CatBus

Don't order the potatoes.  One of them is actually an asteroid.

phelipebreves said:

Sorry if this has already been explained, I'm not very good with English.

I need the subtitles in Portuguese of The Empire Strikes Back and Return of The Jedi.

As I understand I can get here.

Can anyone help me?

You have a private message.

Okay, personal reflection and mea culpa time.  I never liked the DVD colors (too blue) and also was dubious of the Blu-ray colors (too gold), although I thought they looked good in spite of my doubts about their authenticity.  Upon seeing the WOWOW screencaps, I was sold that those represented the real deal.

I'd downloaded custom Blu-ray cover art with the correct movie title, and I'd even edited the "scenes from the film" on the back cover so that they matched the WOWOW colors.  Yeah, I was that kinda anal about it, but I love this movie.

I was all set to start a new project where I'd apply HDTV colors to the Blu-ray, splice in the old, darker, opening without the clipped sky detail, and even try to put back the snake reflection from Laserdisc, what the hell.

I browsed those 35mm stills posted elsewhere and thought, "Well, that shows that the gold tint on the Blu-rays was at least partially justified, but look at that sunset, that's still not right.  Maybe I can figure out if there's a happy medium."  So I spent some time in Photoshop doing some color correcting, and... er, well, now I'm convinced even the sunset is probably much closer to correct on the Blu-rays than on WOWOW.  I've done a U-turn and now think the golden hues of the Blu-ray are actually the result of a careful restoration, not a deliberate alteration.

There's still plenty of deliberate alterations on the Blu-ray.  The overly-brightened opening, the missing snake refection, and so on.  But the colors?  Not so much, I'm now convinced.  And I'm afraid I just can't justify doing a whole preservation project to undo such fairly inconsequential things.  So sorry to all, and thanks in particular to Harmy for providing those 35mm stills.  They may have taken a really long time to do it, but they changed at least one mind.

Not sure how ColourMatch works exactly, but could it recover lost grain (to the extent that it existed on LD)?

Just to be clear, what theatrical footage is on this exactly?  The ROTJ ghosts?  Are we sure it's not an upscale yet?

deepanddark20 said:

Is there something about the inherent nature of stormtroopers that makes a particular stormtrooper bumping into something an impossible event?

Not impossible, funny.  The stormtroopers are trying to do something very serious and menacing and the headbonk completely undermines that.  It doesn't really matter if it's realistic or not.  If a bank robber in the real world cracked his skull on the doorway on the way out of the bank, it'd be funny.  If you were a policeman reviewing the bank's security tapes, tell me you wouldn't be tempted to rewind and watch him bonk his head again.  Yeah it's slapstick, but maybe I'm just lowbrow.

The dramatic reveal of a planet where the whole planet misses its cue by a good few seconds is funny too.  The thing that makes the latter clearly an error is that the musical cue was obviously intended, as shown by the '77 crawl.  Yeah, obviously you wouldn't laugh if you didn't notice, but assuming you notice, it's funny.

Gogogadget said:

...but an error that seems so easy to fix and still existing to this day, i'm not too hot on.

It's not lazy of them not to fix it, it was lazy of them to have broken it. My completely unsubstantiated opinion is that redoing the crawl for the '81 release was a quick job and Marcia wasn't involved. Anyone with a head for good film editing would have caught and fixed it before it saw the light of day. One of the reasons I so strongly prefer the '77 crawl is that good editing is one of the things that distinguishes the originals from the SE's, and having a big editing botch-up right at the start kinda ruins that part of things.

When the stormtrooper bonks his head, it seems OK to laugh. When Tatooine comes into view, it somehow seems wrong to laugh even though the '81 crawl begs you to do it.

Gogogadget said:

i've never liked the incorrect cue and it's totally lazy of Lucasfilm to never go back and fix this.

I both love it and hate it.  I treat it kinda like the stormtrooper headbonk.  Every time I see it, I think [in director voice]: "Early! Tatooine, listen for your cue! Now go back into the starfield and wait for it this time!"

TV's Frink said:

I think the only solution is to hire celebrity impersonators.

Yeah, but what problem COULDN'T that solve?

I suspect run-of-the-mill corporate merger/buyout administrative stuff.  Lucasfilm had a different Privacy Policy and Terms of Use than Disney.  Disney is changing them to be compatible with the existing Disney ones.  Apparently Lucasfilm's Privacy Policy and Terms of Use did not come with a "subject to change without notice" clause, or nobody would have seen these notifications and the policy change would have happened anyway.

Not that this means that the contents of Disney's Privacy Policies and Terms of Use are necessarily unremarkable, just that a change like this after a buyout is.

Gogogadget said:

If I did the '81 crawl with the incorrect musical cue, you'd have extra frames and then the audio would have to be re-synced to the entire movie.

Aren't the lengths of the '77 and '81 crawl/flyovers the same (the frames are different internally, but they start and stop at the same place)? So if you pasted over the '81 crawl/flyover with the existing audio, the audio glitch would "just happen" exactly correctly?

EDIT: Harmy beat me to it. And yes, the framecounts are different if you just do the crawl, but you'll find you have to do the whole crawl/flyover to do it right, and then they line up nicely.

Harmy said:

This is actually false! The BD contains the SE crawl and flyover, which was made in '97 and has the fast receding SW logo. The '81 crawl and flyover had a different starfield, whereas the '97 crawl has the same starfield as the '77 crawl, albeit shifted slightly upwards, so in order to "restore" the '81 crawl faithfully, one would have to recreate it or use a LD transfer for it and then you'd have to redo the flyover as well, because it was recomposited optically in '81 and has different matte lines than the '77 one and the '97 one, which was recomposited digitally. Plus the background has a slightly different look in the '81 version.

You could probably still use the '97 crawl, if you managed to separate it from the background, because I think what they did was that they wanted to recomposite the crawl and the flyover digitally for the SE, using the original elements, and they ended up using the original element of the '81 crawl and the original elements from '77 for everything else.

Stop blowing my mind!

yoda-sama said:

Not sure what version "present and correct" is supposed to refer to...

I'm assuming it's just a matter of taking the crawl/flyover from the Blu-ray, doing some processing (at minimum, scaling to 720p, but could also attempt better color-matching, laser despecialization, and starfield de-obliteration), and pasting it over the equivalent frames in the DeEd.

The result would be DeEd with the '81 crawl, with the same timing/cue glitch that it's always had.  Any attempt to actually fix the timing glitch, or just paste text in front of Harmy's existing crawl, wouldn't be accurate to any version of Star Wars that's ever existed, so I hope no attempt is made to do that.

deepanddark20 said:

All I'm asking for is a movie that has all the quality of Harmy's edition, except with the words "Episode IV A New Hope" in the opening crawl. I shouldn't need to request that a whole new fan project be started just to make this one little change.

There are other fan projects that swap out the crawl for versions with other languages, so it's not too much of a stretch to think someone might do the same for the alternate crawl/flyover, for example:

In response to Gogogadget, if you can do that and make it seamless with no loss of any quality, I would adore that. 

...and there you go.  A whole new project requested and potentially started.  I'd watch out for starfield incongruity, though.  I'm not sure there are any copies of the '81 crawl and flyover without obliterated starfields.

I apologize I didn't know you weren't looking for the VHS look all-around.  Your dissatisfaction with the brightness of the theatrical version in at least one scene led me to believe (incorrectly) that you might prefer the colors of home video releases to the theatrical colors.

deepanddark20 said:

I suppose while I'm on this thread I'll mention one more little personal issue I have, but this next thing I'm about to mention is not specifically an issue with your despecialized edition but with a general trend I've noticed in fan preservations. It's the lack of "Episode IV A New Hope" in the opening title crawl.

I know, I know, the original theatrical presentation in 1977 didn't have those words. But surely almost everybody grew up watching copies that did, right? Those words were not a "Special Edition" alteration, so if your goal is to remove "Special Edition" changes, you don't have to remove those words.

FWIW, I also saw it more times on video than in the theatre, but every single time I saw it on video, the crawl seemed particularly wrong (not only is the name of the movie wrong, but the entire planet of Tatooine misses its musical cue).  So sheer volume of viewings isn't a good metric, many of us suffered through what we felt was the wrong crawl for decades. The reason it's such a "trend" these days is because so many of us prefer the theatrical version.

As others have said, this is a theatrical preservation.  Not only is the crawl different than your home video experience, but the colors/brightness are different than VHS (as you have noticed), the default soundtrack is different, and you can actually see most of the stars in the space scenes.  It doesn't mean the Despecialized Editions are "wrong", they just have a different goal than you'd like them to have.  Given their goal or preserving the theatrical experience, however, they are extremely successful.

But for what it's worth, not all preservations are trying to preserve the theatrical look & feel.  There are different projects here that attempt to re-create the 1980's home video experience, such as here: http://originaltrilogy.com/forum/topic.cfm/GOUT-Extremely-Cruddy-Edition/topic/15871/

Take a look around.  Just because this project doesn't share your priorities doesn't mean there aren't others that do, or that you can't VHS-ify the Despecialized Edition yourself.

Chewtobacca said:

CatBus said:  Isn't that pretty much what hairy_hen's ESB purist mix (stereo version) was?

I don't know.  I didn't realize he released a stereo version of ESB.

Dangit, I think you're right.  It must have existed as part of the process of creating the 5.1 mix, but I don't see any downloads for the stereo version.

Oh well, if h_h starts applying his fancy new software to the rest of the trilogy, we'll be seeing it soon enough.

No need to pile on the subs.  Sounds like Andrea's planning on just packaging them as they came off the BD.  Whether that will be CIH-safe or not, I don't know, but it'll certainly be type-safe.

Your call, but I'll personally move them so that they are entirely inside the film frame.  Black bars don't exist on some projector systems, so subs located there get chopped out.

But leave the image centered for sure, regardless of subs!

Also: overscan.  With the subs that low, you're likely to have them chopped off on quite a few TV's.  Leave a 3.5%-5% margin on the bottom.  5% for maximum compatibility.  That's likely to end up looking like one line in/one line out of the frame.

FWIW, I'm not sure if the English DTS you're referring to is DTS-MA or not, but often DTS-MA tracks have unnecessarily large lossy DTS cores.  If you uploaded the track somewhere, I could extract the lossless PCM using Arcsoft, and then re-encode the DTS-MA with the smallest possible lossy DTS core, which could save some space.

And if it is DTS-MA, I think you could safely drop the AC3 version unless the content is really that dramatically different.  Pretty much all Blu-ray setups should at the very least be able to play the DTS core.

EDIT: ...and more people speak Japanese than German or Italian, and possibly more than French depending on your source of info. Just sayin'.

yoda-sama said:

It is kind of a shame, if you really think about it, that people around Star Wars fans only tend to hear the negative things we rant about the films, rarely getting insight as to what we love about the originals...

Yeah, that's exactly it. I've really never, to my knowledge, complained about the Special Editions in front of my kid, but kids are pretty astute about picking up things like that--and apparently mine did, from me or someone else.  Certainly from his initial reaction he expected Star Wars to be a sucky movie with dumb dinosaurs in it.  And that's exactly the opposite of what he saw!

Anyway, thanks Harmy.  I know it must be kinda weird hearing about people's only experience with Star Wars being your reconstructions (never seen in the theatre, never seen VHS, never seen GOUT, just the DeEd's), but be very proud that they are good enough to serve such a valuable purpose for future generations!

Chewtobacca said:

hairy_hen said:Speaking of the '93 versions, there is no real reason to avoid them, because unlike the first movie there aren't any sound effects additions.  ESB is missing the snowspeeder crash sound for some reason...

In that case, it would be good to have 2.0 PCM of the '93 mix with the sound of the snowspeeder crash restored.

Isn't that pretty much what hairy_hen's ESB purist mix (stereo version) was?  I'm happy with the upmixed version.

Don't know if I'd mentioned this yet, but my oldest son finally saw Star Wars, thanks to the Despecialized Edition 2.5.

I didn't want to have to explain why this movie looked so bad compared to the other movies he's seen, and now I don't have to, at least until he's older.

But apparently at some point I must have said something about it, because when I said we were gonna watch Star Wars, he rolled his eyes at me and sighed and said: "It doesn't have dinosaurs in it, does it?" When I assured him there would definitely be no dinosaurs, he seemed more interested.

My kid's already got a Star Wars misconception.  He's only seen Star Wars so far (so far he's been able to wait for the Despecialized 2.x series), but I call this one the Darth Vader/Pootie Tang crossover misconception.

Basically Darth Vader is occasionally using big unfamiliar words for a kid (ambassador, etc), and he's wearing a mask which kinda muffles everything he says.  Then practically the first thing Leia says to him is that she has no idea what he's talking about.

...so, later, my kid just starts laughing in the middle of the Death Star conference scene, and says, "Ha! Nobody can even understand what [Vader's] saying!"

Which I think is great!  It points to a whole new source of motivation for Vader.  The sheer rage of being misunderstood wherever he goes.  Finally at the conference he just snaps and force-chokes a guy who misunderstood what he said.  I think it's great.  Also a fairly decent motivator for Bane in The Dark Knight Rises, now that I think of it.

EDIT: I should also add that my son is young enough that he's got at least three friends who are pretty hard to understand because they're still having trouble pronouncing certain sounds, so a guy just going through life not being understood by the people around him is actually not that out of the ordinary to him.

Can't remember anymore, but I think so. But I believe hairy_hen has postulated elsewhere that the 85 mix is based on some master that's earlier-generation than either the stereo or six-track mixes, so it's not just a matter of putting one bit of the mono mix into the otherwise untouched stereo mix--but the result was (to me) a lot like a mashup of the various original mixes.

SpilkaBilka said:

Interesting.  I wonder why they did the remix in 1985 for SW, but not for ESB and ROTJ?

I've always felt that the SW '85 mix was their attempt to reconcile the three theatrical mixes, since the mono mix seemed to get a lot of love, but the future was clearly stereo.  The other films either didn't have multiple mixes to reconcile (ROTJ), or nobody liked any parts of the mono mix better than the stereo mix (ESB), so they just stuck with the stereo mix.