CatBus

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BTW, here's a report on the differences in the (16mm) mono mix for Empire:

- Threepio says: "Oh, this is suicide! There's nowhere to go!"

- Threepio says: "Oh, dear. What now? I don't like the look of this. If only you'd attached my legs..."

- Threepio says "Hello?" only once when looking for the R2 unit in Cloud City.

Lots of little mixing differences, occasionally making dialogue easier to hear, as was the case with the Star Wars mono mix. For example, when Lando says "So you see, since we're a small operation...", the "So" is much more clear in the mono mix.

I plan on including SRT files for the Empire mono mix in the next release, but no pre-rendered graphics, similar to what I've done for the Star Wars mono mix.

FWIW, I'm going back and doing another thorough pass on English dialogue in Empire (mostly to see if there are any other mono mix differences), and I've actually managed to find a few minor issues in the regular non-mono subs.  The biggest one I've found is where Han says a line in a strange ungrammatical fashion, and your brain (or at least mine) tends to automatically correct what he says.

When Leia says "I happen to like nice men", Han actually responds "I'm nice men." The current version of Project Threepio has this as "I'm a nice man." He also says "hydrospanners" instead of "hydrospanner".  These are pretty clear when you listen for them.

We've also been able to find that (to my surprise) our Arabic subtitles are pretty good, for the most part. They are still missing some lines and will stay in "unverified" until someone can do a more thorough correction, but that means the only subtitles I now even suspect of being a complete trainwreck are the Croatian subs for Empire.

Thanks yet again to Feallan and his many international connections!

I use an Epson R320 (which I got used, so I don't know about pricing), and the print quality is great, but I can't say I recommend them because the ink clogs up so much so you waste half your ink cleaning the heads (a common Epson complaint).  I'd probably go for an HP for my next purchase, just to avoid the clogging issue.  It's a real printer though--there may be some sort of DVD-only printing device that's cheaper.

Yeah, I am a huge fan of Lightscribe, but that technology is dead dead dead. The way to handle labeling from now on is to buy inkjet-printable discs and a compatible printer. Sorry, durable tech lost out to flashy fading colors.

More details: You can only get single-layer Lightscribe DVD media anymore.  Dual-layer Lightscribe DVD media was available for a while, and I suppose if you're lucky you can find it used, but it's rare at best. Lightscribe BD-R never happened, and never will.

There was a Lightscribe edition of SureThing, which, combined with the basic Lightscribe interface software, is what I used to make discs for a long time. But inkjet-printable is the future, like it or not.

Do not under any circumstances use those peel-and-stick DVD labels. The glue can lose its stickiness when the disc gets warm, and that can lead to bad things.

PM sent.

Depends on your definition of absurd.  I think using BD50's for anything is absurd.

But I am an optical media fan, so I re-encoded the video down to 21GiB, and put it on a BD25. The source was so beautiful it even looks good after a re-encode.

EDIT: My opposition to BD50's is entirely because I'm a cheap bastard, not because I don't see the value in high bitrate video.

Bulgarian subtitles have been promoted from unverified to verified.

Greek was found to be decent, but with spelling issues. I'm going to leave these marked as unverified until we can get those corrected.

Croatian was found to be decent for SW and ROTJ, but dreadful for ESB.  Again, I'm leaving these marked as unverified until we can get improvements.

No changes or new release (yet).

Thanks again to Feallan for the legwork on this.

Turkish subtitles have been promoted from unverified to verified. No changes or new release (yet).

Thanks to Feallan for this verification, BTW. He's actively going out and finding native speakers who can verify if our remaining unverified subtitles are correct. Certainly beats my strategy of just waiting for someone who speaks one of these languages to come over to my house for dinner...

And FWIW: American Spanish, Russian, and Ukrainian will be verified in the next release, with updated translations.

m_s0 said:

tl;dr: I completely disagree with almost everything you've written :P

That's pretty much the overarching theme of this thread. I'm still trying to get over the shock of learning that there's someone out there that prefers Ben's incongruous SE home over his original home.

zee944 said:

Jonno said:

zee944 said:

Does it mean it's a genuine remix?

 There's an oxymoron for you.

On genuine I mean it doesn't introduce new sound effects and places the old ones where they should be in the space by looking at the movie. So a good remix which is faithful to the movie's original intenion. But I suppose it's clear how I meant it anyway.

Well, according to IMDB, there was a theatrical 6-channel mix. I suppose it's possible that this new mix is simply that 6-channel mix mapped to a 5.1 arrangement, and the reduction in dynamics is just the result of whatever home near-field mix logic they currently employ for their audio. But I don't think that's very likely--I suspect it's a whole new mix, that, AFAICT, doesn't muck up anything but the dynamics--and even there it's not horribly flat, just not as good as the Laserdisc, that's all.

Also interested in the true video source if this isn't DCP-sourced after all.

This is an interesting discovery. Well, interesting if you're into subtitle arcana, I guess. So, subtitles for HD formats are 8-bit images with full alpha transparency. Subtitles for DVD can have 3 colors and 1 fully transparent color, and no alpha channel. This is why subtitles for DVD look like, well, crap.

So in the process of upscaling my 720p subtitles to 1080p, I've been doing some processing to make them look better (just sharpening, really), but the result is always 8 bits with full transparency so I figure I'm good, right?

Except I'm not. Some software reads the subtitles based on the images just fine, but some other software simply doesn't like some of the images. It turns out that if I look at my known good (monochrome) subtitles, they always use the exact same palette of 125 colors, including transparency. If I remap one of my bad images to this new palette, the compatibility problem goes away (and with 124 shades of gray available, it doesn't look any different at all). Could this be the subtitle equivalent of a web-safe palette? (also, the palette may very well be larger than 125 colors if you include non-grayscale colors)

Who knows, but at least I've solved this weird bug. But it also exposes that, as far as I can tell, HD subtitles can't necessarily use their full 8-bits of color--not even quite 7 bits, really, and only using very specific values at that. But as it turns out, that's still quite enough for subtitles IMO.

Still says "Coming Soon" on the project thread's first post.

Romanian subtitles have been promoted from unverified to verified.  No changes or new release (yet).

NeverarGreat said:

When alien archaeologists discover the ruins of Earth, they will use Project Threepio as the Rosetta Stone to decipher Earth's languages ;)

Oddly, when I was coming up with a logo for this project, my first idea was an image of R2-D2 hiding behind a rock, that was actually the Rosetta Stone. One of those ideas that's better in your mind than it is once you've actually made it.

I think we ought to start talking about how the audio mixes sounded so much better in the 2004 DVD and Blu-ray releases, just so we can watch h_h's head spin around.

No kidding. Actually there is other progress going on. I have Ukrainian, improved Russian and American Spanish, and I will likely have improved Polish and Japanese too. And a longshot at Hindi and finishing those Indonesian subs. Some or all of these will be in the next release.

PM sent.

There was a big discussion in my Holy Grail thread, and the consensus seemed to be that even though the US theatrical AR for the film was 1.85:1, the UK theatrical AR was 1.66:1.  So the Blu-ray release isn't really an alteration from theatrical AR, is was just shown in different AR's in different markets, and they picked a different one than they'd used for some earlier home video releases.

Actually I think there's some third parties that do fanless systems based on the NUC. Worth looking into.

Lev Black Lion is pretty good. Also there's a Slovenian lager named Lasko Temno that I quite enjoyed too.

At the very least, I'd also like to see a screencap or two. You can never have too much Empire.

I think the thing the 85 CAV release has going for it is that if it's a transfer from 1985, then the film elements would have been only five years old when the transfer was made, so theoretically less fading.  But as for all the other crap that can go wrong with color during a transfer, it's just as suspect as everything else, if not moreso.

Imperialscum brings up a good point--unless you're part of the old guard, it's unlikely you've seen a version of the Star Wars trilogy with impressive visuals. Relying on home video releases alone, the deck is stacked in favor of the SE's, even for those who see the originals first, simply because those were given such poor home video transfers compared to the SE's.  For the old guard, we can see the unsatisfactory GOUT transfer and it still brings back pleasant memories of how the film really looked.  For the younger crowd, it just looks unsatisfactory.

Few of the "young guard" have actually seen a single actual Star Wars movie. They've only seen the PT and the SE's, and if they have an opinion on those, yippee for them I guess, but it doesn't actually reflect on the Star Wars trilogy.

The only tragedy is that, for the few who actually do finally see Star Wars, they can't help but see it as just an altered form of Star Wars: Episode IV: A New Hope: Special Edition: 2011 Edition. Since the latter is a fairly mediocre film at best, it's hard for them not to feel that the whole story, even if told in a different, considerably better film, is still mediocre.

So again, those "young guards" who saw the SE's first had their well poisoned, and I actually understand how they came to not like the OT very much. By the time they saw Star Wars (if they ever saw it), it wasn't the underpinning of the whole Star Wars universe, it was merely an interesting alternate version of a ho-hum film and historical artifact.

That said, even the SE trilogy is better then the PT in my opinion (with the exception of Jedi: SE, which flat-out blows), but since they're both disastrous in so many ways, I'm not sure it's really surprising that there's some difference of opinion.