CatBus

Not mutually exclusive... Braumeister Rani!

How about Max Von Sydow as an evil Braumeister?

Just to round things out with Russian audio, I now finally have a Russian non-voiceover dub for Empire Strikes Back.  So that makes one voiceover-style and one non-voiceover dub in Russian for the entire trilogy.

The quality is pretty good--I still prefer the quality of the voiceover dubs in general, but this is another fine option for Russian-speaking fans.  The only Russian audio I'm really pretty displeased with is the Star Wars non-voiceover dub, which has quite a lot of issues.  But if you understand Russian and can't stand voiceovers, that one is available too.

Like the non-voiceover dub for Jedi, the one for Empire doesn't voice over the crawl, so forced subs will be needed for that, and will be included in the next version of Project Threepio.

FWIW, although I'm making all of these available to whoever asks, I'm only keeping the voiceover dubs for my personal collection, so I can't say if the non-voiceovers will be available indefinitely in the event of some unplanned failure.  So if you want them, PM me.

Oh yeah, and the blown out detail out the window when discussing the Mining Guild, it looks pretty severe compared to the GOUT, but I know the GOUT levels are pretty wrong, so I'm not sure what correct should be.

Enjoyed the blaster gag too, always nice to have an Easter egg in these previews.  Regarding the colors, I actually really like the new Bespin colors, but I wonder what the new color reference means for our perennial argument about Hoth colors... if I recall, your last Hoth samples were using the color-boosted GOUT reference.

imperialscum said:

Well if we are honest, Lucas was not the only person from the production crew who made stuff up.

For stuff that old, I'm sure a lot of half-forgotten details get fudged or moved around.  Everyone's the big hero of their own personal life story, and details that run counter to that narrative sometimes just get automatically thrown out or altered if for nothing else but to make remembering the big picture easier.  Not necessarily in some self-aggrandizing way, either.  Just a matter of "I made a hell of a lot of dialogue updates.  Here is one dialogue update in Empire.  There's a memory gap of who made the update, but what the hell chances are I did it."  And the rest is (revisionist) history.

I think the misstatements by Lucas fit this mold, but they seem a little more jarring than some others because it's often not merely a matter of switching around a few dates, actions, or cause and effect, so much as creating a whole parallel universe of pseudo-facts to support the narrative of the genius director working outside the Hollywood system, producing a few promising proto-films in the seventies and eighties, and then really coming into his form and making several wildly-critically-acclaimed indie films in the nineties and beyond.

Don't ask for an ETA.

You might get one, but it might be off by a year or so... ;)

That said... July 26th, 4:23:07pm GMT.

Yeah, you've essentially got that right--if Harmy were to do a 1080p version, the SD material wouldn't really look any more out of place than it does now, because of the poor transfer.  IMO the Star Wars Blu-ray transfers are better than the one for Monty Python's Meaning of Life, and maybe not quite as good as the one for My Fair Lady, if that helps you place it in the pantheon of poor Blu-ray transfers.

kk650 said:

That said, I can see the difference between the 720p and 1080p images very clearly on my laptop as well so its probably just you. With all the releases and grading i've done, i'm guessing that my eyes are a little more fine tuned to such things than yours, no offense.

To the contrary, I'm quite certain that the substance of this whole conversation can readily be boiled down to a comparison of equipment size.

kk650 said:

I do actually see a very noticable difference in image quality and detail between that 1080p and 720p shot CatBus, perhaps its my large monitor that makes the difference easier to see.

Uh-huh.

Found it:

The difference in detail is barely perceptible (aside from the color shift from the imperfect attempt to match color grading).  But yes, encoding at 1080p would allow those barely-perceptible differences to be included.

You have the latest version of each.  I don't know the timeline exactly, but the 1.0 series came out earlier than you'd think because it was based on a good-quality HDTV broadcast of the 2004SE, rather than the 2011SE Blu-rays.  And the HDTV source is still used as a high-def way to undo changes that were added post-2004, such as the rocks in front of R2.  Empire is next to get the 2.x treatment, and it has its own discussion thread.

To be fair, Harmy's ESB and ROTJ projects do have missing detail compared to the Blu-rays, but that's more due to the massive compression to fit on a DVD9 than the fact that they're 720p.  As Harmy explained in his Star Wars thread, the 720p HDTV source (used for the 1.0 projects) actually holds its own quite nicely when it's not compressed to hell.  The 2.0 versions won't be as heavily compressed (except, of course, the AVCHD DVD9 downscales...).

Still can't find a link to that Tarkin comparison shot, which is strange considering it's been posted so many times here.

kk650 said:

CatBus said:

I think the previously stated reason was that the Blu-ray doesn't really have more than 720p in detail (even though it's 1080p, the film transfer isn't so great), so there's not much point in 1080p until some source better than the Blu-ray becomes available.  Not that it couldn't be done--it's just a lot more time and a lot larger file sizes for something that, for the most part, won't be noticeably better even in the 100% BD-sourced scenes.  Cue shot of Tarkin at 720p and 1080p...

Hmm, while it is true that the Star Wars OT blu-ray transfers are not the most detailed transfers out there, they could definately use a 4k remastering, they still look noticably better in 1080p than they do in 720p IMHO, at least from my experience encoding to both 1080p and 720p.

I am certain that his Despecialised releases would look better in 1080p and now that he has the processing power to handle it, why not?

As I said, Harmy's done the evaluation already, and he's got the shot of Tarkin at 1080p and 720p to demonstrate the lack of any significant difference (a well-lit shot with no VFX, so probably among the most detailed shots in the OT) that he shows every time someone asks this question.  Is it possible your 720p encodes are losing detail and Harmy's aren't, due to some other differences (bitrate, encoding options, etc)?

That said, I get it.  Hey, 1080p is wonderful.  But it's about cost-benefit.  The cost is known.  The lack of benefit has been demonstrated with an actual visual comparison anyone can look at.  It will take at least another visual comparison anyone can look at to convince anyone otherwise.

I think the previously stated reason was that the Blu-ray doesn't really have more than 720p in detail (even though it's 1080p, the film transfer isn't so great), so there's not much point in 1080p until some source better than the Blu-ray becomes available.  Not that it couldn't be done--it's just a lot more time and a lot larger file sizes for something that, for the most part, won't be noticeably better even in the 100% BD-sourced scenes.  Cue shot of Tarkin at 720p and 1080p...

At least according to Google Translate, in Thai, C-3PO yells at the Mynock: "Go away, you crazy insect!"

...which, from what I've heard about the size of the insects in Thailand, is actually pretty accurate.

Yeah, I don't want to add any more languages unless they're trilogy-complete... so it's up to you, really.  I think lack of Slovak subtitles isn't a huge deal, considering our solid support for Czech, etc.  But if we want a Slovak option, I've got an English template file for Star Wars for you... and I'd want you to go through and check for any terrible errors in the other films too.

That's great.  Since you're in Slovakia, if you have another source for Slovak subtitles for the OT (such as good-quality fansubs), that would be fine too!

Hell yes! Check the subtitle options, and see if any match the languages listed above.  If any of them do, I'd like to see the BD-SUP files for these (the raw subtitle stream from the BD, no need to OCR).  PM me if you have questions.

The "interesting languages" breakdown seems to go like this (question marks indicate I got inconsistent search results):

Italian/Russian BD:
Bulgarian
Croatian
?Czech
Romanian
Russian
?Slovak
Slovenian

German/Spanish BD:
Hebrew
Icelandic
?Arabic
?Mandarin (Simplified)

Hong Kong BD:
Korean

I'll contact some people here to see if we can get anywhere with these.

Actually, it looks like there were multiple Region B releases of the Blu-rays for various language markets.

It looks like I'd be most interested in: the German, Russian, and Hong Kong Blu-ray releases, which would give us a nice range of additional languages to work with or improve.

Ah, too bad.  I'm assuming no other new & exciting languages? (yeah, I know, we've got the Region A market pretty much covered).  Thanks for looking.  Next question... anyone have the Region B Blu-rays?

Oh, if it deals with Arabic just as bad as Thai, then we're stuck with the fansubs we already have and can't use the graphical ones at all.  SE subs have to be retimed, and while that might be technically doable with graphical subs, I need text subs+Google translate to figure out where everything needs to go.  I'll hold onto them in case the situation changes, of course.

No, raw graphical files would be great--I have a great OCR system set up that works for lots of languages*--but if it's possible to label the languages, that would be helpful.

You can check the first post for the languages we don't have "verified" yet--but don't worry about Greek or European Portuguese, because those are already in the works.

* EDIT: except Thai :-\

I suppose now would be a good time to mention that if anyone has access to any graphical subtitles (such as would be found on a DVD or Blu-ray), even Special Edition subtitles, for any languages that this project either doesn't have or hasn't verified, I'd be extremely interested in seeing them.

For example, I believe the 2011 Blu-rays have Icelandic subtitles, and probably a few other interesting options too.