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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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?
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.
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That’ll do, Bunny.
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Yes, there’s a few programs that clip the last line from SRT files, not just tsMuxer. That’s part of why I like to pre-render SUP files, to avoid that and many other little software quirks out there. If you want the SUP files, send me a PM. They’re nice, but a little large 😉
Also, that 35mm scan is very, very clean. Since it’s near the end of a reel, I’m assuming it gets more beat up as it goes on? What’s the overall condition?
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Holy…
That is fantastic.
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Wait…seriously? There are people who genuinely believe that?
The lack of any newly remastered version of Star Wars for twenty years and three generations of home video formats has led to some odd thinking about the films among the public. Many people have quite simply never seen the films at all – they just watch the Special Editions and hear stories from old people at the nursing home about how much better Star Wars was when they were a kid, like everything else, and they don’t believe it. “No thanks, Grandma, we don’t need to hook up your VCR for this right now, I believe you” (rolls eyes).
Someone here ran into a store clerk who must have misheard that there were a few barely-noticeable moments where the lightsaber effects hadn’t been placed over the props the actors held, so he thought that ALL of the lightsabers just looked like cardboard props for the entire film in 1977, until Lucas came along and finally made them glow twenty years later. When people can’t easily verify if some crazy statement is true or not (aside from people who are already Star Wars fans, who even owns a VCR anymore?), all sorts of strange and fantastically wrong ideas grow and spread. That’s the most insidious part of suppressing these films for an entire generation.
EDIT: Found the link to the clerk story – http://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/592462
I’m not really in contact with him outside this forum, but seriously all his PM’s to me read like that, and come in clusters. He disappears for three months, then one day my mailbox is full. I really don’t think there’s anything unusual going on.
LOL I learned how to do it in about a day. Compared to video editing, Markdown’s a cinch! … Or am I just suffering from Markdown syndrome?
Whoosh! Sorry, the joke was that people new to navigating our large forum often end up posting the Markdown tutorial text, often several times, before they finally understand that you need to scroll around a lot to see what you’re doing here, or give up.
Also, FWIW, MPC-HC allows you to add an external subtitle file to whatever video file you’re playing (File/Load Subtitle), and it works with the SUP format too.
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