CatBus

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.

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.