team_negative1 said:
We know there doesn't seem to be a lot of interest in Jedi.
I wanted to chime in that I certainly have interest in this project, just nothing to add to the discussion by posting. I wouldn't necessarily equate a less-active thread with less interest in the thread topic.
Jaitea said:
What would happen to this site if Disney released the BD's of the OT the way we wanted them?
J
I'd be out, in approximately as much time as it takes to write goodbye. For many, including myself, the lack of a proper OT release is the only real reason for being here.
Yeah, there are still fan edits and preservations of unrelated films, some of which I've been involved in. But really, a proper OT release? Our work is done.
But I think the key words in your question are "the way we wanted them". Let's say a good-quality BD release of the OT happens someday. I'm assuming it won't have the '77 crawl, won't have the original six-channel mixes (not to mention no mono mixes), and it will have some sort of screwed up video issues (DNR, boosted contrast, weird colors). That's probably quite enough to keep this site going with its current dedicated following, even if the appeal to new users is reduced.
Yeah, much as I like to geek out on the other despecializations, I must agree that it's the starfields and black levels that are really giving the 2.x previews that cinematic feel for me. It's a huge difference over 1.x, which still had that home video release feel to it.
DELETED: Weird editor issue.
Tyrphanax said:
Empire voted top film of all time by a new poll.
Very interesting to see the films that are not at the tops of these lists. Really reflects the changing of the generational guard. Nice to see many of "our" classics up there.
I swear such lists should disallow films made within the last ten years just to keep the churn down. Not that there aren't always some fine films within the last ten years, but it's not like people will stop making lists in the future, and they can show up then if they still warrant it.
In the context of film preservation, you could discuss what "our streaming future" means, if that grants the rightsholders the ability to alter their films on a whim, and consumers no longer have physical copies to fall back to.
i.e. imagine how much worse the Star Wars purge would have been if Lucas had the ability to overwrite all our private Laserdisc and VHS collections with the Special Editions.
If anyone here can read/write Hebrew or Arabic, I would be delighted with some assistance. There appear to be good-quality (what I'd call "verified") graphical Special Edition subs out there (and I have some for SW, with more on the way), but converting them into text and retiming them to the GOUT may be the death of me. They aren't useful as graphical-only subs because they're SE subs, so it's convert & retime them, or nothing. Also, RTL scripts make my head hurt.
The help I need would involve taking an English template, and either transcribing the translations from a graphical image of the translated subtitle, or pasting in an OCR'd version of those subs, and making manual corrections as needed. You wouldn't actually have to do much translation at all, because that's already done.
I'll try my best on my own of course, but I might not get very far.
IIRC, most home video versions of Star Wars were overly bright in all areas, with washed-out colors, essentially turning dark red-tinted evenings into bright neutral-tinted afternoons, among other things (the matte boxes being very visible on VHS are another example). My VHS copy is pretty pink-tinted too, so any residual red in the sky is lost in the pink cast over the whole thing IMO.
While Harmy did use HD sources for this, everything was color-corrected to match a privately-owned extremely-low-fade theatrical print, so the colors here are pretty unimpeachable in most cases, although there's a few issues with clipping here and there from the HD sources. I doubt we should be so lucky with the other two films, although I'm sure he'll do his best ;)
Leoj found a new source for the American Spanish ESB dub. Not as good-quality overall as the track from roback214, but good enough to patch over the bad areas he described earlier (with the help of the isolated score to help the music blend more seamlessly). FWIW, the missing scream is just how it was on this dub, so I just patched over the areas where the English audio was overlaid.
So we now have a patched-up ESB track (mostly the same as the original, just a few seconds altered) that sounds pretty much great. PM me if you're interested.
Okay, so this is weird. I know DVDs are passé and everything, and that even moreso, MuxMan is ancient and unmaintained, but I nevertheless find it to be an awesome free tool for the job.
But remember a while back how I had to include a modified version of MuxMan because the regular version used the wrong language code for Indonesian (so some players couldn't ID the language correctly)? Well, it turns out that in the late eighties, three ISO-639-1 language codes got changed--Indonesian, Hebrew, and Yiddish. And in at least one official standards document out there somewhere, the code for Javanese was mistyped. MuxMan gets all of these wrong, using the old/wrong values. So I'll be making another modification to MuxMan to take care of this.
And, as a teaser, there's an actual reason beyond anal-retentiveness I needed to make this change ;)
RicOlie_2 said:
So you were sarcastic? What you wrote means that you wouldn't be as ready to believe it as Puggo was...
Precisely--Puggo seemed far too trusting of the rumor by allowing for a slight chance of credibility, when I felt there was none whatsoever. It's probably always safe to assume sarcasm with me. Just close your eyes and think of Frink.
That advice actually works for lots of things, by the way...
RicOlie_2 said:
Do you mean credulous, or incredulous? I wouldn't be as incredulous, though I have some doubts that the DOUT will ever become a reality.
I meant credulous. Puggo sounded like he thought the rumor was 99% BS. I thought he was lowballing it.
Puggo - Jar Jar's Yoda said:
So basically what we have is a one-post rumor that, somewhere out there is another uncited rumor that one person said there might be an attempt at an OT release if it's feasible?
Well, I wouldn't be quite as credulous as all that about it.
darklordoftech said:
Speaking of color references, what did they use as a color reference when creating 97 ESB and 97 ROTJ?
No idea. Even though they had Technicolor prints for Star Wars, I doubt they used them. Since the only reason for using a color reference is for historical accuracy, and historical accuracy was already out the window with the Special Editions, my guess is they just winged it for all three films.
TV's Frink said:
Fang Zei said:
I was in 8th grade when TPM came out and just a couple weeks from turning 14 (way to make me feel old, guys).
Shut up, I was 25.
:cries.
Exactly. If this release ever happens, it's likely to be deficient in some manner and destined to become merely a better-quality source... which would still be fantastic as far as I'm concerned, because that's what we need.
Oh, I think most of us agree it's a tedious and painful film to actually sit through, but I agree with the others it's the high point of the prequels, with ROTS easily the lowest point.
Baronlando said:
Fang Zei said:
The IB Technicolor prints can only be used for a color reference and not a source scan.
They are scannable now, with modern equipment.
If you have something higher up the duplication chain than a projection print, use that instead. Technicolor prints are very good quality projection prints, and I think are actually one generation higher than your typical 35mm projection print, but they are still projection prints. Lots of detail from the negatives has been lost. On the other hand, Technicolor prints retain their color better than most anything else (assuming they got the right color to begin with, which was a bit of an issue with Technicolor in its earlier days, but not really with Star Wars), so for a color reference, you could do a lot worse. So I agree wholeheartedly with Fang Zei, if you replace "can" with "should".
DuracellEnergizer said:
Am I the only one who finds these women creepy? Seriously, it's like The Stepford Wives meets The Shadow over Innsmouth with these girls.
There are women in the photo? I was too busy making sure Tatooine's twin suns were the right color. But now that you mention it... totally agree.
m_s0 said:
pittrek said:
I'd love to see an 8K transfer of the Technicolor prints they still have
Wouldn't that be overkill?
Yes.
Also, FWIW, transferring right off the OCN typically does not result in anything like accurate theatrical colors, so some sort of color grading does need to happen when creating a new HD master.
Sometimes they honestly try to do a good job, but don't (and for the life of me, I don't understand why) use any sort of color reference. You end up with Blu-rays that look quite good, but totally unlike the theatrical colors (example: Do the Right Thing).
Sometimes they go through the trouble of matching the color temperature of a projector bulb from the same era and end up looking totally unlike all previous home video releases, and people don't believe the colors are accurate even when they actually are.
And sometimes they go all revisionist. In many cases, it's because the color grading was done by people who grade things in teal and orange all day long, and they just go through the same process they always use, and somehow they manage to get someone to sign off on it.
I was having a discussion with my German professor (in German, it was a fluency test), and I got around to discussing what I did the previous weekend, which involved joining the crowd of camped out Star Wars freaks on the sidewalk outside the big deluxe downtown theatre.
I described the costumes, excitement, and people all around having a good time out there on the sidewalk. Finally he asked, "Was the movie any good?" I said "No. But it's not about the movie, it's about the Zeitgeist. Like Woodstock--who cared or even noticed if the music was any good?"
At that point, I kinda hadn't yet quite processed exactly how disappointing the movie was. It would only have been like Woodstock if none of the musicians even showed up and they tried to entertain the crowd with a mime, and the drugs ran out in the first hour, and the concert lasted all week...
I'm hoping that people actually having to know/find their language code is a bit of a short-term anomaly. As new projects come out, I hope they'll just mux in these tracks with the correct language code and then nobody will need to download Project Threepio as a separate package. They'll just play the video and their player will display the full language names in the subtitles menu.
This is ultimately designed as a supply-side project, even though the SUP files have yet to actually be used in a preservation--and the language codes can be helpful for disc authors (keeping the filenames as short as possible can be a virtue with certain authoring software), as well as for many of the utilities I use for creating the subtitles in the first place, so they're staying as-is.
FYI, I'm doing a little housekeeping and this will involve a few changes to naming conventions in the next version.
First off, I'm getting rid of the "-forced" suffix, because the titles are not actually forced, they're just the sort of thing that is typically forced. So rather than confusing people as to why those subs are not actually appearing by default (as truly forced subs should), I'm changing the name to "-titles", at least for now, because these subs are for onscreen titles.
I probably won't ever make truly forced subtitles, if for no reason other than the fact that the language tagging conventions for subtitles are inadequate to get it working properly in many cases--if you have your system set to display Chinese forced subtitles if available, great--does that mean Mandarin or Cantonese, Traditional or Simplified, and so on. I will, however, include a utility in the next version which will allow people to easily mark subtitles as truly forced if that's their preference.
Speaking of Chinese, I'll also be changing the Mandarin tags to something a little more correct by modern standards. So zh-cn will become zh-cmn-hans and zh-tw will become zh-cmn-hant.
I remember shortly before the premiere, there was an article about the big upcoming event in one of the local weeklies. One of the local theatres had the option of premiering the film and had declined, and the owner was interviewed saying something to the effect that they can't show films if they can't expect to run them for a decently long period, and after having seen the film, their opinion was that the film just didn't have enough legs to be worth showing.
At the time I was thinking "What?!? There are people ALREADY in line to see it at other theatres! It has such a huge built-in fanbase that even if it were a howling dog of a film, it would still make money!"
Too bad I didn't pay closer heed to that statement. I paid full price, proving my own point, I suppose, but at such a cost.