CatBus

These have been great, thanks a ton!

Thanks to Harmy, I now have a much clearer recording.  Still has a bit of the high frequency waver, but everything else is much better and no crazy echo effect on the music.  Starting over ;)

Okay, I have the Russian 1989 non-voiceover dub for Star Wars, and I need some advice from the OT.com hive mind.

The audio quality, at least by our typical standards, is awful.  The issues are: a persistent, significantly wavering volume on high frequencies throughout the entire film, a severe echoing effect that seems to come and go, and just general low quality.  The actual dubbed voices are usually good quality with no significant issues, which is why I think many of the problems are baked into the original dub's mix.

Out of the box, I have a hard time listening to it, or imagining someone else happily doing so.  Dialog tends to be fine, most sound effects tend to be tolerable, but the music is just utterly trashed. So I'm engaged in an effort to replace parts of the dub with a copy of the English 85 mix wherever the dramatic change in audio quality is less jarring than the wavering/echoing issue.

I've had reasonable success with:

- The Fox fanfare

- The victory ceremony music through the end credits

- The sunset scene

I have problems with any scene with dialogue, because obviously I can't replace that. Basically it seems to only work if I can swap out the whole scene, otherwise the mid-scene transition is too jarring.

The opening crawl was rough, because it sounded horrible but had dubbed-over narration.  I found that the echoing was less of a cacophony in the right channel than the left, so I duplicated the right channel on both channels, effectively making the crawl mono.  It still sounds terrible, but less so.

My question is: Does anyone have other ideas for large spans with no dialogue that might work for replacement with the 85 mix?

I don't see the shame in it, I enjoy the Holiday Special quite a bit more than the PT in a completely non-ironic way.  I can sometimes go entire minutes without wanting to turn it off.

Not to mention, one of the prevailing theories explaining "Why did they release the GOUT when they explicitly said they'd never release the originals again?" was that the GOUT was released to shut down the burgeoning industry in Star Wars Laserdisc rips (because, at least on the video side, the GOUT was marginally better quality than those rips).  And it more-or-less worked, simple competition.  Superior product at a fair price.

If that theory is true and the pattern holds, that means they may consider the best way to deal with us is to deliver a better-quality product at a fair price.  Although I have my doubts they can actually deliver on "better-quality", supposing for a moment that they actually did it, I think most people here would be happy to pack it in and call it a day, including myself.

Check the first post.  "native" means designed to accompany video with crawl text and alien subtitles in the same language (thus, these subs do not provide translations for those).  "match" means designed to match the onscreen appearance of burnt-in alien subtitles (which I'll be the first to admit is more of a novelty than something I'd want to use all the time, so it's safe to ignore these).

PM sent; no SRT-only download is available.  This project comes in one size: friggen' huge!

Well, for dubs, it's your only real hope for a surround mix at all.  But yeah, there's not much hope of even approximating anything original with it.

Yep.  Neither has ESB.

Back to the OP, it's just fairly unlikely anyone's going to do this other than yourself, Rebelscum, because the pairing is so odd.  The primary appeal (to me) of the DeEd is that it actually looks like a movie from the late 70's.  Having it sound like a movie from the 90's* while simultaneously looking like a movie from the 70's would seem, at least to me, pretty jarring.

* Except I don't actually think the Blu-ray mix sounds like a movie from the 90's--it sounds like a movie from the 70's that's gone through a weird warping/muddying wringer in a disastrous attempt to make it sound more like a movie from the 90's, but I realize this is subjective and I know some people really like it.

It turns out there was a miscommunication and I don't have a source for the Russian dub for Star Wars after all.  So I'll be uploading the two ROTJ dubs I do have, and just hope for more to land in my inbox someday.  PM me if you're interested.

I have been contacted by someone with access to some Russian dubs.  Right now, I have the voiceover-style dub and another more typical dub of ROTJ, and I hope to have access to SW soon, and Empire within a month or so.

They sound good, but unless someone has any need to hear them right now, I'll wait to share until I get the Star Wars dubs (hopefully in time for the DeEd Blu-rays!)

I'm not sure of the history behind the newer non-voiceover Russian dub, and how popular it is with Russian fans.  I didn't know it even existed, and I don't know the status of similar dubs for the rest of the trilogy.

Nope.  Sounds fine here.

EDIT: Waitasec... are you expecting the dialogue to be EXCLUSIVELY on the center channel?!?

Nope, you're hearing it right.  This is an upmix from Dolby surround encoded stereo.  There's no way you're getting that sort of bleed-free channel separation.  It's unlikely it was that way theatrically either.

What's the significance of the "raw" in the filename, as opposed to the other files?

Also, if anyone has the American Spanish ROTJ track from the R1 GOUT DVD, please PM me.  I'd like to compare it against the one I already have from roback214.

-1's project is the only 1080p project on my radar, so I'm definitely already willing to do a special release for that one (whenever that happens).  I just wasn't sure if there were any others.

Also, there's still a bit of a question about whether or not -1's project will be GOUT-synced, or if it will be close enough for subtitles at least.  We won't know that for a while either.

PM sent

jerryshadoe said:

So that's a total of 15 languages (will be the most complete "International" edition ever made) with a total of 29 audio tracks AND subtitles for the following:

English
English SDH
French
Italian
Spanish
Portoguese(Portugal)
Portuguese(Brazilian)
Dutch
Japanese
German
Russian
Chinese
Arabic
Indonesian
Bulgarian
Croatian
Czech
Polish
Estonian
Hebrew
Hungarian
Icelandic
Romanian
Serbain
Slovenian
Thai
Turkish
Latvian
Danish
Finnish
Greek
Norwegian
Slovak
Swedish
English for commentary track 1
French for commentary track 1
Italian for commentary track 1
Spanish for commentary track 1
Portoguese(Portugal) for commentary track 1
Dutch for commentary track 1
Czech for commentary track 1
Hungarian for commentary track 1
Turkish for commentary track 1
Chinese for commentary track 1
Chinese for commentary track 2
Chinese for commentary track 3
Chinese for commentary track 4
Chinese for commentary track 5 (not sure on this one, will have to verify since there is almost nothing said in track 5 since its mostly a score track)

This makes for a total of 48 subtitle tracks in 32 languages.

So jealous right now ;)

Our existing American Spanish dub of SW is pretty muffled, so a better copy would be most welcome!

Empire and Jedi already use HD source material in v1.0, but Harmy has said he intends to revisit them, release better and less-compressed versions, etc.  Empire is slated to go first, and he's already released some test clips.

In other news, if anyone wants these subs for a 1080p preservation, I've just improved the upscaling process and it now produces great-looking results.  These will be included in the next release, but I don't know of any critical need for 1080p subs right now, so unless I hear otherwise, I'll sit on them until I get some more changes.

Please don't post direct links in this thread. Although it's far from a settled matter, some would consider even subtitles to be copyrighted materials, and I want this thread to be clean of that sort of link.  You can mention they are available via PM, post them at some common location, or start a new thread.

If any Special Edition subtitles were derived from Project Threepio, my subtitles were simply used as a baseline and the alterations/additions/retimings were done by someone else... I haven't provided any SE subtitles to anyone.  What's in the project is what everyone else has.

This project has subtitles only for the unaltered theatrical versions--no Special Edition subtitles.

No, this project is limited in scope to the OT films. However, I've designed this project as a sort of complete subtitling toolkit/template so that others can build on what I've done, as needed.  So, while I don't personally plan on any expansion more radical than adding languages, that's not to say someone else couldn't use some of my tools and workflow to create something different.

EDIT: Oh yeah, and you're very welcome. Making these films accessible to deaf viewers was in fact the whole reason this project got started.  It just got a little out of control...

PM sent.

PM sent (check the image link in my signature for more details about Project Threepio).