CatBus

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TV's Frink said:

The randomness of this 9th anniversary got me thinking to check what gift would be appropriate.  Apparently it would be willow/wicker, pottery, or leather.

Let the S&M jokes begin...

Come on, there's an obvious joke there.  You're not really trying.

Yay for the GOUT! While fairly useless in its own right, it provided some unique raw materials for fan preservations:

- A frame reference that fans could agree on for all of their audio and video projects so that things could work together better.  Imagine if Harmy's DeEd used the DC for video, but hairy_hen decided to sync his audio to the JSC, etc.

- The only home video release of the 1977 Star Wars crawl/flyover (making the choice of 93 audio more ridiculous).

- Lots of language and subtitle options (in various unique global releases) in an easily rippable format.  Without this, our preservations wouldn't have the global accessibility they currently enjoy.

And finally, it provided the final push for some fans (like me) to get off their butts and start doing something to save Star Wars for posterity, because it was finally crystal clear that Lucasfilm wasn't going to do it.

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There's lots of things that complicate any color correction evaluations.

First off, nobody's color memory is perfect.  And I say this with the utmost respect for people who do this professionally, and who clearly have a better memory for such things than I do, but the memories of humans are faulty, period.  Nothing matches a good objective reference, and, well, to borrow from Monty Python: We've already got one.  It's very nice.

Secondly, objective references aren't identical.  Harmy used a high-quality scan of a Technicolor print.  The person in question, even when they were using a reference all those decades ago, was, at best, using fast-fading 35mm filmstock, already several years old and nowhere near its original colors.  Even before fading, the Technicolor and other 35mm prints may have had different color characteristics, and may have looked a little different when projected--but the Technicolor print retained its color, while the other 35mm prints lost it very, very quickly.

Thirdly, the source for most of the DeEd's is the Blu-rays.  They have already been heavily manipulated, and not all of that manipulation is reversible.  Sometimes Harmy needs to choose a least bad approximation of the Technicolor prints, because an exact match is either not possible or not desirable for other reasons.

I'm not saying it can't be improved--I'm sure it can.  But Harmy is sitting on a copy of pretty much the definitive color reference for this film.  That is much, much better than the best-retained memories and gut feelings of even the best color experts around.

Now, for Empire?  Gut feelings have a lot more value there, as no objective reference exists, AFAIK, although I believe some of the Empire prints faded significantly slower than others, so they may be useful.  Jedi was filmed on color-stable filmstock, so more-or-less objective references likely abound.

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Multiple takes, multiple pronunciations.  They don't always use the same take when they replace dialogue.  It doesn't sound like "the" to me.  It sounds like the soft "d" from the end of "find" blends with "a" to make something that sounds like "fayn-dhuh".  There's a lot of that to be found in any movie really, but, you know, it was the seventies... slurred speech and all that.

Haven't honestly gone to that spot to listen, but the 1977 English audio is, as far as anyone's been able to tell, using in-theatre recordings and 35mm captures, faithful to how it sounded in the theatres.  For the Blu-rays, they purportedly went back and found the original unmixed dialogue, which theoretically could make the dialogue clearer.  I've never found the Blu-ray audio particularly bearable, but you may have found a spot where it worked.

Well, to be clear, "supposed to" doesn't necessarily line up with reality.  Accounting for blanking makes little sense in a world where DVD's are expected to be played back over all-digital connections, so modern DVDs frequently go right to the edges.  But older discs tend to put some room for blanking on the sides, and that seems to include the GOUT.  If there's usable image within the blanking area, you're free to decide what you want done with it, as long as you maintain the right aspect ratio.  I tend to just chop it, because it was designed for that to happen.

Ryan McAvoy said:

They spend half the movie trying to capture, burn alive and eat our heroes...

That is, believe it or not, part of the "cutesy".  For audiences who saw a lot of adventure serials in the seventies and eighties, the "natives capturing the heroes and roasting/boiling them alive" schtick was already so worn out by 1983 that by then it was a well-understood joke, not a threat.  It was a cheesy homage to the genre, like Chewie's Tarzan yell.  If anyone was terrified, it was only through lack of exposure to pop culture, even kids.  Scooby Doo, Gilligan's Island, The Far Side.  EVERYONE knew this joke, and they'd heard it a hundred times apiece.  The entire sequence was one big sight gag.

That doesn't mean any of the other arguments are less worthy, or that ROTJ can't be a fine film in spite of or because of it, but the "roasting alive=terrifying menace" thing just ain't there.

No, an error with one of the DVD releases.  I'll PM you a corrected track.

Yeah, I've worked with a Hong Kong film, so I know all about misaligned dub-overs ;)  Heck, in Star Wars, there's even lines where people's lips say an entirely different line (i.e. Leia's lips say a 70mm line in Empire, but the 35mm audio says something else).  In this case, I'm just talking about the problems introduced by mix-and-matching the PAL and NTSC audio and video, that's all.

As for interlacing artifacts, I think it was stated early on that digging out bad IVTC frames wasn't in the scope of this project, but that may have changed.

Argh.  Yes, for ROTJ, PAL is slightly better visually.  But all preservations seem to be gravitating toward NTSC framecount, even if the ROTJ source was PAL, by deleting and inserting the extra frames.  Man, all I want is for Han's lips to move at the same time he's talking...

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Last question, I swear.  NTSC and PAL discs of the GOUT have slightly different frame counts.  This causes a noticeable sync difference in ROTJ.  Which source are you using for ROTJ?

What's your preferred encoding/bitrate for audio?  AC3 is lossy, but pretty universally supported.  I typically do 224k AC3 for lossy encodings (112k for mono, 448k for 5.1), but I can also do DTS-MA or WAV for lossless (or to let you handle the encoding yourself).

We have an excellent-quality 77 stereo mix sourced primarily from the Japanese P&S Laserdisc (digital audio), and patched over with audio from analogue Laserdisc sources when needed, already synced to the video we're talking about.  We also have a lesser-quality 1977 mono mix and a fine 1977 6-channel reconstruction.  If home video release and top-notch quality are requirements, then 1977 stereo is the best option IMO.

VHS... *spits* ...we absolutely positively do not ever have to deal with that crap.  Heck, even if we want the 93 mix, I'd recommend at least using a Laserdisc-derived copy for the improved quality over DVD.  We've already got one of those synced too.

DrDre said:

I was planning on leaving the audio as it is. So, it will be an exact dublicate of the audio on the DVD. I think it sounds fine as well. :-)

Bah, 1993 audio with 1977 video?  Such an anachronism shouldn't be allowed to survive.  In my opinion, while I admittedly don't like the 93 audio anyway, it should at least accompany the 81 crawl to maintain some semblance of historical... uh, whatever. 77 video must have one of the 77 audio mixes.

Regarding the AR, did you crop off the left- and rightmost 8 pixels before stretching?  Because those 16 pixels of blanking (NTSC only, PAL is a little different) are never intended to make it to the display device, and the actual usable image is 704x480.  If you don't do this cropping, all DVDs with analogue blanking will make everyone just a hair too tall and skinny, circles will be ovals, etc... (but there's no guarantee DVDs will have the correct AR anyway even taking all that into account)

EDIT: Wikipedia linkage for blanking

Nah, this is an open "PM sent" thread.  Everyone's free to send them ;)

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Wazzles said:

CatBus said:

What? No mention of spiders? They happen to be the fiercest killers in the insect kingdom, I'll have you know.

 They're not insects.

Whoosh! Tell that to Jon Peters.

What? No mention of spiders? They happen to be the fiercest killers in the insect kingdom, I'll have you know.

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