CatBus

dvdmike said:

For no reason?
Idiots who lap it up due to wanting all their speakers filled is a reaosn

Yep, it’s essentially 3D upconversion for audio. You’ve got a fancy new 3D TV and 21 channels of audio, and then you watch My Dinner with Andre and say “Hold up, what’s with this 2D video and mono audio crap!” So they hire a fly-by-night outfit do a 3D conversion, upmix the mono (and let me just tell you this actually happens and it’s exactly as bad as it sounds), and BOOM, they’ve got a disc they think is actually more appealing than the film was when it was actually in theatres.

That said, there’s a LITTLE bit of reason for messing with the audio IMO, and only just so much. Just as with video, when going back to the negatives means you lose the color timing and have to re-time everything to (hopefully) match, when going back to audio stems, you have to re-mix them as well. And theatre surround formats (e.g. 4.2) don’t quite match common home video surround formats, so a little remixing there may be warranted as well. If it’s done carefully, and with fidelity to the original in mind.

Wazzles said:

The timing is definitely different there.

Depends on what you mean by “timing”. The difference is only in saturation, AFAICT, so I’d say they are clearly from the same master, just processed differently. Home video releases were often badly desaturated like those Laserdisc examples, back in the day.

PM’s sent.

CatBus said:

Hm, need_93’s stay here was brief, but interesting. My offer still stands: if you know anyone, send them my way. Like if you happen to have Sarah Vowell in your corporate rolodex or something. For instance.

Dang, it looks like need_93 was all part of this:

http://www.afb.org/community/announcements/conde-nast-is-seeking-the-biggest-star-wars-fan-in-the-nyc-area/12

Too bad, I thought I was a special snowflake for just a second, or maybe that we at least had an in with some large media conglomerate, but apparently they’ve (maybe inadvertently) spammed everyone out there that some computer algorithm has linked to both Star Wars and the blind community, hoping to find their blind Star Wars superfan.

Apparently they’re a little new to the topic too–one of the questions was “What color do you imagine Yoda is?”. Uh, green, because that’s what the descriptive audio says?

PM sent.

I filed another a bug in GitHub, I’ll give you three guesses what it’s about (hint: it’s not DuckDuckGo)

Actually the audio for ROTJ Despecialized 1.0 is slightly out-of-sync. If what you’re seeing only starts after the final scene on Endor, and is most noticeable until partway through the battle on Endor, then this is what you’re seeing. The audio is about two frames off during that period, and then one frame off until the end of the film (I notice the two frame difference, but not the one frame difference).

You can either wait for the 2.x update or download a fixed audio track and mux it in yourself. PM me for a link to the fixed audio.

And here I was afraid I couldn’t get the right tone across on the Internet…

hairy_hen said:

I took the advice to check the 'spleen, and what I found there is extremely interesting. I’m amazed hardly anyone here is talking about it: anyone even slightly interested in colour timing should download this immediately. The difference between the home video releases and the 35mm version of The Matrix is STAGGERING.

I dunno, I saw it and shrugged. To me it looks like something very photochemically bad happened with those prints–or at least a reel or two of them–and they ended up with an extreme orange tint. Either that or something equally bad happened during scanning, but I tend to think that’s less likely. Maybe with some color-correction, we can get some idea what the film originally looked like, but man, as it stands right now, that is so unbelievably orange I would have remembered if it looked like that, and it didn’t. Color specifics are hard to remember, but unrealistic blanket hues are not. Everyone remembers how Do the Right Thing was gold-tinted, and this is way more out of whack than that.

I don’t know enough about print chemistry to say how this could have happened, but I’m guessing some cut-rate duplication facility or a tragic accident at the Tang factory.

TV’s Frink said:

I certainly didn’t expect that response.

No one expects the brief polite response!!

PM sent.

Here’s a question TheHutt might be able to help with: Does anyone know if there was a French or Portuguese dub of the theatrical version–and if so, is it different in any other way from the dub for the extended version? And finally, do you have a copy?

Similar for other languages too (e.g. German), I guess – the US Blu-ray only has French, Portuguese, and a badly butchered Japanese track. Japanese is the only non-English track I’ve re-created, the others I just chopped at the transition.

I’m sure he’ll jump right on it now that he knows we want to see it.

With apologies to Puggo, the first post is really more of a project mausoleum than a project index. If any thread needs unstickying, it’s this one.

Yeah, I think that’s been partially quoted in this thread before. It’s pretty clear from this and other sources that they see the extended cut as an improvement, and that we won’t be seeing any more official releases of the theatrical cut, so here we are.

PM sent.

PM sent.

PM sent. Sorry about the new forum layout, it’s still got some usability kinks being worked out.

PM’s sent.

꧅

ESB MKV is listed in the first post, down a bit:

CRC32: C4BF0283
MD5: 1E34878403B05924F71354E961016FCE
SHA-1: 66FD71200749FE96123888228868789ACDBF34C5

I don’t think he ever posted ones for the 1.x series, so you’d need to ask someone for the one for ROTJ. I’ve already demuxed and remuxed my copy, so mine’s pretty useless for that.

Jim said:

I’m about to watch the trilogy with my Japanese buddy who has never seen any of the films.

I got my hands on a copy of Harmy’s version, and it has Japanese audio, but he would prefer Japanese subtitles. When I checked out the Japanese sub file, there was very little text in there. Doesn’t look like the complete movie. Could anyone help me find a complete Japanese sub file for A New Hope? Or even the whole trilogy? (Don’t know if this issue pervades through the other two films or not.)

I sent you a link to an updated version of Project Threepio. At the time SW DeEd 2.5 was released, complete Japanese subtitles were only available in graphical form. Now there’s text files for Star Wars and Empire–Jedi is still being worked on. However, the best format is graphical (it’s just large, that’s all), so you should be all set for the complete trilogy.

IIRC, Harmy’s already made a 1981 crawl/flyover in 720p, as bonus material for a not-yet-created Blu-ray. You could probably just ask him for a link, and save yourself some trouble.

PM sent.

LexX said:

Just wondering out loud… Can any of you guys think about a situation where there comes a new SW movie that is actually better than any of the OT?

Sure. In the seventies and eighties, sci-fi/fantasy was a niche market nobody was much interested in capitalizing on. Nowadays every other damn movie is sci-fi or fantasy. Sturgeon’s Law still applies, naturally – 90% of everything is crap – and with a much larger raw number of films, you’ve certainly got more crap today, but I feel you’ve also still got a better chance of great sci-fi/fantasy too, just from the increased numbers.

Heck, the prequels came out in the midst of a very good run of creative, well-written films that were groundbreaking in many ways. They just weren’t among them.

I love the OT in a sentimental sort of way, and maybe nothing will surpass it in that regard. But I’ve never considered any of them among my top ten favorite films. I find sci-fi/fantasy works that surpass the OT all the time. Firefly, for example, IMO. Could something that good end up in a new Star Wars film? Well, Sturgeon’s Law again says it’s unlikely, but not impossible.