CatBus

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."

FWIW, there appears to be a Cantonese and Thai dub on the Hong Kong Blu-ray set.  That plus the official Korean subtitle translations make that set pretty interesting to me.  If anyone happens to be sitting on this set, send me a PM and you can be my best friend forever.

The dubs should be no harder to despecialize than our Ukrainian audio--perhaps easier since we don't have to deal with perfectly syncing the English audio accompanying the Ukrainian overdub.  ROTJ should be a piece of cake, SW somewhat hard, and ESB will be a complete bear.

AFAICT there weren't any dubs in these languages prior to the Special Editions (or else they'd have been on the Region 3 GOUT, I figure), but I'd be delighted to be proven wrong.

team_negative1 said:

There will be better encodes and transfers of the 8mm and 16mm eventually.

Let's also hope for a complete 8mm mono track, which I understand to be yet another ESB audio variation.

The Blu-ray mix isn't really all that different from the 2004 DVD mix overall, AFAICT.

Badness depends on your reference.  So many of us have seen the films so many times that we have at least one of the pre-97 mixes permanently etched into our brains, so that's our reference whether we like it or not.  Maybe if you judge the Blu-rays without that mental reference, they sound okay, but for me it's impossible, because I also know how they could/should have sounded.

So here's what I remember not liking about the Blu-ray audio.  Please keep in mind I'm not really an audio guy, so my terminology or explanations might be completely wrong.  They had a weird combination of muddiness and harshness throughout, which I took to mean overzealous use of noise reduction (muddiness), combined with a hamfisted attempt to bring the reduced details back out (harshness).  Usually this was constant, so your ears could get used to it, I suppose, but occasionally they must have done some major adjustments, and the sound suddenly sounded more broken than normal.  I remember that happening with Vader dialogue occasionally.

Then there's the score, which was pushed way into the background in a few scenes--yeah, it's not like the score isn't the best part of the soundtrack, people--let's just minimize that John Williams garbage so people can hear our crap new sound effects for our crap new CGI.  Bleah.  Bad choices all around, even if you accept the bad choice of the Special Editions to begin with.

EDIT: hairy_hen may be your best bet for more detail. A lot of people who don't like the 2011 mix may have only heard it once quite a while ago, or be actively trying to forget it.  It's not something I hope to re-live.

Well, my first reaction was: God, the Blu-ray is unbelievably ugly.

After that, I guess I could see myself being equally happy with either the workprint or the new colors.  I think the problem for me is that, without a reference, I'm just looking for things that are obviously way out of bounds, and I don't see much in either.

I'm assuming you're making changes based on the "they made the colors of the 97SE good on film before they made them bad on the DVD" theory, using some sort of adjusted 97SE as a reference?  What sort of adjustments?

Red lights are clipped on the Blu-rays (often in more than just the red channel), and very hard to restore to a more natural-looking state.  Unless Harmy has a new trick for ESB, I imagine these will remain, as they did in Star Wars.

Now we're talking.  Thank you Harmy!

I found five:

Lando's aide, Luke's gunner, Wedge's gunner, JOANNE D'ANTONIO, KEVIN O'CONNELL

Most noticeable in the first three.  You are a saint.

Ah, then doing it by hand is the only option, unless you can get someone to re-rasterize the text ;)

Nevermind then--it's not horrible not to care.  I'm just trying to find anything that might signal to people that this is a reconstruction, and anachronistic PC-era punctuation is one of them.  But it's not a big deal at all.

EDIT: Actually if you're re-rasterizing--even if you can't match the form exactly, I think U+2019 would be "a better kind of wrong".  Wrong, but more plausible for the era in which it was created.

For an upside-down drop, you may get lucky with U+2032, depending on how the font you've chosen decides to render it.  Different fonts may render it differently.  It's not a typical form though.

Harmy said:

Is it horrible that I don't really care? Or at least not enough to actually go through the whole thing and replace every apostrophe by hand, which I think is pretty much the only solution.

Heh, not horrible at all.  But if they're "curly" (look like the commas, just up high), then you should just be able to swap out the characters in the RTF file with the Unicode character (U+2019) that looks more like that.  If they don't easily match up to a particular glyph in the font you're using, then yeah, hand-replacing seems to be all there is.  But curly apostrophes should be a piece of cake.  And slanty apostrophes may be doable with a prime character (U+2032).

Harmy said:

Here are the new and hopefully final credits:

http://uloz.to/xkG3V6u2/credits-new-mp4

Did you check the apostrophes against the 35mm scan?  Were they clear enough to make any verdict about slantiness/curliness/chunkiness?  They still look a bit anachronistic in their current state.

Oh, absolutely.  But that still supports the idea of the new beeps as part of an overall intentional personality transplant, not as a mere technical detail.