CatBus

To be honest, you can't.  There has never been an official home video release of Star Wars with both the '77 theatrical video AND the '77 theatrical audio.  If you must go with official releases, you have to pick one over the other.  The 2006 DVD bonus discs have the 77 video, but with the revised 93 audio, which I find to be grating.  Empire and Jedi fare better--it's actually possible to get theatrical audio & video on the same release (VHS or Laserdisc), but they still suffer from some more subtle flaws that affected many home video releases of these films.

The despecialized editions, in spite of their flaws, are closer to recreating the theatrical versions than any official home video release.  If you buy the official releases, IMO, you'll be disappointed.

Basically it's two things:

He's saying people are over-reacting about a "lack of a good release" because image quality is only a very small part of what makes the trilogy enjoyable, and because projection prints really aren't all that quality-wise anyway.  And it's a pretty good point to make.  Not sure he needs to make it in every single post, but it's a good point nevertheless.

He's saying most of why people hate the SE's is because they grew so used to the OT.  That argument is BS, because it pretends quality isn't a factor.  (it's a bit like saying if you wanna watch This Island Earth, you should just go ahead and watch MST3K: The Movie.  It shares a lot of the same audio and video so it's effectively the same thing)

danny_boy said:

Kubrik gets away with it because hardly anyone remembers what those sacred 19 minutes were(although it is documented on wikipedia/IMBD) but Lucas does not because everyone has seen his film way too many times(me included).

Kubrick also gets away with it because the edited version is just about as good as the opening day version.  If he'd added a few wiggly dinosaurs on the moon, or had Hal be the first one to get locked outside the pod bay door, or similar inanities, it's quite possible 2001 would not be considered a classic today.  Similarly, if George had made his 1997 edits twenty years earlier, there might not have been enough studio interest to even make Empire.  You never know.

But yeah, in principle, the movie, as released on opening day, should always be available as an option.  But you also can't ignore the obvious--people aren't so attached to the originals only because they saw them so many times--they saw them so many times only because they loved them so much.  Had the Special Editions been as good as the originals, the outrage over George's alterations could easily have been about the same as the dust-up over 2001. 

You simply can't pretend the quality of the editing doesn't matter.

Okay, we now have (more or less) complete audio for the trilogy in Ukrainian.  PM me for links if you're interested.

All are despecialized, but not fully.  Just the most major incongruous audio elements were replaced, whenever possible.  Some dialogue was despecialized when it was easy, but most was left alone.  These are voiceover dubs, so there is English AND Ukrainian dialogue playing simultaneously, which added to the some of the difficulties.  For the most part, they're pretty good, but you can hear a rough spot here and there.

By far, the easiest film to despecialize in this manner was Jedi.  Most of the major audio additions were not blended with old audio, and those that were, were usually not blended over dialogue.  The hardest scene in the entire trilogy was the conversation with the Emperor in Empire, and it's still the roughest-sounding bit in the trilogy.  In fact, there's one line there that's missing a translation altogether ("We have a new enemy... Luke Skywalker"), so that one is just in English.  I'm fishing around for a Ukrainian speaker to provide a decent dub for this line, just in case it works out.  If so, I'll blend it in and the Ukrainian audio will be truly complete.

I suspect regular non-voiceover dubs might be easier to despecialize because of no longer needing to lip-match the video so closely, but it was an interesting exercise anyway.  And it demonstrates that despecializing dubs is a viable option for Star Wars fans who didn't get a dub in their language prior to the Special Editions.

YDM.

FWIW nobody's arguing that LD audio doesn't frequently sound better, but I'd argue it's more a function of the medium's age than its capabilities.  Studios futzed around with audio in the Laserdisc era, certainly, but the technology wasn't so ubiquitous--someone had to actually decide to futz with the audio if they wanted to do it, and the ways they could mess with it were limited.  Now, it's just assumed that audio will be heavily processed for a home video release, and someone needs to decide NOT to if they don't want that to happen.

Which is why, generally speaking, LD audio beats DVD audio, but DVD audio still manages to beat BD audio on at least some titles.  Lossy or lossless doesn't enter into it, it's the mastering.

I’m working on despecializing some dubs, and the isolated score proved helpful for Star Wars.  Anyone have isolated score tracks for ESB and ROTJ?  Lossy is fine.  Let me know.

FWIW, I agree with Moth3r that in nearly all cases, 192k AC3 should be just fine for 2.0 tracks.  I tend to encode all "alternate" tracks (dubs, commentary, etc) at 192k and think it's perfectly reasonable.  For "main" tracks, though, I throw just a hair more bitrate at it (no objective reason for this)--if I don't do lossless, then I do 224k AC3 for "main" stereo tracks.  Those are the only two bitrates I've ever seen on mainstream commercial discs for DD stereo tracks.  Mastering differences account for most if not all of the differences you might hear between a lossy DVD tracks and the equivalent lossless Blu-ray track.

You can save a lot of space, without sacrificing quality, by encoding mono as a single channel.  i.e. on Laserdiscs and many other media, mono tracks are encoded as two identical channels for left and right.  If you encode it as a single channel, you can get away with half the bitrate--96k or 112k using my methods above.  Some people don't like single-channel mono tracks because of how some receivers don't upmix them the way they want, but you can't please everyone.

PM sent.

Interesting to note, many of the flaws on the Belbucus audio are also present here, but the flaws are more distinct, if that makes sense.  For example, there's a bit of a vague background hiss when Luke's talking to 3PO in the oil bath.  Well, on the 35mm capture, it's less vague--it's just an obnoxious background hiss when Luke's talking.  Similarly, other "blurred out" imperfections in other scenes seem to be more well-defined here.  I don't plan on trying to get rid of any flaw that's present across all sources, I just thought I'd point it out.  And reel 2 is synced and patched over with Belbucus in the damaged areas.

Looks like a little damage at either end of reel 2, but the middle part is solid.  No sync yet for R2, I've somehow gotten my hands into a few too many projects.

...and rounding out the Russian audio, we now have a voiceover-style dub for ESB.  Still no "regular" dub, but we have a complete set of good-quality Russian voiceovers for the whole trilogy now.  That should definitely improve the popularity of our preservations.

Actually, I hate to shred whatever geek cred I may have here, but I haven't seen (or heard) Puggo Grande.  However, I suspect if it were noticeably better than Belbucus, some of our audio heavy-hitters would have synced it by now and made it the default mono track for preservations.

I'm really not sure how a "best of breed" audio track will sound.  It may be more of a Frankentrack than anyone cares to listen to as more than a curiosity.  Especially with me doing the editing ;)  We'll see.

I'll also happily step aside if someone else wants to jump in and do this.  I've just always felt like I haven't given the mono mix the respect it deserves for a long time, and this might help change that.

PM sent.

If anyone's interested in hearing -1's latest capture GOUT-synced (so you can watch it with video), PM me.  At the moment it's just reel 1 and a bunch of empty space for the rest of the film (lossy for now).  I used the fanfare from the Spanish audio due to better quality, but otherwise it's all from this new capture, which is a lot cleaner-sounding.

Keep in mind I'm used to syncing dubs, which frankly are a lot more forgiving for bad sync work, and this might not be the best sync job out there.  Once I have all the reels -1 has to offer, I'll likely create a 35mm/Belbucus (and possibly Spanish for bits) hybrid.  Not sure how listenable it will be as a soundtrack, but it might at the very least be a way to highlight the quality improvements in the 35mm captures.

Sounds really good.  Appreciate the bitrate bump BTW.

Okay, we now also have a Russian voiceover-style dub for Star Wars, and the quality for this one is quite a bit better than the '89 dub mentioned in the last post.  So for Russian, that's a voiceover and non-voiceover for both SW and ROTJ.  Nothing for ESB yet, but that's likely to change.

Ah OK.  No rush at all (esp considering I'm not sure anyone will do anything useful with them but listen and drool over the possibilities), but if you post them, do it lossless ;)

PM sent.

yoda-sama said:

Now TV's Frink is Jeff Goldblum?  Did I miss something?

He was pretty good in the Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai too. Plus, I always imagine Frink in wooly chaps anyway.

negative1 said:

and finally, we have to replace 'han shoots greedo'

scene, because that's in english. we are hoping

to get an original from the voice actor that played

c3p0.

Does anyone know if this particular lead is still being pursued?  'cause we're only about 55 seconds short of the hands-down best-sounding Star Wars dub ever.

(55 seconds of film sure sounds a lot shorter than 90 feet of film, doesn't it?)

Which ones? ;)

Reels 1 & 6 have big long stretches without dialogue which could be patched pretty easily with the Spanish audio.  The middle reels not so much.

Well it looks like we do have an alternate source, but it's partial.  If it overlaps with the bad areas and blends well, we may be able to do something.

EDIT: Oh yeah, and keep posting times if you find any more, even minor problems.  Not knowing Spanish, I rarely listen very closely to the dialogue itself, and would easily miss problems like this.

Okay, I PM'd roback214, maybe we'll get lucky.  What are the times for these problems in Empire?

I suppose we could ask roback214 about his upstream source for our Empire track.  Not sure if he synced it himself of if he got it roughly as-is.  I suppose it's possible there are raw unsynced sources somewhere.