CatBus

It's not immediately obvious that Mike's restoration does actually benefit people at the present, but it does. Maybe not as much as some would like, but real tangible benefits of this project do exist.

Now if only I could get Mike to use the right apostrophe character in his avatar. That really is something we should be up in arms about.  It should look like a "9", not a "6".

PM sent.  Yeah, you have to be careful rendering the subtitles yourself because the SRT files are UTF-8, which some renderers may not understand, and also there may be some other issues depending on which fonts you choose.  Using the pre-rendered ones is best ;)

porkinsred6 said:

Maybe I obsess over this too much.

No such thing as too much obsessing.

http://originaltrilogy.com/forum/topic.cfm/Adventures-in-Raising-the-Next-Generation-of-Original-Star-Wars-Fans/topic/12304/

I'm no expert, I could easily be doing something wrong, but...

For AVC:

x264 --preset=veryslow --tune=grain --bluray-compat --fps=23.976 --force-cfr --vbv-maxrate=25000 --vbv-bufsize=30000 --crf=18 --level=4.1 --keyint=24 --open-gop --slices=4 -o output.264 input.264

To be clear, I target BD25@1080p and this usually hits the target for a standard-length film (19-21GiB video--not much headroom for extras--I'd increase crf to make more room).  Also, the vbv-maxrate could be unneccessarily low but I've heard about burned media sometimes needing lower peak rates--maybe this is unsubstantiated.  Either way, I do know my encodes work across a wide range of media and players, so that's the test I'm most concerned with, and the results are generally pretty good-looking, so I'm happy.

For MPEG-2:

I use the HCEnc GUI, targetting DVD9@720x480 avg bitrate 6500, max bitrate 8000, pulldown yes, profile best.  This usually gives you ~5.5GiB video files and lots of headroom for extra audio and subtitle streams.

All Windows for now, although I'm making plans to jump that ship.

An alternate take is: since the future can be assumed to be increasingly digital, and analogue displays often have aspect ratio issues in their own right, why not just pretend 720x480 is 16x9?  Digital systems will do this anyway, and analogue systems may end up with a stretched, cropped image, but with their aspect ratio issues and overscan, they may have ended up stretched and cropped regardless of how correct the source image was.

Or, "How I Learned to Stop Worrying And Love Doing It Wrong Just Like Hollywood"...

I've done enough reading to know that 704x480 is the closest NTSC 16x9 video size for DVD video, and 720x480 is actually a little wider than 16x9.  The question I have is: what's the difference between adding 8px borders (nominal analogue blanking) onto 704x480 video to make it 720x480 and putting that on DVD (which seems to be the way most commercial DVDs with correct aspect ratios use), and simply encoding a 704x480 video and putting that directly on DVD without modification?

The problem I'm encountering is that adding black borders and then putting it in a 720x480 frame results in digital players (software players, Blu-ray players) incorrectly assuming the black bars are part of the 16x9 image and displaying them, resulting in a displayed image that is slightly too narrow horizontally.  Analogue DVD players are fine and discard the borders, as they should.

I'm just looking for a way to have an image that displays correctly on digital players without screwing up analogue players.  Directly encoding 704x480 seems like it might work, but am I overlooking something?

And let's pretend I just don't care about overscan on the output device.  We're only talking about nominal analogue blanking, that's it.

SilverWook said:

It's not a happy ending, if it makes you feel any better.

Yeah, because that statement is really going to make the images in our heads more tolerable. Thanks so much.

Not that it hasn't been said before, but I just want to add that this rocks.  Holy damn does it rock. Nice work, everyone involved.

He's like the man on the run who tries to drop off the grid and make himself disappear, but he keeps using his credit card.  Okay, maybe he really hasn't been here since November, but we've heard this "-1 doesn't live here anymore" spiel before.

I am sorely tempted, but I'm pretty burned out on audio work right now and badly need a little break.  It's just one film too, not the entire trilogy, so that makes the workload smaller.

EDIT: I'm assuming it needs to be despecialized, which is really the hard part. But then, I also just hate the idea of anyone trying to tie the long-term survival of their language to the cinematic albatross of the Special Edition, so that also provides more motivation.  Ergh, so torn.

I haven't had a chance to check the DCP file out yet, but what are the opinions on its 5.1 DTS track?  I'm assuming it was redone/remastered for digital cinema, but is it still pretty faithful to the original theatrical feel?  I don't recall there being much to complain about with the Blu-ray audio, but maybe that's because I was so distracted by the video problems that I didn't notice audio problems.  And I'm just assuming the 2.0 PCM track is awesome.

bkev said:

DuracellEnergizer said:

I don't know why Lucas didn't just reshoot the shot so that Han shoots second.

All He would have had to do was have a replica of the cantina set built, have a few Han/Greedo costumes made/taken out of storage, and then hired a guy who could have reasonably stood in for a young Harrison Ford to play Han (he could have always cut-and-pasted Ford's head onto the guy's body later, anyway). And then, during the reshoot, the guy could have made a realistic dodge away from Greedo's blasterfire, and then shot the scaly green bastard from under/over the table in self-defense.

I honestly don't know why Lucas didn't just do it -- and many of the other changes -- this way. It would have cost a couple thousand bucks or so to do (I can't see it costing much more than digitally twisting Han's body around in the original footage) and it would have look far better and seamless.

Lucas seems to like half-assing everything he does, though, even when he had the millions to do better.

 Sometimes the things you say just make no sense to me.  This is one of them.

He meant Lucas should have cut the image of Ford's head off and pasted it onto the image of the other guy's body. You're just twisted to have read it the other way ;)

For people who want a keepsake, so they can remember in 2026 that Han wasn't always wearing wooly chaps and a cowboy hat, and Yoda didn't always have antennae. You know, nostalgia for the good old days before the really egregious changes.

Just to post a status update, roback214 is my source for everything regarding ESB Spanish audio, and he's been offline for a while. So there'll likely be nothing to report on this front until he returns.

Same here. There's a big difference between not understanding how anyone can come to a certain conclusion, and saying nobody's allowed to come to that conclusion, or even that this conclusion is wrong.

It actually shares some shocking similarities to a statement made by a relative one year around Christmas. They live in one of those neighborhoods where the neighbors all try to outdo one another decoration-wise. Every year, the house across the street had miles of blinking, gaudy lights, a herd of animatronic deer, an inflatable Santa, and Christmas music playing on outdoor speakers. But this year, they also had, for some reason, lawn flamingos. My relative said "I can't believe they have flamingos. How tacky!" Now, I'm not saying they aren't entitled to their opinion, and that it all isn't subjective anyway, and that I didn't ultimately agree with them that the lawn flamingos were in fact tacky, but nevertheless, I doubt I'll ever be able to understand why those flamingos, of all things, were the tipping point. It is pretty much the same feeling I have for all the rage over Vader's "Nooo!"

msycamore said:

It's just Lucas' hamfisted and embarrassing attempt to connect all the films with each other. In fact, this goes all the way back to his retitling of the first film in 1981.

I actually never gave the alterations enough thought to realize this, but at least for many of the major changes, it's true.  However, I think that if you do accept the idea of altering movies to tie them in better with one another, you can still reject the idea of altering movies to tie them in better with crappy other movies.  So that's where the "97 is best" opinion can arise.

Although frankly I do have to agree with Frink.  If you're already on board with the film alteration train for the first fifty miles, I honestly can't see how you can very well complain about another inch and a half.

Well, for what it's worth, I now have a GOUT-synced "hybrid" mono track for Star Wars.  Here's how it was assembled:

Reel 1: Spanish 35mm capture from -1 for fanfare, English 35mm capture for everything else

Reel 2: Belbucus audio to cover a little damage at the beginning and end of the reel, English 35mm capture for everything else (end of reel 2 is Tarkin saying "one swift stroke")

Reels 3-5: Belbucus audio

Reel 6: Spanish 35mm capture for the awards ceremony through the end credits, Belbucus audio for everything else.

I tried patching in Spanish 35mm audio in other places without any dialogue, but it just didn't work well.  I actually think the result is quite listenable and the transitions are relatively seamless.  That said, don't just assume I didn't make some sort of rookie mistake and screw something up before you go do something crazy like deleting your other copies of the mono mix.

The track is available in FLAC, DTS-MA mono and 112k lossy AC3.  PM me if you're interested.

Ah, excellent.  Thanks very much.  I'll start working on the Frankentrack then ;)

I guess I just wanted to confirm with -1... there is at least one more reel of mono audio on the way, right?  I'm assuming there's a delay due to your workload in a million other things, but it occurred to me I never was really clear on which or how many reels you actually were going to capture.

If 1 & 2 are all you have, I can work with that too.

PM sent.

Okay the links are up and have been shared.  Sadako has a lot of projects going on, and this could be pretty time-consuming, so we may not have updates for a while--but progress is actually happening, so that's news!

I'll get the audio and subtitle template uploaded for you soon.

If you hide the Blu-Ray set in a closet, people might still accidentally see that you own it. I recommend throwing the boxes away, gluing the discs together (shiny side out), and hiding them in a crawlspace or wall cavity. You can't be too careful.

FWIW, my impression has always been that MPEG-2 was a fine codec if you gave it enough bitrate.  Where it falls down is that its bit-starved behavior is much uglier than H.264.  For that reason, H.264's advantage is not really on disc, where space is plentiful, but in things like streaming, where the bitrate is throttled way back by necessity.  I'm sure there's also some minor advantages on disc that derive from this, such as better VBR performance due to better low-bitrate performance, and maybe some other minor things too.  But if you give MPEG-2 30Mbps to work with, my impression was that it could produce fine-looking results.

Any releases of Empire and Jedi prior to 1993 would be theatrical audio, and video too, if it's letterboxed.  Every home video release of Star Wars has had the altered 1981 opening (where the movie is given an episode number and named "A New Hope"), except the 2006 DVD bonus disc, which is the only one with the 1977 theatrical opening where the name of the movie is simply Star Wars with no episode number, just like it was in theatres.

How much the revised Star Wars opening matters to you is up to you (in spite of simply being the addition of some new text, they managed to screw up the edit even then if you watch carefully), but you said you wanted theatrical, and, well, that's a complicated story.  And that's not mentioning the fact that when you saw it in the theatre in 77, chances are you didn't hear the stereo mix which is the only audio mix you have the option of buying officially.  If you want the original mono mix or the six-channel mix, your only option is fan preservations.

Also keep in mind, the home video releases have been through processes that prevent them from looking or sounding quite like the theatre.  At best, they're considerably brighter, less saturated, pink-shifted, and they have compressed audio dynamics.  This makes things like the matte boxes around spaceships a lot more visible than they'd have been in the theatre.  So I can't stress enough--fan preservations are a better representation of what it actually looked and sounded like in theatres than anything you can buy.