CatBus

Bingowings said:

Vader hopes Luke will be take is place as second in command with himself as the new Emperor.

I've always understood that as Vader's overt motivation in Empire, but I actually like the idea of that as a motivation in Jedi too.

Vader brings Luke to the throne room so that together they can defeat the Emperor, but he can't tell Luke this directly because Luke is not interested in an imperial power grab... yet.  But Luke fails to act against the Emperor on his own (fails to turn to the dark side), and Vader sees his chances of a successful coup dropping by the second.  So he hastily grabs the Emperor and stages the coup single-handedly... critically injuring himself in the process.

So it wasn't an act of self-sacrifice, it was a simple coup gone wrong.  Vader's "you were right about me" at the end was just as disingenuous as the deathbed confession of any bastard who wants to whitewash his record before it's too late.  And Luke buys the whole act, the credulous schmuck.  Blown up planets?  Torture?  Forget all that, Luke had a Special Moment with his dad.

I'm not sure how I can work in the whole force ghost thing, but I actually like this interpretation enough that I'm willing to bend a few facts to make them fit ;)

AntcuFaalb said:

I'd be surprised if -1's project isn't GOUT-synced already (after removing all of the leaders/etc. from the beginning, of course).

It'll be close, I'm sure.  But it only takes a two frame difference to be annoying to me.  And if -1's ROTJ has all of the frames from the PAL and NTSC GOUTs, then it's already 1 frame off from our PAL reference.

I think -1 means that these will be a new standard.  He doesn't want to throw frames out just because some other home video version did, and I can see why--you don't just discard parts of an historical preservation without a damned good reason.

However, I agree that a GOUT-synced version will appear almost overnight.  It's just required to make it useful for many people.

FWIW, I got some Latin American Spanish subtitles, but I'm suspicious of them and would like someone to double-check them if possible.

Star Wars and Empire both seem good quality, and mostly match the Castilian subtitles except for the odd word or phrase here and there, as I'd expect.  The problem is that they had a few Special Edition lines in them, and for those, I just copied over the Castilian text.  Jedi is nothing at all like the Castilian text, has Special Edition lines I pasted over, and was missing all of the subtitled lines, which I also pasted over from the Castilian.  I suspect it's not as well-done as the other two.

Anyway, if you're interested in checking these out and offering corrections, let me know.  Incidentally, Latin American Spanish has the weirdest language code so far: es-419.  The UN apparently has numerical designations for super-national regions, and 419 is the one for Latin America and the Caribbean.  The source for these files is Argentine, but I'd like them to be as "neutral" as possible.

Okay, it looks like I have GOUT-synced Polish audio for the entire trilogy.  I should have this available soon, so PM me for links if you're interested.

FWIW, I was sick to death of syncing audio to an exact-frame level of accuracy, so I decided to see what would happen if I just stretched the whole thing to fit and let the audio drift in and out of sync through the movie.  It turns out, at least for the VHS captures I was working with, it's certainly good enough for dubs.  Generally speaking, the audio on these is always within 0-2 frames of perfect sync.  Since at that level, you only notice sync problems by carefully watching the actors' lips and listening to the English audio, it's not really a big problem for dubs.  Polish is a little harder because the English audio is actually present in the background, but I think I could recommend this method for anyone else wanting to sync a VHS capture without a lot of time and effort.

Basically, the process is this: find a sync point near the beginning and end of the film (excluding the fanfare), where the waveforms line up nicely--a good pop, click, or bang usually does nicely.  Record the timestamps of those locations on the dub track and on the English track.  From this, you can create a stretch factor and offset (slope and intersection for the more geometrically minded).  Use the stretch factor to stretch the audio, then use the offset to either pad silence onto the beginning or chop a bit off.  Then volume-match the fanfare off an English track and paste it over the beginning of the dub track (the fanfare on dubs is often wrong, mistimed, or missing, so I don't bother to work with it).

That process gave me "good enough" sync on the first try for both Empire and Jedi.  For Star Wars, there was a bit halfway through (just when they come out of hyperspace), where the sync jumped to over 2 frames off.  So I just repeated the stretch/offset process for the movie starting at that point instead of the beginning, pasted that over, and it was good too.

I'd been calling this the "sloppy sync" method because I spent no effort on actually syncing anything but two or three points in the film, but I think the results are good enough to call it something else.  Maybe "easy sync"?

Anyway, it's so fast and easy that I'm now excited about the prospect of someone finding other dubs, because syncing them all seems like a realistic prospect now.

And, I realize the DVD downscale is a bit of an also-ran release, but I'm assuming it can be released early too, since lossless audio is irrelevant there?

If they were re-creations, he did a crap job ;)

Challenge!  A challenge!

I don't see any reason why you can't.

Laserschwert--do you have everything you need to work on ESB/ROTJ credits?  No pressure, you just did a finished up a great project.

AntcuFaalb said:

What exactly did Harrison and Carrie not do? Their acting in ROTJ is A-OK by me.

I actually think neither Han nor Leia as scripted in ROTJ gave them much to work with.  It's a lackluster performance IMO, but they'd turned into lackluster characters, so IMO you can't blame the actors too much for failing to make them shine.

Fisher did great in SW, switching on a dime between damsel in distress and sassy take-charge heroine.  Then in ESB, she was a respectable leader fighting with her secret passion.  In ROTJ, she was all damsel all the time, sometimes in distress, sometimes not.  Bleh, no complexity at all.  Good enough for your storybook princess, maybe, not for Leia.

Solo was the can-you-trust-him-or-not scoundrel in SW, where you weren't even sure he'd show up for the final battle.  And then in ESB he hatched brilliant escape plans one minute and complained about the hyperdrive not being his fault the next--strategic genius or overgrown child, who could tell?  In ROTJ, he... well, he leads a mission, and he does use trickery to accomplish it, yes, but he's always a good guy.  Even worse, a reliable good guy.  Yawn.  Even Lando, who pulled a shift as the can-you-trust-him-or-not scoundrel in ESB, skips straight to reliable good guy in this one.

My opinion on that anyway.  What I liked about Star Wars was that, while it certainly was based on storybook archetypes as old as dirt, it tweaked them enough to keep it interesting.  ROTJ had some good moments and I actually enjoy it, but Han and Leia were not the best parts.

poita said:

This leads to interesting problems, leia looking like a hooker, Luke looking like a wax dummy

Oddly, in the Holiday Special, it's Leia looking like a wax dummy and Luke looking like a hooker.

msycamore said:

In the end this is a matter of opinion and taste I guess but do expect to see stuff that was never intended to be seen that's visible on the O-neg but was never visible on prints. This is something studios recently have realized when releasing some of their classic catalog titles, where they instead aim for something that is more representative of what would have been seen in theaters instead.

Generational detail loss is fairly easy for the end-user to simulate.  If I'm ever watching a movie that appears too sharp, I can switch my player's output to 720p or even 480p.  That blurs up the picture pretty nicely--not necessarily to EXACTLY the same level as theatrical prints of that particular film, but pretty close.

There are some advantages to going back to sources earlier than projection prints other than more detail.  Assuming nothing else goes awry with the Blu-ray, I think OCN-based transfers are usually a good choice for the studios (but there are always exceptions).  It's much easier for the end-user to "fix" a too-detailed Blu-ray than a wrong-colored/DNR'd Blu-ray.

bkev said:

Also the fact that it's clearly -1 on the account.

Now, now.  It's all about plausible deniability.

xhonzi said:

imperialscum said:

Sad thing is seeing comments of people after seeing the videos such as: "I didn't realise before how flawed the prequels are" etc.

He didn't change my opinion, but he did inform it.

Not to mention, particularly if the movie is dull, you tend to forget details about movies you don't like.  The Phantom Menace came out the same year as The Thirteenth Floor.  I saw both, thought both were incredibly tedious, promptly forgot most of them, and never saw them again.  So both were crap movies seen once over a decade ago.  Why should I be able to deconstruct them myself to demonstrate their flaws so many years later?

I can barely remember who was even in The Thirteenth Floor or what the plot was.  The only reason I remember more about The Phantom Menace is because of the neverending merchandising blitz, and hanging around Star Wars forums.  If it wasn't for OT.com, I wouldn't have even remembered that Yoda was in The Phantom Menace, let alone a creepy puppet.

But if some guy made a funny video explaining exactly what was horrible about The Thirteenth Floor, I might see it, because I know it was bad but no longer remember precisely how bad.  Worked for Showgirls.  And Showgirls was better than The Phantom Menace.

And FWIW, I thought the RLM review was pretty hit-and-miss.  I didn't watch it again either.

Brooks said:

I'm confused about this.  The detail lost in the generational losses between the negative and the theatrical prints mean that a theatrical print scanned at 4k or higher would be equivalent in detail to the negative scanned at 1080p?

There are a lot of factors, but it could often be less than 1080p.  For example, if the film uses a lot of opticals or composites... the Mos Eisley flyby is never gonna have 1080 lines of detail.

Asaki said:

I just don't understand how mixing it with BluRay footage would make it look better.

It's not entirely about looks (although the comments above about the Blu-ray being based on earlier-generation sources are true).  Even if this thing gets released and it looks better than every other video source out there, it's very unlikely to be GOUT-synced, so alternate audio tracks, etc will not work out-of-the-box with it.  Having someone GOUT-sync this video would be worth it, even if no other video sources were used.

Leonardo said:

I would recommend Google Drive, it seems to fit all your requirements. 

Thanks, I'm testing this out now.

Does anyone have any recommendations for file hosting services?

My requirements:

1) Web-based upload and download, no client required.

2) Anonymous downloads permitted.

3) Not too obnoxious with the ad and attempts to get you to download software (iLivid, etc).

4) Decent file sizes permitted for non-paid accounts.

I know I'm probably a few years too late on this bandwagon, but Rapidshare just got too obnoxious to use anymore.

timdiggerm said:

As much as I think the team_negative_one/-1 posting style is absurd, I have to ask: Which forum rule does it violate?

Multiple accounts for one person?

Er, except I'm totally convinced -1 is two totally different people with the exact same idiosyncratic posting style. Wait, I mean Team, er, oh, screw it.

Moth3r said:

I've fixed the formatting of your posts above, but I don't have the patience to do this on a regular basis.

Hmm. I wonder how this will play out...

rockin said:

I'm not really sure what to make of the Superman movies.

IMO, at least for the first film, the blue is too shifted to teal and the reds are too saturated.  Other than that it's actually pretty good.

thejediknighthusezni said:

It's a pity they were just too far above it to provide recognition.

Yeah, it's not like they gave Star Wars more Oscars than they gave Annie Hall or anyth... er, okay, it turns out they did.

But showering Star Wars with Oscars like they did doesn't count as recog... er, okay, it does.

What was your point again?  Six Oscars and a Special Achievement Award doesn't count?  They just give six Oscars to every movie that gets made that year? Maybe you thought Star Wars should have swept every single Oscar category?  According to those standards, those dirty elites haven't recognized a single movie EVER!  They are too busy watching opera and eating caviar!

They are so DOWN on Star Wars!  All the Oscars they gave it weren't even real gold I bet!

DominicCobb said:

Look, I know my Oscar history which means I know what kind of bullshit it is. But when you're movie wins 11 Oscars (tied for the most ever actually) then IT HAS TO BE GOOD. That's all I'm saying.

Titanic got 11, Forrest Gump got 6, Gladiator and Braveheart got 5.  All were terrible.

I wouldn't say the number of Oscars is predictive of anything but commercial success.  And Shakespeare in Love was better than Saving Private Ryan (although neither deserved to win that year), because the former had some mild entertainment value beyond the first ten minutes.

Is there anyone I didn't manage to piss off with this post?  I'm sure I can do better.

TV's Frink said:

CatBus said:

To quote Frink: "SHUN!"

I stole it.

SHUN!