CatBus

timdiggerm said:

CatBus said:

There was a conveyor belt scene in AOTC? Seriously? Wow did that movie make no lasting impression.

 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-K4GE9RMTZI

Can't tell if crappy fan edit or crappy real edit.

Seriously, that whole video triggered zero recollection for me. My only memory of the entire damn movie was an obnoxious screeching lizard, which was my cue for a bathroom break.  A pretend bathroom break, so that I could just get out of the theatre for a few minutes.  Maybe that scene was in the middle of the lizard scene?  If not, wow, no impression at all.

There was a conveyor belt scene in AOTC? Seriously? Wow did that movie make no lasting impression.

Okay, we have scripts. I've put out feelers for some voice talent, but if you know of anyone with a radio-friendly voice (and preferably experience, but you can't have everything) who'd be willing to help, let me know.

Complete trilogy commitment is needed, I want to avoid mix-and-match voices if I can help it. The scripts contain pronunciation cues for some of the more obscure Star Wars names (Rieekan, Ozzel, etc), so they don't even have to be a big Star Wars fan to do it, although I'm sure it wouldn't hurt.

Bingowings said:

If they came out first people would have probably rated them quite well...

For people who are not me, you may be right ;)

Obviously you liked the Hobbit films a bit better than me, I'll leave it at that.

Bingowings said:

The fashion for disliking The Hobbit is like the bashing Quantum of Solace got after the almost identical Casino Royale and before the almost identical Skyfall. It's just a popularity blip. 

That's taking things too far in the other direction. People who are disappointed by a mediocre film that pales in comparison to related films tend to exaggerate their dislike, saying it was awful/horrible/unwatchable, when its only real fault was being dull.  I'd agree with that*.

But to suggest that the dislike for the films is due more to the popular mood than an actual assessment of the film itself, well, that's just wrong. People just disagree on whether films are good or not, and sometimes you will find yourself in the minority. Just ask me about Cabin Boy sometime...

*EDIT: This statement is not to be interpreted as applying to the Prequels! No, those were well and truly awful.

I've sent Alestat our Hungarian dubs for the whole trilogy. He should be all set.

They both suffer from serious problems, but not the same problems.

The Hobbitses just have poor editing.  Chop ~70% of the movies away and suddenly what seemed like crappy writing or over-reliance on CGI at the time would just be revealed to be the sort of uninteresting filler that would have been edited out under normal circumstances.  I'm sure if nothing was ever cut from the Lord of the Rings Trilogy, it would have fared no better.

The PT, on the other hand, has crappy writing, crappy acting, crappy directing, crappy CGI, mediocre music, boring sets, poor editing, etc.  It's not just bad, it's really a whole different level of awful.

Both, I'd agree, are symptomatic of creators operating without any outside checks on their ideas, or they'd have never seen the light of day.

Bingowings said:

As we have explored before opinions can be wrong (only Americans seem to think this is impossible).

In defense [sic] of Americans, we may have stripped the word "opinion" of any useful meaning, but we have taken the art of pedantry and missing the point to a whole new level.

.Mac. said:

I understand that many people are bitter about the PT, and rightfully so.

It's not just that, though (although it is mostly that). The other problem is that Return of the Jedi closed pretty much all of the OT storylines down.  Unlike Empire, which followed in the traditions of your classic serials by opening up more plotlines than it resolved, Jedi wrapped up the loose ends and put a nice bow on top of it for everyone.  The story was finished.  I didn't really want to see any more Star Wars movies after Jedi (for the same reason I really don't want to see a sequel to Casablanca--the story is already complete), and the prequels simply drew a line under that sentiment.

Anyone who makes a sequel pretty much has to create their own story. This is risky because people loved the old stories, and would accept continuations of those stories more easily than entirely new stories that just happen to have some of the same characters later in life.  Not saying it won't be good, just saying it's a tough act to follow.

The next versions of our major ROTJ preservations will be a few frames different than the current batch (they will use NTSC frames instead of PAL), so for all of the ROTJ dubs that I synced to the PAL frames, I have created new dubs synced to the NTSC frames.

This includes Polish, Russian (voiceover), Ukrainian, and Thai.

There are, of course, lots of others dubs out there that I did not personally sync, but at least the ones I did a preliminary check on are actually close enough to the NTSC frames (~20ms difference, even on audio from the PAL GOUT!) to not require any modification for this change.

Since the difference is, at maximum, only two frames, in my opinion it's only noticeable for audio with English dialogue anyway due to visible lip sync issues (English audio and voiceover dubs), so I probably didn't even need to modify the Thai dub.

Anyway, at the moment, these new dubs don't actually perfectly sync with any major preservation, but that will hopefully change soon.

V2? Eh? Details?

I'd be satisfied hearing people who had worked with Leigh pronouncing Leigh.  Presumably if they pronounced it too badly when they worked together, she'd have corrected them. That's why I was interested in seeing if anyone heard it during a commentary track or making-of featurette, even if it was someone else talking.

But yeah, point taken about people and their weird-ass pronunciations.

So Harmy, are you going NTSC on this one? I don't want to start editing until you give the word.

Also, does anyone have the French audio for ROTJ from the NTSC GOUT? This track was available on both NTSC and PAL, and I'd rather have one straight from the NTSC than a re-encode of the PAL.

Aggh, conflicting opinions on Leigh's name (Molly offered "Lee" in another thread). Anyone got anything authoritative on that one for a tiebreaker? Or a podcast we can listen to to find out for ourselves?

I get the feeling transcribing is the easy part--doing the voice recording and putting together the audio tracks is where this thing will really go off the rails ;)

Thanks for the kind words, though. The genesis for Project Threepio was an SDH project for a deaf friend. It just didn't seem right not to extend the same courtesy to the visually-impaired, once we had the materials to make it happen.  Heck, once we have the scripts, we could translate the descriptive scripts into other languages and then merge them into the dubs and then... argh, no. Someone else will need to do that part!

I posted this and some other pronunciation questions in a new thread here:

http://originaltrilogy.com/forum/topic.cfm/How-to-pronounce-the-names-of-the-creators-of-Star-Wars/topic/17138/

Figured there are plenty of people who probably know the correct pronunciations, but few of them who are also interested in this somewhat arcane topic.

I have two scripts complete, the third (Jedi) may be harder than the others, due to big chunks of video missing in the SE.

One of my failings is that I've never really cared to listen to a commentary track or behind-the-scenes making-of featurette about Star Wars. As such, I've never really heard the correct way to pronounce many of the names behind it.

Can anyone provide guidance with the following?

Leigh Brackett (sounds like "Lee"?)

Richard Marquand (sounds like "Mark-AND"?)

Howard Kazanjian (sounds like "Kaz-AN-jee-an"?)

Ian McDiarmid (sounds like "Mick-DUR-mid"?)

All of the others seem fairly self-explanatory, but if you know of any that have a very counter-intuitive pronunciation, go ahead and let me know that too.

Ugh. I suppose the upside of using NTSC-synced video is that PAL-synced audio will be, at worst, two frames late, which is more tolerable than two frames early.

Here's the original discussion of the frame differences. PAL has two extra frames at the Dagobah-to-fleet transition. NTSC has an extra frame during the Endor battle after the Ewoks jump over a log.

http://originaltrilogy.com/forum/topic.cfm/Whats-missing-from-GOUT/post/457548/#TopicPost457548

The screencaps appear to be dead though, so maybe you could get frame numbers from Darth Mallwalker.

Uh, yeah, PAL frames or we're already totally screwed.  Please don't switch back to NTSC, or people won't be able to share audio between your project and others, e.g. dark_jedi's.

And Harmy--dammit about the burnt-in sub timing, but I'm sure I'll survive.

EDIT: Regarding the Belbucus tracks, I think we're likely to get another digital stereo track from schorman's archive, for '83 and '93, which will hopefully be better quality, as well as giving us a chance to sync to the PAL frames.  If Puggo discovered a unique 16mm Jedi mono track (did he?), then we can do that as well.  Resyncing a handful of audio tracks for which we have excellent-quality sources available is the least of our worries.

I wouldn't mind hearing if you plan on timing the burnt-in subtitles any differently for the next version (i.e. appearing or disappearing on different frames), or changing their appearance (positioning, size, etc) from 1.x.  I'm really hoping "No" for timing differences, but early notice would help me.

Actually all our frame references use the PAL GOUT for Jedi, because someone, at some point, decided that the PAL GOUT had slightly more detail for Jedi.  So you'd actually be making a mistake by using the NTSC GOUT.  i.e. dark_jedi's upscales and various audio tracks use the PAL GOUT frames.  hariy_hen's ROTJ 5.1 audio used NTSC GOUT by mistake, but he plans to fix this.

So we use NTSC GOUT for SW and Empire, PAL GOUT for Jedi.  Because we're weird that way.

Not excited here either. This could change as the (reputable) reviews roll in, though.

I probably won't even bother to see it unless people really rave about it.  The Star Wars franchise has been dead to me for so long, I have my doubts anything can kick it back to life again.

I saw ROTS (for free, come on...) when some people said it wasn't as bad as the other prequels. Never again. Never. Again.

Agreed (except on points 4, 5 and 6...). TPM was an awful movie and huge disappointment, but the prequel trilogy steadily got worse as it continued, hitting rock bottom (or so I dearly hope) in ROTS.

Scripts are well underway, let me know if there are any special requests or things to look out for.  I'm planning to include credits up to a point (basically getting through all the stars and co-stars, but stopping short of the scrolling credits).  That way, pronunciation issues are kept to a minimum, except I'm not sure how to pronounce Leigh Brackett's first name.

Sticking pretty tightly to the American script for Star Wars (the one included with the DeEd, which I've decided sounds bad enough to just go ahead and redo with the others) and the UK scripts for Empire and Jedi (the Alex Newman/James O'Hara ones, despecialized), but I am going through and fixing occasional things that sound wrong or are bad descriptions (by my judgment).

TV's Frink said:

We did?  I thought we signed up because we wanted the OOT on DVD, and we stayed because hairy_hen's mom is easy.

That's no mom.