CatBus

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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.

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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.

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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.

TK428 said:

It’s when, not if at this point.

I said that in 1997. When sometimes takes longer than you’d think.

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imperialscum said:

Benign Viewer said:

In ROTJ, Han is bland.

No he is not.

How many posts are left until we get to which Star Wars characters could beat up which other Star Wars characters, or did we already get there?

Harmy said:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-12-14/restoring-star-wars/6994818

I don’t think any other article has better showcased your work! And considering the heavy use of the ROTJ 2.0 workprint, it probably wasn’t possible until fairly recently…

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Ah, those subtitles are what’s called “burnt-in”, they are part of the picture itself.

The short answer is: because The Despecialized Editions are reconstructions of the theatrical versions, and the alien subtitles were burnt-in in the theatres too – so failing to have burnt-in subtitles wouldn’t be authentic. Other preservations, such as the German “Krieg der Sterne” preservation, have burnt-in German subtitles (and an alternate German crawl and credits), because prints shown in Germany looked like that. Similar projects exist for other print variations: Italian and French, maybe others.

The longer answer is that the alternative methods are much harder to make feel authentic, and require some odd authoring. On DVD downscales, it’s simply impossible to have separate subtitles look as good as burnt-in – the DVD format’s subtitle specs are flat-out awful. On Blu-rays, you can emulate the look very accurately, but things like having a very slight wobble (gate weave) on the subtitles, which is authentic, require animating the subtitles as a series of one-frame images, which isn’t well supported by some players, and can end up looking terrible or unreadable. Then, if you end up doing it anyway, then you have to auto-select the subtitle track when authoring, and make sure all of your alternate tracks still include those lines (right now, the English subtitles exclude those lines). And lastly, the Blu-ray format is limited in the total number of subtitle tracks you can have, so making them into a separate subtitle track means you need to possibly throw out one alternate language track, if you were maxing out your disc (and the Despecialized Editions definitely try to push the envelope on languages). It’s all technically doable to some degree, but there are trade-offs.

The ideal way to handle all of this is through seamless branching – have burnt-in subtitles for each of the known print variations: English, German, etc, on their own video branch, and then have a subtitle-free branch which is shown for other languages with no burnt-in option. It would also work for translated crawls, credits, etc – but seamless branching brings authoring to a whole new level of complexity. But it’s the best option, regardless. IMO having burnt-in English alien subs with translations in other languages shown at the top of the screen is the next best thing, and considerably easier to accomplish.

All of this is another reason why I really push the SUP files hard, and only recommend the SRT files for people who cannot use the SUP files. Among the other things they help with, they shift the translations for the burnt-in alien subtitles up to the top of the screen, so that they don’t clutter the bottom of the screen with subtitles in two languages, or worse, overlap them! You can see examples of this in the first post of the Project Threepio thread (click the Project Threepio logo in my signature)

Yes, I realize the Despecialized Editions include the SRT files instead of the SUP files. Harmy and I disagree on that point, and it’s his project to do what he wants with – not that I won’t keep trying to convince him.

The existence of the 16mm mono mix on PSB was a surprise to me, I’m holding out hope for a similar surprise in ROTP, but I admit it’s probably not likely.