CatBus

ATMachine said:

In his 1977 story conferences with Leigh Brackett, GL said something about wanting to create a fantasy film where all the knights rode around on giant lizards.

Then he made Willow and completely failed to pick up on that idea.

(Or maybe he just realized how hard it would be, thanks to all the stop-motion Tauntauns and AT-ATs used in ESB.)

Pity, in my view. I'd really like to see on screen a fantasy world where heroes ride on sauruses in the vasty desert, Lawrence of Arabia style.

Actually he did make this movie, it's just that the final production design really hid the fact that Tauntauns were originally conceived as snow lizards.  When I saw that description of them, I thought the writer was on drugs--they were clearly mammals of some sort for goodness sake, but then I saw it elsewhere, so, uhh... vasty ice fields, anyone?

PM sent.

PM sent.

PM sent.

ray_afraid said:

Ahem...

Harmy said:

...
Wrong thread.

He finally took the hint. Frink can have his thread back.

PM sent.

What's best for me about these previews is that watching the official Blu-ray footage is like getting kicked in the teeth all over again.  God, those red skin tones look AWFUL.

EDIT: But on the positive side, the stabilization and color correction looks great.

Good idea to remove links from your posts here, it's against the rules.

Especially with the Russian audio, the fanfare was damaged or partial in my sources, so it's patched over from another source.

I'll do the rest via PM.

Stereo, edited speed so that the pitch was correct.

metall_havy said:

Guys, it's fine, my  interest in the Soviet dubbing, with the picture in 1977.Get Soviet dubbing was not easy.

 I've got the Soviet dub synced to this project, if you don't already have it.

Yeah, we've got that one.  If you want audio waver so bad the London Symphony Orchestra sounds like a mariachi band, we got you covered ;)

If you mean the nasty-ass dub, then yes.  But we also have a decent Russian voiceover.

Does anyone know if there were any dubs that were screwed up on the 2.5 release for any reason (I think I recall sync issues with some of the earlier 2.x releases)?  I'm trying to provide updated tracks for the possibility of the BD, and I know there's updated versions for the German and Castilian tracks, but honestly forget if there were others.  Plus added Russian, Ukrainian, and Thai.

Faded prints and typical home video overbrightening account for pretty much all of the differences.  There was also likely a missing filter on home video releases regarding the R2 canyon scene.

Basically the color of crap film stock goes all to hell over ten years, let alone twenty years.  It's only because of superior-quality Technicolor prints that we actually know how things looked back then (more or less).  We do not have references of that quality for Empire...

Project Threepio is based on the original stereo/surround mixes.  It does not make any attempt to accommodate later audio revisions (85 mix, 93 mix), it does not attempt to match the dialogue on foreign dubs (i.e. the translations can be different), nor does it include alternate crawl translations for the 81 video revision.

The mono mixes are a bit special, since they are original, so Project Threepio includes subtitles for the mono mixes of Star Wars and Empire (16mm), but only in English, and only in SRT format.  I don't plan to do subtitles for the 70mm/8mm audio for Empire, even though that's also a unique original mix.

Future versions of Project Threepio will include a way to align foreign subtitles to the timing of the mono mixes, although it still will not include translations of the different lines.

Anyone who wants to use Project Threepio with a mono mix can do it, but there's some manual work involved.  It's doable, but it doesn't work out of the box.

Direct other questions to the Project Threepio thread.  This little question can go way down the rabbit hole in so many directions.

True.  I suppose "it's not really watchable in its current state, but just wait until the fan editors fix all of the major issues" is a quality tier that usually means crap for other films, but it's the gold standard for official Star Wars releases... sigh.

Leonardo said:

TV's Frink said:

Nocturnaloner said:

On the blu-ray.com forum, someone posted that the UOT will be released on blu-ray on 9/21/15.  Seems legit, right? 

 I have some legit property I'd like to sell you.

 is it the Brooklyn Bridge? I bought that already from a rabbit years ago.

It should also be mentioned that the person on the Blu-ray forum didn't actually say anything at all about a UOT Blu-ray release.  Just another OT Blu-ray re-release, which falls neatly into the "who the hell cares" bucket.  In addition to that, they're also talking out their ass, but that's really beside the point.

Funcha--if it helps, the community does benefit from this.  Not as directly as you'd certainly prefer, but the existence of this project makes all of the projects that you CAN download better.  Far better.

Nobody expects the Spanish Inq-- er, yeah, the FBI, I guess you can expect them.

Even if VBR would work, I wouldn't do it for this particular purpose.  It'd just make it harder to find out where the bitrate peaks are across all tracks, and you'd have to test the whole movie, rather than just a little bit.  At least with CBR you know every second is getting the same bits from each track, and you only have to worry about bitrate spikes coming from the subtitles.

Video bitrate won't change anything--the 8Mbps is reserved for non-video streams, so it can only be adjusted via audio and subtitle changes.

192k audio streams (most dubs and alternate tracks) are already pretty dang tiny--if audio is where we want to make cuts, we need to cut down the big ones, the lossless tracks.  Even encoding with a slightly smaller lossy core isn't going to save much space--switching from lossless to lossy on one or two tracks will free up a world of space.  The question is: which tracks?  I think hairy_hen's 5.1 track should be sacred, but that's about it.

Yeah, have it handled in the audio selection logic.  You choose Thai audio, you get Thai forced subs whether you like it or not.  The trick is that they should also be UN-selected when you select any other audio option.

Regarding which subtitles to drop, here's my advice:

Drop the matching subs.  I'll admit it--it's a gimmick, just use the regular English subs.  But in answer to your question, the v2 subs match the whole v2.x series, including 2.5.

Drop dialects.  Drop Castilian Spanish (keeping American Spanish), drop European Portuguese (keeping Brazilian Portuguese), and drop Malay (keeping Indonesian).  I'd also say for combined quality/language overlap reasons you could drop Ukrainian.

Keep in mind that by including a dub (i.e. the Thai dub), you'll also need to include the forced subs that go with it.  Did I mention we have some dub updates too? ;)

For the rest, just follow the order listed in the Project Threepio README, which roughly follows number of speakers.  Get as far down the list as you can and cut the rest.  Yes, that will mean you will cut high-quality awesome subtitles like our Icelandic subtitles, and it kinda pains me to see that, but the cut has to be somewhere, and that seems a reasonable way to do it.

Also, when you get ready for a final run, PM me for a more current link.  There are some minor fixes that the most recent version doesn't have, and I'd like the Blu-ray to have them.

Nanner Split said:

I deleted all subtitle tracks that are listed as "unverified" in the OP of this thread (and ONLY those) and recompiled the disc and it was a success, so unless there are some specific ones you would like me to try to add back in, we are now good to go.

Well, assuming you go with the most recent Project Threepio, the unverified languages have dropped to just Estonian, Farsi, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese (and I don't even list them like that anymore, because the quality issues aren't nearly as bad).  If pressed for space, you could also drop dialects (one of the Spanish or Portuguese dialects, for example).

The next version will also have Malay, and for God's sake use the 720p graphical subs instead of trying to render the things yourself.