CatBus

I believe h_h called his ESB and Jedi mixes "purist" mixes.  Not 70mm because we don't even know for sure if 70mm had a different mix for those films (and ESB had different video, so having 70mm audio with 35mm video would be weird), but also no non-original elements included, so possibly faithful to 70mm, but definitely faithful to the original feel.

I now have more concrete information on the Hong Kong Blu-rays.  There does not appear to be a Cantonese dub (too bad!), but there is a Thai dub, and some Korean subtitles (among some other subtitle options you can find elsewhere).

The Thai dub voices over the crawl, but does not voice over Greedo (haven't checked Jabba yet), so I'll need to make a subtitle track to accompany the dub, once it's synced.

leecho said:

I was more like a bit dissapointed that it is not the original one, that's all. :-)

The Hun dub on Harmy's Star Wars 2.5 is definitely the original one, not from '93.

My labeling may be off, then.  According to the source in my link, the "original" dubs were the 93 ones (and the ones he provided for SW and ESB), so maybe we've got the original one for ESB too, whatever the date is.

leecho said:

CatBus said:

Hungarian is 1993

 Nnnoooooooooooooooo... :-)

Yeah, apparently opinions are divided ;)

Our info on these dubs is from here: http://originaltrilogy.com/forum/topic.cfm/International-Audio-including-Voice-Over-Translations/post/590611/#TopicPost590611

In my collection, I have 1993 for SW and ESB, but the later 1995 one for ROTJ, because the 1993 one for ROTJ was considered a bit of a trainwreck by the person who supplied them.  It's all Hungarian to me.

From what I can tell from the archive I gave Harmy...

Czech is 1992

Hungarian is 1993

Polish is 1995

I don't know the dates for the rest.  Most are GOUT-sourced.

Well apparently Harmy now has access to some bad-ass BD authoring software, which may change things.

...and since we brought it up, seamless branching would work for translated crawls, translated alien subtitling, and, if they exist, translated credits.

Can of worms is now fully opened.

I'm not sure Ukrainian is actually 2011.  It's from a DVD Special Edition release, so probably earlier.

I told you to forget it.

They won't. I don't think they exist anymore. They died around the same time as the Prequels.

I came up with something like that while working on a translation, and needing to distract myself with anything but the job at hand:

Tomorrow, I want you to take that trilogy to Harmy and have its alterations erased. That'll be the end of it. It belongs to us now.

I'm certainly excited to hear both tracks!

Also, if since you have access to some very nice pro encoders, I'd be interested in 448k AC3 versions of both your SW 70mm and ESB purist mixes, for friends and family stuck in DVD-land.  I've encoded from lossless myself with aften, but I imagine you can squeeze out better quality.

Gogogadget said:

Clue is a bad example because the film was released simultaneously with those multiple endings so there is no 'original' version.

It exactly matches the Star Wars audio mixes in that respect, which makes it a good example.

I think it's pretty clear we're going in circles here.  For most of the world, pre-release production details are simply trivia that add insight into the final product, but don't fundamentally change its authenticity.  Obviously, we've run into someone for whom pre-release production details fundamentally change the authenticity of the final product.  That's fine, but it's clearly an unusual--as in atypical, not wrong--way of looking at things.

Higher-resolution-than-necessary scans help with image stabilization.  i.e. you can't shift an image half a pixel, so you either don't align it quite right, or you end up blurring it a bit.  With too many pixels, you can shift the image just the right amount.

Also, there's a big difference between 35mm negatives and prints. 35mm negatives can actually have 4k worth of detail on them in some circumstances, prints are variable but can occasionally exceed 2k.

That would be a question better asked of Harmy, I'd imagine. However, I can safely say that he doesn't seem to be married to any one source--if a better one comes along, he'll switch to it in a heartbeat, unless it has some sort of other major issue. 35mm scans are way better than the GOUT, regardless of, well, practically anything you can imagine, and the Jedi prints in general look to be in very good shape.

Looks like version 8 is now up on MySpleen.  That should make the downloading easier.

There has never been an official home video release of Star Wars with both the theatrical video and theatrical audio (I think even the 35mm print at the Library of Congress has the altered 1981 crawl), so fan preservations are all there is for most people, and the ones you mentioned are the ones worth mentioning.

I'd say your definition of "original" is a bit weird--Star Wars was shown theatrically with three different mixes, all of which could be considered original. The order in which the mixes were completed is more of a production footnote. Does the movie Clue only have one original ending because it was the one completed first? No, some films simply have multiple original versions.  Depending on when and where you saw it, you got a slightly different version. There are also those who argue that the mono mix is the "true" original mix because it was completed last (so obviously more care went into it than the others).

Also keep in mind how much of Team Blu's GOUT treatment goes beyond simply scaling--there's image stabilization, image repair, and fixing IVTC cadence interruption issues. Hardware players can't match any of that in an automated fashion at realtime speeds.

PM sent.

I don't think it's so cut-and-dry as all that.

The brutal offscreen execution of Oola produces screams but no mangled corpse. The brutal offscreen executions of Owen and Beru produce no screams but do produce mangled corpses.  I'd say they're both pretty awful, but if I had to choose, ROTJ is slightly kid-friendlier.

Yoda dying a peaceful natural death compared to Obi-Wan's murder. No contest, ROTJ is kid-friendlier there, too.

Luke's torture is onscreen, yes, but I'd say Leia's offscreen torture trumps both Luke's in ROTJ and Han's in ESB. That interrogation droid was pretty much designed to scare the bejeezus out of kids.

And the roasted alive schtick? At the time, that was such a tired old trope kids were very familiar and it played for laughs even among the most sensitive kids.  They saw "natives roasting explorers" on everything from Gilligan's Island to Scooby Doo.  Nowadays that joke has been played out for decades, so someone born in, say, the late eighties might be totally unfamiliar with it, and actually be disturbed by what used to be a fairly pedestrian joke.  But to people raised in the late seventies and early eighties, it was just a somewhat lame gag, like Chewie's Tarzan yell.  Oh, the heroes are being roasted by the natives, just like a zillion other serial adventures before.  Har, har.

That said, there's plenty of kid-unfriendly stuff in Jedi.  The rape vibe likely went over most kids' heads, but it's still there.  The Rancor and the Emperor were both flat-out terrifying (pigman or not), and Jabba's death was brutal, slow, and surprisingly onscreen.  I don't agree ROTJ is the kiddie movie everyone makes it out to be, but it's hardly the dark one of the trilogy.

And, back on-topic, I don't think the relative kid-friendliness of one movie over another, which is arguable, is really even tangentially related to R2's cheerier personality in ROTJ, which I find to be pretty much just the way it is.

PM sent.

Danfun128 said:

I have some questions. Do your subs cover every language the 2011se covers? Are there any languages in here that aren't in the 2011se? What about the other se's and official releases? Lastly, can you PM me the most recent sub update?

PM sent.

I think I got every language used by the 2011SE Blu-rays worldwide, but as Feallan mentioned, there may be smaller-market releases I may have missed.  As for previous Special Editions, that's also a good question.  They've been around longer, so I'd imagine they've had more time to spread to various language markets.  If there are any official subtitled SE releases out there for languages we don't cover, I sure don't know about them.

As for languages we cover that are not covered by the 2011SE OT release, we've got American Spanish (as opposed to Castilian), Indonesian, and Ukrainian.  I've got a lead on Slovak as well, and a small pile of fansubs if I ever get around to it.

That said, I think at this point, it would be far more helpful to sync up foreign dubs than to add more subtitle languages (say what you will about dubs, they are kid-friendly).  So next time you see a pile of old used Greek VHS tapes or somesuch, take a peek... We definitely do not have every dub covered by the 2011SE. That is also being worked on ;)

EDIT: I should also add that numbers are good for bragging, but quality is where it counts.  And the 2011SE still beats us handily in one very large language market: Arabic.  Everywhere else, we're likely competitive on quality, or better!

doubleKO said:

Ha! Did Google Translate mangle it, or is that in the official subs? If so, do you think it was deliberate? Was it capitalised (or the Mandarin equivalent)?

There probably is an official Mandarin translation for Star Trek, which, if they were literal about it, would be something like "Space Journey".  So when C-3PO complains about hating "space travel", a translator could very well use the same characters.  Mandarin doesn't use the same signifiers for proper names as we use in English, so it could really be identical.  So it's probably a good translation, and Google Translate made a wrong guess that could have been right in another context.

In related news, Grand Theft Auto probably has localized names abroad that are less literal, because the reference to US criminal code would make little sense to those audiences.  I suspect Grand Theft Audio is called something akin to "Rogue" or "Antisocial Bastard" in Chinese.  Why?  Because "Rogue 2" translated back as "Grand Theft Auto 2".  You get odd bits like this all the time from Google Translate.

Keep up the good work guys, even though many of us only speak English we appreciate your efforts to bring the OT to a wider audience.

Thanks!

Project files have been updated to version 8.0 (original post has been updated as well). Please PM me for the temporary download links until the files are available in a more permanent location.

The goal of the 8.x series is to provide complete subtitle parity, in terms of both quantity and quality, with every known release of the 2011SE worldwide.

I was not able to complete everything I wanted to do before I felt obligated to release what I had in its current form, so there will be a smaller point-release or two down the road--but in its current state, we already offer a complete superset of the subtitle languages offered in every 2011SE release (that I'm aware of), and are very close to matching them in terms of quality as well. Congratulations to everyone who has contributed anything to this project so far!

Rough summary of changes:
- Added four new languages: European Portuguese, Hebrew, Slovenian, and Icelandic
- Changed quite a few languages that were partially or completely based on fansubs to official translations, including: Mandarin/Simplified, Russian, Turkish, Romanian, Croatian, Greek, and Bulgarian. Candidates for similar changes in the future include Arabic and Korean.
- Operation Eyestrain (a joint effort between Sadako, Feallan, and myself) is converting our graphical-only subtitles to text-based subtitles, and this work is ongoing. The status as of this release is: Mandarin/Traditional (complete), Cantonese (complete), Japanese (SW & ESB only), and Thai (ESB & ROTJ only). The result of this work will be editable/correctable subtitles in these languages that also happen to look nicer than our current graphical ones.
- Minor "correctness" fixes and cleanup to documentation and file naming conventions. The subtitles formerly known as "forced" are now known as "titles".
- Instructions are included for how to mark certain subtitles as forced, if that's what you really want to do.
- The version of Muxman included with this project has been modified (again), so that it no longer uses incorrect language codes for the following languages: Indonesian, Javanese, Hebrew, and Yiddish. No plans for Javanese or Yiddish subtitles, but never say never...
- Minor changes to Polish and English subtitles.
- The project now includes a HELP_WANTED.html file, as a reminder to people who use our subtitles that we can use feedback on our existing subtitles, and could always use subtitles in new languages.

Thanks to Feallan, pittrek, Sadako, Teesel, and lexsanor for their enormous amount of help, hard work, and raw materials used in many parts of this release.

As always, I'm sure I've forgotten a thing or two, but those are the big changes.

Nearly all subtitles are now of high enough quality that I feel the categories of "verified" and "unverified" subtitles have outlived their usefulness, so I will no longer make this distinction. The only fansub that I feel I can safely say needs some serious attention at this point is Arabic, and I'll keep working to address that. As always, any of our subtitles may contain errors, including errors duplicated from the original translation, but they can be perfected over time as people report the problems.

The shift toward using official translations in this release doesn't mean I think official translations are necessarily better than fansubs--simply that without the ability to determine the quality of any particular translation, the official ones are the safest choice, and also more likely to be consistent between films.

Lastly, if anyone out there knows how to read and type Arabic text, and would like to help this project provide top-quality Arabic subtitles, let me know. I already have complete Arabic translations in graphical form, but the OCR results from multiple programs just don't seem to be very usable without heavy correction, which I doubt I can do by myself. You don't even really have to know the Arabic language, just be able to read and type the characters accurately. Qualified parties please apply within--otherwise, Arabic subtitles will require a minor miracle to reach parity with the others.

TV's Frink said:

I don't see how someone could post screenshots and video previews of their doubts.

That's the Special Editions in a nutshell, really.

While using Google Translate to help sync the official Simplified Mandarin translation to the GOUT, I got my favorite mangled translation so far.

As our heroes are escaping Mos Eisley, C-3PO says: "I forgot how much I hate Star Trek."