (translated subtitles look funny if they don’t show up at more-or-less the same time as the burnt-in ones). The trick is that DeEd 1.x and the 2.0 workprint don’t use the theatrical timing, so the 8.3 timing actually works better for them. Then there’s a whole new and improved Finnish translation, some miscellaneous improvements, mostly to Portuguese, the long-awaited Japanese SRT file for ROTJ, and also tiny improvements scattered elsewhere. I’ll post a more complete list with appropriate credits once it’s actually released.

The thing I’m waiting for Harmy on is a sample frame showing his new 2.0 subtitles, so that I can do “matching” style English subtitles for them like in the first post. And heck, if Return of the Pug gets released soon enough, I could even write the conversion script for that, so that people can watch it subtitled. But neither of these are dealbreakers for me, and if I have to, the only real problem with releasing what I have right now in its current state is the mismatched alien subtitle timing, which will disappear when the final version of ROTJ DeEd 2.0 is released.

PM sent.

Yeah the lack of Rifftrax is certainly one of the only downsides IMO.

PM sent.

PM sent.