CatBus

PM sent.  Heh, I get to do that in another thread.

Ah, too bad.  I'll find it and send you a link to what I have.

So, I'm not clear, do you have a better source for the Han-Greedo bit?  Because, if so, this is fantastic!

team_negative1 said:

We are actually looking into 70mm transfers currently. Running some test clips of Empire to see what happens. Nothing about full prints though.

We would want those primarily for their soundtrack.

Team Negative1

Umm, 70mm Empire? Yum, alternate video & audio!

Can't say about this particular film, but I've read that 70mm blow-up prints often do have slightly more detail than 35mm prints.  Not sure how the math behind this observation pencils out, but maybe it's just that size matters more than you'd think.  Frankly in this case, though, I'd say practical matters such as how well the film was cared for, how long it was in circulation, etc is far more of a concern than hypothetical best-case scenarios.

EDIT: Beat to the answer by happycube.

DrDre said:

Thanks for the positive feedback!

Back to the aspect ratio mystery. Here's two comparisons with Harmy's DE. Some aspects of the frames seem to suggest that the AR should be wider, while others suggest to opposite. Anyone?

http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/130819

http://screenshotcomparison.com/comparison/130820

I'd probably compare against similar frames from Negative1's project.  Harmy's projects, while wonderful, are based on the Blu-rays, which can't be considered definitive references for anything at all.

All three, last I read about it, and I recall some excitingly cryptic comments about the 6-channel mix which I chose to interpret as meaning something cryptically awesome rather than run-of-the-mill cryptically obtuse.

EDIT: Crap, no the 6-channel was for Legacy, which means the cryptic was definitely awesome rather than obtuse, but whatever it is, it's likely not in this project.

G E Predator said:

That shows Lucas has no appreciation for his art.

Or respect for other peoples' art. A most meddlesome executive producer.

It occurred to me that I'd given Operation Eyestrain a cool name but no accompanying logo.  So here you go:

The joke may be lost on you if you weren't into the late 80's/early 90's ska/punk scene*.  You can look up Operation Ivy to see where this comes from.  Feallan, Sadako, this eyedropper's for you!

* To be honest, I wasn't into it either, but I worked in a record store and this image of theirs stuck with me.

PM sent.  Labors of love and labors of OCD are sometimes very similar ;)

Mine's pronounceable, it's just Welsh.  No, seriously, it's all good.  Honestly the concept of having an official shortened URL is probably a little wrong, since people are quite likely used to handling their own shortening and would never think there's one already set up to use.

The need for it came not from Twitter (where I assume it's way more useful), but from the NFO file.  Some NFO readers add clickable hyperlinks to URLs, and the way I'd broken up the long URL in the existing NFO file meant it didn't work in those readers.  Using a shortened URL, it works without making the NFO file 100 columns wide.  And for all three people who use an NFO reader instead of a text editor so they can see the not-actually-very-fancy graphics in the Project Threepio file, well, probably only one of them uses one that does clickable hyperlinks.  So Bob, if you're reading this, I did this for you.

Well, mine's one longer, isn't it? It's not ten. You see, most blokes, you know, will be browsing at ten. You're on ten here, all the way up, all the way up, all the way up, you're on ten on your browser. Where can you go from there? Where? Nowhere. Exactly. What we do is, if we need that extra push over the cliff, you know what we do? Eleven. Exactly. One longer.

...

I guess an "official" ensmallified URL isn't strictly necessary, as people could do it on their own.  I just thought the fact that the current project URL approached 100 characters on its own presented a problem.  Either of the above enweensificated URLs should work fine.

Project Threepio now has an official, uh, enshortenated URL.  So if you need to refer to Project Threepio in some sort of newfangled social media context these kids are so on about these days, you can use this URL:

http://goo.gl/qwfGLz

Almost there.

It might not matter to a huge number of people here, but the latest free version of Muxman contains some errors.  The language codes for Indonesian, Javanese, Hebrew, and Yiddish are incorrect, so if you make DVDs with subtitles (or audio) in those languages using Muxman, your player may or may not be able to identify the language of that track in its language selection menus (some players know about the language code errors and can successfully identify them, others follow the spec more strictly and don't).

I made a customized Muxman executable for Project Threepio which uses the correct codes for these languages, so DVDs have better compatibility on this front.  I don't know if you plan to distribute binaries as part of the guide or not, but you could certainly include my customized binary.  If not, I suppose you can reference the Project Threepio project thread for people who wanted to get the modified binary.

Ah, the initial complaint may have been more of an audio quality complaint rather than a translation/voices complaint anyway--i.e. yes, VHS audio isn't so great.  If that's the case, this is just the Brazilian dub debate all over again.

FWIW, my personal priorities for dubs are:

1) authenticity of the recording--SE dubs are only considered of no other dubs exist

2) quality of the translation--only considered if there are multiple non-SE dubs to choose from

3) quality of the voice acting--only considered if there are multiple non-SE dubs with good translations (we should be so lucky!)  Not really applicable to voiceover dubs.

4) audio quality--only even considered if the top three factors are tied.  This is what drives me to prefer the Russian voiceover-style dub for Star Wars over the traditional acting-style dub, which has dreadful audio quality but seems decent in every other respect.

I really don't know how well my priorities on this matter line up with Harmy's, and I just give him the dubs I choose, which he's free to use or discard as he sees fit.  But obviously there's a lot of room for disagreement--if your top priority is crystal clear audio, you're going to pick different dubs than I do.

Unless he forgets.  They, I meant they, of course.

Neat.  Well if you've got these already synced and Harmy does indeed deem them to be better than the ones we use now (i.e. if they don't actually have the bad translations he mentioned in the 97 dubs)... out with the old, in with the new.

What's your opinion on the quality differences?

TV's Frink said:

The only thing less necessary than a hashtag on this forum are mirrors in our houses.

Team Olie

you forgot

to include

later,

see that it doesn't

happen again

Regarding the MPC bug tracker, whatever issue seemed to be going on yesterday seems to be resolved now.  I was able to file my bug with them, so I don't need any assistance.

Okay, this is plain weird.  I'm trying to make this BD-compliant, and so I re-encoded the video (works fine), and the main audio also works fine without alterations, but I'm having a heck of a time with the isolated score and French tracks.  I've tried re-encoding and everything--they're just dead silent on my system, but play fine on my PC.  Any ideas?  48k sampling, 16-bit audio, not much that can go wrong there, right?  Weird watermark/copy protection issue?  No idea.

Harmy chose the Czech dub (not sure the criteria of this one over the 95 one).  If you can convince him to drop the current dub in favor of the 95 dub, I'm sure it'll make the next release.  But that's a big "if".

He has mentioned that the Czech SE dubs are technically better, but neither he nor I are interested in including despecialized SE dubs when there are already available dubs, even if lesser-quality, for the unaltered trilogy.  One reason for this is that it's impossible to completely despecialize the audio, so original mixes simply always sound more authentic, and the second reason is that there is a certain nostalgia factor for the old dubs--to watch them as you first saw them as a child.  For languages with multiple original dubs, there's always a bit of subjectivity in picking which is best.  Hell, there are like fifteen Russian dubs (slight exaggeration), at some point you just need to pick one and run with it.

All of this doesn't mean you aren't free to add your own audio if the one we pick doesn't suit you.  You can't please everyone, and I think Harmy and I also share the opinion that one dub in each language is typically adequate for global accessibility, and that including several audio options for any given language is up to another project (much like the Krieg der Sterne/German project does).

Still kinda sorta holding out hope for some surprise unique mono mix.

I seem to be having trouble activating my new account in MPC-HC's bug tracking system (username: CatBus)--not receiving any of the activation mails.  Does anyone have an account in that tracker, or know some admin who can help with this?  I really just want to file a bug report.

Never tried the box, but most software pays very little attention to the actual size of an image when printing--they all attempt to do different stretch-to-fit algorithms (such that "stretch to fit" and "don't stretch to fit" are actually just two different stretching algorithms, neither correct).

I use Photoshop, which works.  I'm sure there's others.  Windows Photo Viewer is a bad move.