CatBus

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...

Cheezeburgers sended.

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 ;)

PM sent.

PM's sent.

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.

PM's sent.

Robot monkey pirate ninjas?

Safe from ninjas?

While he was off signing the documents, they could send ninjas to his house.  Just sayin'.

DavidMerrick said:

The 1.0 versions of all three movies, which draw primarily from the DVDs and laserdisc footage, are all released. Harms has put out HD versions of Star Wars and Empire (2.5 and 2.0, respectively) that use the Blu Rays as their basis and use more 35mm footage. He's working on 2.0 of Jedi currently.

Actually, FWIW, the 1.0 versions were mostly HD-sourced as well, using the HD broadcast of the 2004 SE.  2.x were the first versions to use the Blu-rays as a source.  The 1.0 versions were also much more heavily compressed than the 2.x series, but they were still HD.

AntcuFaalb said:

CatBus said:

Dang, that was your cue to trash-talk CRT's! Oh well, maybe next time.

CRTs are wonderful. >:-{

That was my custom-made troll-bait lovingly crafted to target you ;)

Agreed about CRT's, though.  I spent a large part of last weekend with the kids cooped up in a vacation rental with one of those crappy 16x9 SD-CRT's, with a bottom-shelf DVD player putting comb artifacts over everything, and a weird zoom setting cropping off huge amounts of the edges of the image, and yet... I just couldn't stop gaping in awe of the perfect motion handling on this setup that probably cost $100 total, outperforming (in this one metric, 3:2 pulldown notwithstanding) what I've seen in ridiculously-priced OLED demo units.

Dang, that was your cue to trash-talk CRT's! Oh well, maybe next time.

Owyn_Merrilin said:

Drifter1989 said:

I think these DVD re releases are a lucas attempt at trying to trick people to buy altered versions. I've seen a few DVD releases claiming to be 'origonal versions' but weren't unaltered. 

The DVDs that claim to be the original that you're thinking of are probably the 2006 release.

Actually I think he's referring to the fact that Lucasfilm insists on using the term "Original Trilogy" to talk about any release of the Special Editions (to distinguish them from the Prequel Trilogy), when it's perfectly logical for Star Wars fans to interpret "Original Trilogy" to mean the original films, to distinguish them from the Special Editions.  That difference in interpretation has certainly padded their sales figures with accidental sales.

While I think the "Original Trilogy" term is vague enough, I think the fact that they no longer use the words "Special Edition" anywhere on the packaging definitely qualifies as a bait-and-switch.

PM sent.

This project is not available in AVI format, unless you got some low-quality third-party re-encode off a torrent site.  I'd suggest downloading the real thing, as the quality and compatibility are both undoubtedly much better.

PM sent.