CatBus

JediZombie said:

I doubt casual fans care one way or the other. 

Many casual fans, particularly younger ones, have never seen the original Star Wars trilogy.  Which really indicates the need for a term for people who call themselves Star Wars fans, but who aren't in fact fans of the Star Wars trilogy, since the term "Star Wars fan" is already taken by those who are.  Too many Star Warses.

RobotWalrus said:

Sweet Lord. I had attributed the problem with the Castillian track to either a honest mistake by whoever put together the GOUT edition or just lazy editing, but after reading what you all mention, I'm beginning to think that they are doing it on purpose.

Not to mention the Russian dub mixes PAL and film-speed sources without pitch-correcting them to match. I get the feeling that dubbing is an afterthought in a lot of places, and not just with Star Wars. The only place I've noticed that dubs get a real professional level of attention is in France.  In fact, I personally had a pretty low opinion of dubbing in general until I heard some French audio for some films.

Well, the Castilian audio is fixed now, and I think the only noticeable side-effect is that Chewie's SE door-tapping is now present, but I think that's more bearable than switching dialects (and actors) mid-film.

RobotWalrus said:

I'd like to point out, though, a little problem I found in the Castillian Spanish audio track. From 1:16:45 to 1:19:46 (the first half of the trash compactor scene), the audio is in Latino Spanish instead of Castillian Spanish.

Just to close the loop on this, there is certainly an error here, and it's like that on the GOUT, which means it likely has been an error on most Castilian dubs of the OT since it was first out on home video.  IIRC there's a reel change right in the middle of the trash compactor scene, so if, perhaps, there was damage on their Castilian audio at the end of one reel, maybe some wise guy thought they could just splice in the Latino audio and nobody would care.  When they went back and re-did things for the Special Editions, they either found some undamaged audio or managed to repair or re-record it, so it's correct on the Blu-rays.  Since that scene isn't very much altered, it should be a piece of cake to restore.

It reminds me very much of what happened with the missing dialogue on the German dub, and I wonder if the other pre-home-video dubs (French, Italian) may need some looking over too.  RobotWalrus has checked the rest of the trilogy and the Castilian dubs for those are fine.

I'll make a fixed track and make it available to any interested parties.  I don't have it yet, but let me know if you're interested.

CatBus said:

RobotWalrus said:

I'd like to point out, though, a little problem I found in the Castillian Spanish audio track. From 1:16:45 to 1:19:46 (the first half of the trash compactor scene), the audio is in Latino Spanish instead of Castillian Spanish.

Whoah.  That audio is straight off the NTSC GOUT IIRC (maybe PAL GOUT... the splicing was on the Latino track, not the Castilian one).  Maybe it's always been like this?  Does anyone have a source that doesn't do this?

PM if you've got another source, even if it's just partial for the section mentioned.

I'd like to add that Special Edition sources would probably be fine for this segment, if there really is different Castilian Spanish for this.

RobotWalrus said:

First of all, Mr. Harmy, thank you very much for creating and sharing this incredible redux (or should I say "dedux"?) of the Star Wars movies! It's just absurdly mind-blowing how a single guy working on this in his free time has managed to create a better cut of the original, unaltered films than what George Lucas and his +500 employees at IL&M did.

I'd like to point out, though, a little problem I found in the Castillian Spanish audio track. From 1:16:45 to 1:19:46 (the first half of the trash compactor scene), the audio is in Latino Spanish instead of Castillian Spanish.

It's a minor problem alright, since Latino Spanish and Castillian Spanish are pretty much the same, other than the accents used and some minor differences in vocabulary, but still, it would awesome if you could check that out and see if you can get it fixed.

Once again, thank you very much for your amazing effort! :)

Whoah.  That audio is straight off the NTSC GOUT IIRC (maybe PAL GOUT... the splicing was on the Latino track, not the Castilian one).  Maybe it's always been like this?  Does anyone have a source that doesn't do this?

PM if you've got another source, even if it's just partial for the section mentioned.

Bingowings said:

Handman said:

No Jar-Jar.

*snip*

If you look at aliens like Yoda or Chewie or even Jabba they have a realistic feel to them despite their nature. There's a physicality to them and they feel like people.

OT Yoda and Chewie, sure.  But PT Yoda and Chewie?  I have to disagree.  Any complexity they had in the prequels was inherited from the OT.  They were cartoonish cardboard cutouts, just from a different cartoon than Jar-Jar.

If the same care had been taken as was taken with the OT characters he could have worked.

He is a touchstone as to what went wrong with the PT. It's just too cartoonish and lacks enough human spirit.

I'd actually argue he's got more going for him than most other characters in the PT. Sure, he doesn't fit in the Star Wars universe, I'll give you that, but in anything but the name, does PT Obi-Wan? Anakin? They don't belong in Star Wars either, just not because they are too silly.  At least "idiotic goofball" is a schtick.  Anakin doesn't even have that going for him.  And Jar-Jar is one of the few PT characters that successfully makes eye contact with other characters, so he compares favorably with the "real" characters on the physicality side as well.

DeeBeeP said:

Feallan said:

DeeBeeP said:

Works flawlessly, thanks so much. 2 down, 1 to go. Any time-frame when the ROTJ subtitles could be finished? If its before the end of the year we might just hold off on watching them, if not then oh well.

 I dunno, ask Sadako. BTW if I were you, I'd wait for ROTJ 2.0 anyway

 I skimmed through 1.0 and its got some rough spots. Its definitely watchable I just need some subtitles. 

Just to be clear, Project Threepio has Japanese subtitles for ROTJ, and they work just fine with DeEd ROTJ 1.0.  They're just not available in the SRT format yet.

PM's sent.

Nanner Split said:

I saw this musician in Victoria, BC not too many years back. I wonder if you could still find Darth Stradivarius there.

Star Wars: Drive-in, in parents' car.

Empire: 35mm theatre

Jedi: 35mm theatre

Holiday Special: In my parents' basement on our TV which was still black-and-white at the time.

I never saw Caravan of Courage.  I don't think there are any other Star Wars films or shows worth mentioning.

mechanikism said:

I'm pretty sure the Tantive IV crew's blaster bolts were blue, while the stormtroopers' were red.

Learning is half the battle ;-)

Actually the 1980 Latino dub is a merger from two different sources, both of which came to me, unlabelled, audio-only.  One or both may have ultimately come from you.  Most of it is from a very high quality source that had about three locations where English audio was still present, and those three areas were patched over using a lower-quality source blended with the isolated score to make the transitions more seamless.  If you are responsible for either or both of these sources, thank you very much!

EDIT: More details about how this track was assembled can be found here.

Well, that was mostly a '93 change, not an SE change, right?  I don't like it either, but if the focus is the SE's...

TV's Frink said:

Stinky-Dinkins said:

Watched it. It looks superb man, top notch work as usual.

 C'mon, you can't come back to the forum with such a boring post.

Wrong again, Frink! [/dinkins-voice]

I remember the lead-up to the attack on the Death Star sounding pretty anemic music-wise on the Blus, but it's been a long time and I've been trying to forget how it sounded.

Agreed. Heavily-composited shots look very rough (Mos Eisley being a fine example), and poorly-lit shots as well.  But well-lit shots with just sets and actors?  Those look pretty good.

Feallan said:

CatBus said:

It's also an interesting idea for distributing fan edits if Disney starts coming down hard on them.  Just distribute xdeltas that convert the Blu-rays to the DeEds. Absolutely no infringement.

 Someone would upload DeEd to thepiratebay in t=200s

Then they are the ones doing the infringing, who cares? ;)

But, as AntcuFaalb pointed out with his helpful link, even data that does not contain one bit of usable infringing material (such as xdeltas) could likely still be considered a derivative work, so xdeltas don't really solve that problem after all.

Basically it's a differences file, which, when applied to file 1, changes it into file 2.  This one converts from DeEd v1 to DeEd v2.

It's also an interesting idea for distributing fan edits if Disney starts coming down hard on them.  Just distribute xdeltas that convert the Blu-rays to the DeEds. Absolutely no infringement.

To update everyone on what's cooking for 8.1 (likely timed to match Harmy's Despecialized Jedi 2.0):

- As mentioned earlier, I'm hoping for more progress from Operation Eyestrain.  Thai and Japanese still have one movie apiece that are graphical-only

- "Matching" subtitles for Despecialized Jedi 2.0 (the only thing on my to-do list since day one, finally done!)

- Improved Arabic subtitles. I'm diving in and doing this manually, character-by-character, and it is not easy

- CJK subtitles will use different fonts for their graphical subtitles

- Maybe some new languages.  Slovak is most likely, but you never know what might come along

- Miscellaneous minor updates, I'm sure

The deal with the CJK subtitles and fonts is interesting.  Like I'm sure a lot of Westerners, I believed all I really needed was one good-quality Unicode font and all of my language needs would be met.  As it turns out, even with the best-looking Unicode font out there, you're going to run into problems with CJK characters.

As I'm sure you know, Japanese and Korean use characters of Chinese origin in their writing systems.  The Unicode standard has a "unified CJK" section where these characters are mapped.  The problem is that the characters are often written slightly differently in Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, even when there is only one shared character defined in Unicode.  So if you use one Unicode font for everything, it will look a little off for some CJK text.  The solution is to use a different font for each of the four systems, which is what I'll do.

The problem isn't huge, and it's fairly common in the computer age, but there are enough people complaining that the Japanese text on their iPhone looks like it was written by a Chinese speaker, that I figured I'd do my best to avoid annoying people further.  I've heard the problem described as being like if someone reversed every R and N while writing English, but maybe not quite that bad.  It's still completely readable, but it looks wrong, nobody who knew English would ever write it like that, and it gives the text a vaguely Cyrillic feel.

Just to add, there's a lot of Lucasfilm BS about how the originals looked really bad and that's why they aren't available in any better quality than Laserdisc.  This is quite simply a lie designed to peddle the Special Editions, nothing more.

In spite of being derived from some Special Edition sources, I feel that the Despecialized Editions more accurately represent the theatrical experience than anything else out there.  If you watch anything based on the Laserdisc masters, they may be technically more accurate in detail (which I understand is important!), but they only represent the theatrical experience if you went to the theatre with some Saran Wrap wrapped around your head a couple of times.  It just didn't look like that in theatres.

Beber said:

Harmy said:

Yes, I certainly could do that, which is why I have.

Really? So why is the definition quite less precise and the colors a tad different so that these shots stick out?

Because the 35mm prints he used had lower effective definition and different colors than the Blu-rays, so the matching was imperfect, I'd hazard to guess... and simply using different 35mm projection print scans from an alternate source, as you're suggesting, is unlikely to fix the issue (projection prints do vary, but in general, they have lower effective resolution than interpositives, negatives, and the sort of sources used for Blu-rays, and Negative1's 35mm scans are in no way more magical than other 35mm scans) .  Maybe better color matching and blurring up the Blu-ray parts would make it match the 35mm source he used in 2.0 better, but switching to a different 35mm scan will, at best, only marginally improve the edge detail.

EDIT: Sorry, just re-read and saw that you thought he was using GOUT footage. It should suffice to say he wasn't.  That's about as good as we're gonna get detail-wise without access to the Lucasfilm vault.

I've been gone all week, so hooray for unintentionally skipping the slightly problematic initial release.  I'm eagerly downloading it now.  Can't wait to see (and hear) the improvement!  Thanks for the gallery, Harmy.  This is going to be great!

Looks like Jabba is dubbed in Thai, so just Star Wars needs a special subtitle track to accompany the Thai dub, but none of the others do.  Jabba sounds... weird in Thai.

Just verified that our Korean subtitles are the official translations. That should certainly save me some time.