CatBus

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I didn't mean to throw shade on any particular methods, I was just trying to point out that this is a classic "you can't get there from here" problem.  Nothing you do to an SE source will make it look exactly like the originals, so it's a matter of prioritizing what matters most, shot-by-shot.  You can match colors and throw out detail, you can match detail and throw out color, you can match color in some areas but not others, and so on.  The only guarantee is that there's going to be something demonstrably wrong with the result.  The hard thing is trying to balance these tradeoffs to produce something that looks close enough, while not introducing new problems.  Any of these choices is "making another SE" in a sense because it's just not going to exactly match the originals.  Harmy chose one path, but there are thousands of others you can choose as well.

Again, using actual original source material, this all changes.

Just for the sake of completeness, I made a small change to the Operation Eyestrain logo, which is visible on the first post but not yet in the project.  It now includes a Star Wars element (it had none before, and I can't believe I never thought of it until now).  Anyway, now it fits a little better with the others, even though it's always going to be a bit of an inside joke with limited popular appeal.

EDIT: Thought of a slogan too, but it doesn't go with the image: "We stare because we care"

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iamsometal said:

The color correction in 2.5 is honestly my only minor issue with this version.

With a "warts and all" restoration, you get warts.  Star Wars is the only film where Harmy was working with a pretty dead-on accurate theatrical color reference.  With the others (particularly Empire), he's a little freer to even out inconsistent skin tones, because he doesn't have a definitive color reference telling him he shouldn't.

There is also some level of suck that's always going to be left over from any Special Edition source material--to match colors better than what we have now, you'd need original film elements (IMO DrDre's example demonstrates that trying to exactly match the Blu-ray to theatrical colors can end up blowing out detail, so you may want to bump the gamma to compensate, but then you lose color accuracy, and so on).  Not that that isn't coming some day, but Harmy may not be the one to do it.  It's not "Despecialized" if it wasn't "Special" to begin with.

Just use tsMuxer to create your Blu-ray folder structure, and burn that to disc using ImgBurn.  Haven't messed with other software, but there's always a risk something may try to re-encode the video, and that would open the door to all sorts of problems.

DuracellEnergizer said:

I'm confused. Is Artoo a cyborg, now, or a muscle man with a trash can worn over his head?

Don't get duped by the clever editing.  That blast on C-3PO is an exit wound.  He's been shot in the chest before, so he'll live, as R2 is assessing in the second frame.  R2 is pulling out his muscle man accessories because his normal ones aren't sufficient to finish the job.  His little saw blade can't cut through metal, his zapper doesn't have the voltage, and his grabber arm can't beat the life out of a damaged robot.  And that stormtrooper?  Clearly just an action figure superimposed over the original images.

Not too surprising, Harmy's is (more or less) matched to a Technicolor reference print, which would likely not exactly match the colors on another 35mm medium, even on opening day.  Even less so for something this old, even if it is relatively well preserved.  Technicolors may have been dimmer and greenish from the start, but a slightly pink-shifted and faded print would also look brighter and less green.  I'm inclined to say it's the latter--home video has really colored our memories of how this film looks.

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Hello new user titl... hrm, maybe not.

generalfrevious said:

 Well what changes could they make without George Lucas? Will Disney now put in bullshit changes of their own every seven years until the end of time? Then we have lost forever, straight into the dustbin of history. What a fucking horrible time to be a SW fan; we're drifting further and further away from the originals. Disney is now worse than Lucas.

The Reliance project was started before the Disney deal.  What they do with that project is yet to be seen--maybe they'll can it, maybe they'll let it go along whatever path it's already heading (simple corporate inertia will keep it on this track for a while), and maybe they'll intervene to change it into a proper 4K restoration of the OOT.  I think the evil is yet to be demonstrated, at least with these particular films.

towne32 said:

 I suppose I could go look at that thread again and not be lazy. But isn't the strong evidence just people who claimed to have seen it with no proof? (people who previously claimed it was the April 2015 digital release, until that came out and then "corrected" themselves)

No, it's based on a pretty fleeting but nevertheless concrete preview clip from Reliance Media.  Whether the 4K scan will ever amount to anything, be released as a consumer product, etc, is still an open question, but somebody's doing something, and that something oddly doesn't exactly match any previous release, at least in the preview clip (it would have been helpful if they included the Han/Jabba scene or something that helped nail down the clip's pedigree, but the clips are from scenes that weren't changed much, so it took our neighborhood lightsaber-glow-specialists and whatnot to sort out what it was).

generalfrevious said:

The only version that will exist are the 2011 versions

I'm surprised to be saying this to you, but you are not being nearly pessimistic enough.  The 4K thread contains some pretty strong evidence that we'll see yet another variation of the Special Editions, based on a 4K 97SE scan, but with changes piled on top of that.  The hydra still has a few heads left.

Well, to be clear, we're trying to get RID of the furigana by coming up with translations that don't need it--SW and ESB don't use any furigana anymore, only ROTJ still has them.

Mitch said:

I love the Harmy editions. It's the best we have until Lucasfilm gets around to releasing official theatrical versions

Given Lucasfilm's track record of quality through the years, I'd say it's quite likely Harmy's will remain better than any hypothetical future official release from Lucasfilm.

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The complete story of the Japanese subs is scattered over many posts in this thread, so I guess I'll collect them all in one spot.

First off, I always recommend graphical subtitles over SRT files.  SRT files have the advantage of being small, but you lose the font, size, positioning, and layout information you get with the graphical subtitles.  Even once we finally have Japanese SRT files for ROTJ, I wouldn't recommend anyone actually use them, but instead use the new graphical files derived from them.

That said, the current graphical files for ROTJ are upscaled SD-quality graphics, so they are not as sharp as the others, and they do look a little dated.  We have OCR software that can turn pretty much any graphical subtitle into equivalent text, but with many errors requiring manual correction.  We have had a project going on called Operation Eyestrain in which people are going through the files that have non-Western characters and manually correcting them character-by-character, usually not knowing the language in question (Arabic, Thai, Chinese, Hebrew), and in one special case, by someone who actually knows the language in question (Japanese).

Japanese is special in a few ways.  First off, the original GOUT-based Japanese subs make heavy use of Furigana, which is something that can't be copied in a usable fashion directly into a text file.  You could leave the Furigana out, of course, but that often leaves you with a pretty inadequate translation.  Also, there are some translation problems in the files themselves--for example, Return of the Jedi is translated as Revenge of the Jedi--historically interesting but not really a good translation.

For that reason, the Japanese SRT files aren't just a direct transcription of the GOUT subtitles, but are instead a re-translation, using the GOUT subtitles as a template.  I'm really quite happy with the work our translator has done on the first two movies, and I'm willing to wait to get subtitles from the same translator, making the same stylistic choices, etc, for the best consistency between films.  Right now, our translator is crazy busy with real life stuff, but still willing and able to do the job.  Since I have no real deadline other than Harmy's next ROTJ release, I'm happy to wait some more.

That said, if things go sideways and our original translator can't do it anymore, I am keeping a mental tally of other offers for help ;)

Pessimists get tired of being right all the time.

The revised 8.3 is up on MySpleen, enjoy!

Nope, at least not the audio I have.  I'll take a look.

Leonardo said:

CatBus said:

EDIT: Also, you know, if there's an audio genius with access to lots of high-end software who can simulate Dolby-A through software... uh, PM me ;)

 is that actually possible? what about Dolby-B or other variants?

Theoretically, I don't see why not.  But the last time I looked, this was technology protected by a pack of intellectual property crazed dingoes, so it wasn't in any low-to mid-range software.  At the extreme high end, it's possible.  Again, theoretically.  I have no idea what sort of terms they'd require to license it in software, but they have a pretty sweet hardware monopoly and they may fear risking that.

For an example many of you may already have in hand, the Latino Spanish track on Star Wars Despecialized 2.5 was recorded without the Dolby decoder.  It's still the best-sounding track we have of that particular dub, so we still use it, but you could A/B dialogue-free sections of that against the English 1977 mono mix to get an idea what the difference is (levels, dynamic range, recording quality, etc, may also be different for unrelated reasons).

I guess I should ask if -1 plans to re-capture the Latino Spanish audio with the Dolby decoder.  I think that was the plan, but you know how things go sometimes...

EDIT: Also, you know, if there's an audio genius with access to lots of high-end software who can simulate Dolby-A through software... uh, PM me ;)

A fixed version is already available--I'll PM you with a link to the fixed audio.

Film was used for the Star Wars credits even though we'd already made a very good reconstruction.  I'd say if he has the film elements, he'll use them, and stability/cleanup will be less of an issue for ROTJ than it was for SW.  I think the only reason we have a reconstruction for ESB is because the timing just didn't work out right for getting the film elements.