CatBus

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Timoty said:

Do you think the GOUT ROTJ would rest well alongside Harmy’s ANH and ESB? I’m doing standard DL DVDs to accommodate all the “special features” I’m including

No, GOUT wouldn’t look good under any circumstances. In fact, I’d still recommend Harmy’s v1 over the previously-mentioned dark_jedi’s v3 – once you’ve scaled it down to DVD resolution, a lot of the most noticeable faults in v1 (blurry GOUT footage) are much less severe, while the HD-sourced material still looks like a top-quality DVD instead of an non-anamorphic mess. There’s some bad DVD downscales out there though, so be sure to get a good one or roll your own.

Timoty said:

Maybe slightly off-topic but I’m making Harmy DVDs for my dad for Christmas. For ROTJ, would you guys recommend v1.0 or is the workprint complete enough for now? I know the video quality is supposed to be much better in the WP.

I appreciate any opinions!

IMO – and it pains me to say it – 1.0 is better for general-purpose enjoyment than the 2.0WP. The missing subtitles can be fixed, but the crazy wrong R2 freakout just wrecks it, worse than blurry eyebrows. For my own purposes – like a lot of people here, it seems – I’ve made a mashup of the workprint with 1.0 spliced in at a few key points. I’m confident the second workprint or final release of 2.0, whatever’s next, will be clearly better than 1.0 in every respect. The first workprint very nearly is.

PM’s sent. These subtitles will only sync to the unaltered versions of the films, not the official Blu-rays.

PM’s sent. If you run into trouble, there’s a detailed README file in the project.

PM sent. The current Brazilian Portuguese subtitles have a couple errors in ROTJ that will be fixed in the next version, but nothing major.

Easy for you to say.

EDIT: Dang your post-edits, Gimli, now my comment makes even less sense than before.

PM’s sent. To clarify, complete Japanese subtitles are available for ROTJ, just not in the SRT format at the moment.

Yeah, there’s a lot of little weird audio things that happen in ROTJ, and if you’re talking about what I think you are, that’s one of them. I’m afraid all of the audio sources have them, to some degree. That’s a “warts and all” preservation for you 😉

PM sent. Full Japanese subtitles for ROTJ are currently available only in graphical form. This will be fixed in the next release, which I’m hoping will be soon.

PM sent.

dwsiddall said:

Why do you think prints are rare? This was the biggest film of all time and showed in thousands of theaters around the world. There must have been 5,000 or more prints of this film struck. Is there a reason to believe that most of these prints were destroyed? (Maybe there is…I sincerely don’t know.)

Films are “on loan” to theatres, and theatres must return them to their owners (the studios) at the end of the loan period, like a checked-out book at the library. Private ownership of film reels only even happens when someone says “Oopsie! We lost the whole film! Just bill us the replacement cost!” which sometimes happens for real, but is often a way to get film reels into the gray market. The studio owns them, and for these particular films, I believe Mr. Verta has verified that the “destroy order” for these films both exists and is still in effect today. So in short, if everyone was a good rule-obeying theatre operator, every single print would have been destroyed long ago. The prints still in existence are almost entirely due to other sorts of theatre operators.

So it’s not really a matter of how many copies of the films were struck, so much as how many people had the foresight to pull a fast one on the studios and get a private copy. Of that, how many got the type of print that didn’t fade into useless reels of pink vinegar after ten years (the vast majority of reels out there were fast-fading)? So, yeah, rare–and due to chemistry, getting rarer every day.

Many TV’s are too bright out-of-the-box, you’d need a calibrated set to be certain. Many of the Rancor shots seem too dark to me (but of course, I have no reference), but the one where it’s probably easiest to explain is the brief shot after Jabba says “They will all pay…” of the dead Rancor and the crying keeper. The keeper is being comforted by another character in dark clothes, and that character is practically a black hole.

By the way, when Puggo says how surprised he is that anyone actually wants to watch his projects, now I kinda know how that feels. That’s actually the second request I’ve gotten today for subtitles for Puggo’s projects.

Not out of the box, but if you download Project Threepio, there are some Perl scripts and a README file you can use to convert the subtitles to versions that work with Puggo Grande and Puggo Strikes Back. The trick is you need to merge all the VOB files into a single file, and the subs will sync with that.

I’ll PM you a link.

PM’s sent.

PM’s sent.

So usually I post this for people who haven’t really been away at all, but welcome back!

Bah! I’m a sucker for talking about subtitles, are you kidding? Normally nobody wants to talk about such a boring topic.

So for a sub-free version–nothing pre-made exists (not in the Harmy-quality league anyway) that I know of. However, Harmy does maintain sub-free sections of his DeEd’s to share with, for example, the Krieg der Sterne people, so that they have a blank template on which to make their own burnt-in subtitles. I believe it was also going to included as an extra on the hypothetical Blu-ray. But you’d have to splice the video together and re-encode it yourself, though.

I can’t give you exactly what you’re looking for, but there is something else about the graphical subtitles you may be interested to know. There are some utilities in the project that allow you to “reframe” the subtitles–make them fit into a differently-sized video frame. For example, for Puggo’s 16mm preservations, you need to scoot them in toward the middle of the screen about 4.5% so that they have about the same position within the video frame. Well… if you feed the utility a number like -100% instead of 4.5%, it scoots the subtitles away from the middle of the screen, as far as they can go, right into the black bars.

The problem is that subtitles that were already shifted to the top of the frame are adjusted into the top black bar. So to work around that, there’s another utility you could run first, designed to modify the subtitles to work on video that doesn’t have burnt-in subs, and that will shift the alien subtitles back down to the bottom.

So you run the unshift subs utility to put the alien subs on the bottom, the reframe subs utility to put them in the black bars, and you’re almost there… except you’ve still got burnt-in subtitles and also the crawl subtitles are still in the top black bar, so no, it’s not exactly what you want, but you gave me an excuse to talk about it.

PM sent.

towne32 said:

yoda-sama said:

At this rate, there are probably only a few occasions to really be concerned about legal action… or during/after an official release of the OOT (if they feel the DeEd could harm sales of a product they’re finally trying to sell).

I love Harmy’s versions. But man, they’d have to really butcher their own release in order to make that a valid concern. Still, they may find a way to manage.

EDIT: Oh, you’re talking about a Disney OOT release. Yeah, assuming that very improbable scenario ever comes to pass, the vast majority of the general public will probably be happy with Disney’s 81 crawl/93 audio upmixed to Atmos/bad color timing release, and we’d be an even smaller minority of Star Wars fans than we are now.

CatBus said:

Harmy said:

I think the real issue here is that I really need a frame perfect rip of NTSC GOUT to use as a reference. I used v1.0 as a guide and only changed those frames that differ between PAL and NTSC GOUT.

FWIW, I use v1.0 as a guide for the GOUT sync of the subtitles ref, so if you make adjustments from 1.0 in the first half hour, they will need to be applied to the synced subtitles ref too.

Nevermind, I just did the frame math and it doesn’t look like any subtitle frames are in any of the affected periods, so the reference I made is still frame-accurate, as far as the subtitles go.

Darth Mallwalker said:

It remains out-of-sync throughout those sequence:
23045-25407
25408-28651
141781-143417

Can you be more specific for the AviSynth-challenged? i.e. in sequence 1, the workprint video is 1 frame late, and in sequences 2 & 3, it’s 1 frame early?

Harmy said:

I think the real issue here is that I really need a frame perfect rip of NTSC GOUT to use as a reference. I used v1.0 as a guide and only changed those frames that differ between PAL and NTSC GOUT.

FWIW, I use v1.0 as a guide for the GOUT sync of the subtitles ref, so if you make adjustments from 1.0 in the first half hour, they will need to be applied to the synced subtitles ref too.

PM’s sent. Yes, the frame difference between PAL and NTSC is only barely noticeable for audio, and completely unnoticeable for subtitles. Not that I didn’t adjust the subtitle timing anyway, because I’m like that.