CatBus

Bitrate gives an encoder the ability to make a better-looking encode, but there are factors that could cancel that advantage out. For example, people tend to like to DNR animation into levels of oblivion even the worst live action video never sees, so if that’s the case, the high-bitrate advantage in encoding fine detail goes away. If in doubt, high bitrate is usually better though. If you’re comparing images, compare still images of the same frame blown up to a large size, so that you’re not limited by your display size, or where your eyes happen to be focused at that point in time. Look for common video artifacts, edge enhancement, loss of fine detail, that sort of thing.

I’d personally pick the higher bitrate unless it looked worse (which it could: DNR, color issues, etc), because you’ll eventually be re-encoding anyway, which will lose quality.

Properly done 5.1 is nice, but 5.1 upmixes from stereo mixes are not. Find out what he original audio format is for your show and go with that. If it was produced in stereo, you’re almost certainly going to get a better experience with stereo. If it was originally done in 5.1, go with that. You’ll likely need to talk to people who know a lot more about the show than me to get those answers though.

I’m syncing the Mandarin dubs now, and am uploading to the usual locations. SW and ROTJ are already done. I always save ESB for last – it’s the hardest to despecialize, and may take a while.

Some of the color corrections for 4K83 (1.3 I think) really match the feel of the Faces set best (full disclosure: I actually strongly dislike the colors of the Faces set). 4K77 would match better than DeEd, but you may want to look at earlier versions if you want to best match the reddish hues.

Or you could take whichever preservation you want, and pump the magenta/cut the yellow and it’d probably be about right.

simps said:

Galician
Notes :

• All three films were dubbed in 1992 for TV.

Georgian
Notes :

• Voiceovers

Hindi
Notes :

• Available on Disney+ Hotstar Southeast Asia.

Indonesian
Notes :

• Produced in the 2010s for TV showings on The Disney Channel. Also available on Disney+ Hotstar in Southeast Asia.

Korean
Notes :
Multiple dubs produced on varying dates.

“A New Hope”

• First dub was produced in 1985 for KBS television.
• Second dub was produced in 2003 for MBC television.
• Third dub was produced in 2006 for KBS television.

“The Empire Strikes Back”

• First dub was produced in 1988 for KBS television.
• Second dub was produced in 2003 for MBC television.
• Third dub was produced in 2006 for KBS television.

“Return of the Jedi”

• First dub was produced in 1990 for KBS television.
• Second dub was produced in 2003 for MBC television.
• Third dub was produced in 2006 for KBS television.

Lithuanian
Notes :

• Voiceover

Malay
Notes :

• Produced in the 2010s for TV showings on The Disney Channel. Also available on Disney+ Hotstar in Southeast Asia.

Mandarin Chinese
Notes :

• There are many dubs, at least three for each film. One produced in Beijing, another produced for CCTV6 in Shanghai, and another in Guangdong Mandarin.

Persian
Notes : -

Tagalog
Notes :

• The three films were dubbed in 2016 for TV5 television.

Tamil
Notes :

• Only “The Empire Strikes Back” and “Return of the Jedi” were dubbed in Tamil. “A New Hope” was not dubbed. Available on Disney+ Hotstar in Southeast Asia.

Telugu
Notes :

• Only “The Empire Strikes Back” and “Return of the Jedi” were dubbed in Telugu. “A New Hope” was not dubbed. Available on Disney+ Hotstar in Southeast Asia.

Thai
Notes :

• The first was done for VHS release by CVD Video.

Ukrainian
Notes :

• Produced in 2019 by LeDoyen (the same company responsible for the Disney Ukrainian dubbings) and commissioned by Disney Character Voices International.

Thank you for the list! If you have, you know, access to any of these highlighted dubs, I’d certainly like to know about it.

Project files have been updated to version 12.2 (codename: “Doce monos”), and the first post has been updated. Please PM me for temporary download links until the files are available at some more permanent locations.

Rough summary of changes from 12.1 to 12.2:

• Added Canadian French titles-only subtitles (thanks to schorman13)
• Lots of fixes for Star Wars mono mix subtitles, and SDH improvments (thanks to CAL0901)
• Resync script supports the 4K77-based Star Wars Technicolor Grindhouse Edition (thanks to CAL0901 and alexp120)
• Added resync option for 24.000fps preservations (I do not know of any preservations using this framerate)
• Fixed more multithreading-related bugs in the render script
• Precompiled Windows executables are now built using PyInstaller 4.5, which should reduce antivirus false positive detections

MattMahdi said:

This floated up in a recent eBay visit: “Star Wars Holiday Special 2020 EXTENDED CUT (Blu-ray SPECIAL EDITION 1978)”

https://www.ebay.com/itm/363476765732?hash=item54a0e74c24:g:LcIAAOSwGpJg8YE3

The word “extended” seems to refer to this: “As a special treat a new opening theme was created with an introduction that is exclusive to this release.”

Although it sounds intriguing a) I’m never going to pay for another copy of the Special (made that mistake twice 20+ years ago before I discovered this group and a wonderful online community) and b) I would never want to enrich someone on eBay who’s hawking something that shouldn’t be sold anyway.

My guess is it’s the Rifftrax crawl tacked onto the beginning. Extended cut!

44rh1n said:

That way, in 5+ years from now when HDR grading becomes much simpler, none of the restoration work has to be redone. The only thing it will need is a new color grade.

Emphasis mine. You certainly know the way to Harmy’s heart 😉

FYI, there’s a new minor Project Threepio release upcoming, codename “Doce monos”. The main feature is a ton of little fixes for the Star Wars mono mix. While small, I’m just gonna go ahead and apologize to all the mono mix fans out there right now for letting these problems persist this long, because they still look bad. All I can say in my defense is that I rarely watch with the mono mix. If anyone has any changes they’d like to submit, now’s the time to do it if you want them included!

Strictly theoretically, averaging multiple prints would get you less grain. Similar to the temporal averaging used by some DNR processes, except with less of a risk of producing frozen grain. But Mike’s secret sauce is his secret sauce. The videos may not describe it fully or even entirely accurately.

Where would I get more information on the “4K77 Grindhouse” release? I’ve got a user wanting to sync subtitle tracks to it, and I don’t know where all the extra/missing frames are. Does anyone already have this info? e.g. the person who synced the audio?

I’m adding the original Bulgarian dubs to my collection as I sync them.

In terms of video quality, NTSC is better for Star Wars and Empire. PAL is better for ROTJ.

CAL0901 said:

Does the OOT subs include Swahili? My son-in-law has been sucked into the Star Wars universe recently, in large part by, and credit is due to DigModiFicaTion (fanedit.org). He created a “Youngling” edit of ESB for younger kids. As a result my grandson was able to watch. Soon after my granddaughter, his younger sister, got hooked, and thereby has subjected her father, my son-in-law, to watching it well over a dozen times. While my son-in-law understands English fluently, I’m thinking he would appreciate it more in his native tongue. On that note, does anyone know if there is a Swahili audio?

We do not have Swahili subtitles, and I don’t know of any Swahili dubs. TV stations frequently commission dubs that never make it onto any “official” releases, so there’s a possibility that there’s a Swahili dub out there, if dubbing is popular in Swahili-speaking areas. Some parts of the world show Hollywood films with English audio AND English subtitles, with an expectation that the audience knows English, but may not be able to follow American accents.

This project does include English template files designed for translators who want to create subtitles in new languages, and Swahili is on my list of languages I’d most like to add. So if you, or someone you know, has the time and ability to create Swahili translations, I would be delighted to add them to the collection.

Keep in mind: translation is hard. For every simple “Hello there”, there’s a “hyperdrive motivator”, and three movies is a lot of translation work. But boy would I love to offer a Swahili language option!

PM sent.

Project files have been updated to version 12.1 (codename: “Gigawatt”), and the first post has been updated. Please PM me for temporary download links until the files are available at some more permanent locations.

Rough summary of changes from 12.0 to 12.1:

• Improvements to Turkish subtitles (thanks to ArdaYlcn)
• Turkish titles-only subtitles updated to accompany new Turkish dub
• Improvements to Korean subtitles (thanks to Kaz47)
• Czech titles-only subtitles included to accompany new Czech dub
• Persian/Farsi titles-only subtitles included to accompany incomplete Persian/Farsi dub
• Project Threepio is now theatrically synced rather than GOUT synced, because all major Star Wars preservations now plan to move to theatrical sync – while having theatrical sync doesn’t break subtitle compatibility with the existing versions. In practical terms, this makes no difference at all, since a difference of a few frames means nothing for subtitles.
• Added support for the 70mm cut of Empire. I don’t currently know of any restored 70mm prints or full-film 70mm reconstructions for Empire, but if/when one exists, the whole world should be able to watch it (thanks to morgands1)
• Updated Noto fonts to more current versions. Most significant changes: Arabic available in semibold weight, Hong Kong CJK variant available. Lots of minor fixes included as well.
• Graphical Italian alien subtitles for Star Wars (in the style of the original theatrical 35mm Italian prints) are now based on 35mm scans, rather than approximated with a custom font (thanks to williarob)
• Project Threepio now includes more Windows binaries for portability, allowing most operations to work on the Windows platform without installing any software at all
• Fixed several multithreading-related bugs in the scripts
• Fixed some posterization that would result from subtitle colors being reduced for the indexed PNG format required for subtitles. This was most noticeable in the 35mm alien subtitles, which included lots of subtle color variations. Everything is now properly dithered, and the unmodified PNG32 files are now included for use by preservation projects.
• Some scripts now support a -yuv flag to compensate for expected color shifts from an RGB-YCbCr-RGB round trip (i.e. they make the colors a little wrong, so that after they’re encoded as a BD-SUP and displayed during playback, they’re approximately right again). All included BD-SUP files have been created this way. These color shifts are extremely small and typically unnoticeable for a single round trip, but since Project Threepio’s instructions for some tasks can include multiple RGB-YCbCr-RGB round trips, they can add up to something noticeable unless compensated for.
• Python scripts now require Python 3.6 or later

Just a customary reminder that we’re now just a few weeks out from a new release. If anyone has any corrections/additions to existing subtitles, now’s the time to let me know about them.

PM sent.

fmalover said:

Wazzles said:

RU.08 said:

I don’t think it’s “finished” Wazzles.

I mean, you’re probably right, but he has at least claimed to have finished it. I’m trying to be a little careful though, since Mike is a controversial figure round these parts.

A controversial figure? How so?

Let’s not, please.

This is not based directly on a 70mm print. AFAIK nobody has a complete 70mm print, but certainly we’d be interested if one turned up, particularly for Star Wars (mostly for the audio) and Empire (for the audio and video). What we do have is in-theatre recordings (mono) of the 70mm mix, which tells us what the content differences are, and the fact that the Dolby surround encoded stereo mixes are closely related to the same four-track master used to create the 70mm mix. The 70mm mix was a 4.2 mix, which doesn’t quite align with the 5.1 home video standard, but it’s what we have, and 5.1 represents it well IMO.

So with a little audio archaeology, a little technical whiz-bangery, and quite a lot of audio skill, hairy_hen put this together, which is a reconstruction of the 70mm mix, but not literally the 70mm mix itself. But knowing the care that went into it, I trust it’s pretty close, and it’s my favorite audio track for Star Wars.

Similarly, the 5.1 mixes for Empire and Jedi are based on the same surround encoded stereo mixes being related to the four-track master used for the theatrical six-channel mixes. The difference being that we have no references for the 70mm audio mix for Jedi, and the 70mm mix for Empire requires the 70mm video (it would not sync with the 35mm video, and has unique audio we’d only be able to get from a print), so the six-channel audio we have is much closer to the stereo tracks in terms of content. These are more of tasteful upmixes than reconstructions, although hairy_hen did put some serious effort into improving the LFE channel, so they’re not simple upmixes either.

My SE knowledge is limited, but IIRC the 97 mixes are pretty good, but they introduced a bunch of crap in 2004. Some of those things, like the swapped surrounds, were later fixed. But a lot of the crap remains, and no SE mixes have measured up to the 97 mixes since.

On the other end of the quality spectrum, the Persian dubs are now as complete as I can get them. They’ll require an update to Project Threepio to cover the extensive sections that remain undubbed.

Not here that I know of. More likely there’s something lie that on thestarwarstrilogy.com

I rarely get feedback – none on the Swedish yet for sure. There are a few contributors here who’d like feedback, but most people just want subs and then run when they have them. Unfortunately I think the quality of subs found online is pretty low, so people have low expectations and don’t have anything to say unless they’re really bad.

I’ve synced the 2011 Czech Blu-ray dubs, to replace the early nineties dubs in my collection. These turned out really well and are the nicest despecialized audio tracks I’ve done yet.

I’ve also synced the Farsi dub for ROTJ, and I’m now dreading having no other audio projects to do except the Farsi dub for Empire. These pirate dubs are really not great, and are woefully incomplete. I swear Empire is half in English, just from the scenes they didn’t dub. But it’s the only Farsi audio we have, so I’ll do what I can.

PM sent.

PM sent.