CatBus

Laserschwert said:

Joining a collaborative community like ours comes with some adaption in behaviour. To me the OT.com community has always been about sharing and helping each other out. If I have something that can make someone else's project better, I'm happy to help out. And as far as I can tell that's pretty much how this whole community works. Need a missing audio track off a release that's not seeded anymore? Someone uploads it! Need something scanned? Done! My impression was, that this is something that's natural for projects like this.

It's not unheard of here.  Sometimes there's a guy here who offers great stuff for free, sometimes with strings attached, and sometimes he talks about having great stuff and won't share with anyone (mverta).

He has his reasons for acting this way--some people think they're good enough and others don't.

Frankly, I'm a pragmatist about it.  I take what I can get now and don't burn bridges in case more comes along later.  I'm not saying everyone needs to approve of the choices of our more reticent users like mverta and roback214, but it can only help us in the long term if they get a good impression of our community--because apparently, they both do in fact have the goods.

FWIW, roback214 gave me American Spanish subtitles in exchange for nothing, and I have seen no indication through our PM conversations he's expecting anything in return for the American Spanish dubs.  Let's avoid pre-judging this one, alright?  I'd hate to poison this so-far productive well based on some old grudge.

roback214 said:

Here's a sampler of the intro to Star Wars (Harmy 2.1) with scroll text in Spanish, as seen in Latin America in 1977. still work to do ... but it's a start. I think I can finally have STAR WARS as I saw as a child thanks to Harmy ... May the force be with you with version 2.5!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nt8-_lCfa2o&feature=youtu.be

I hope you're still planning to release those dubs!

Only 15?  I'll see what I can do. ;)

We already have that, for all 3 films, lossless.

EDIT: But they were created using an entirely different method.

davextreme said:

CatBus said:

It's the same actor Luke found inexplicably hiding inside Hayden's suit earlier. 

Hmm, now that I think about it I'm sort of surprised the SpEd didn't replace Shaw with a digitally aged Christensen in RotJ.

That'll be fixed in the 3D re-release, don't worry.

Laserschwert said:

Who's that old guy on the left?

It's the same actor Luke found inexplicably hiding inside Hayden's suit earlier.  Except in that photo he's got eyebrows, and they look way too bushy and weird.  Photoshop fail ;)

Hot damn.

By the way, Teeceezy, how are these syncs going?  If you're done, I'd like to hear them (esp. '80 ESB and '83 ROTJ).

xhonzi said:

However it still is the matter of some debate, as CatBus has illuminated. 

You give me too much credit.  It really isn't up for that much debate, I was just arguing that point because I became enamored with the idea of the "Vader never gets redeemed and Luke is a gullible putz" ending.  I still do like it, but it's ultimately not supported by all of the facts (force ghosts pretty much undermine it).

I may wish Lucas ended up writing something different, but if wishes were horses we'd all be eating steak.

That's the royal "I".

timdiggerm said:

It's pretty clear from the way that Vader looks at the Emperor, looks at Luke, looks at the Emperor, looks at Luke, and then yells "NOOOOOO" that he's in it to save Luke.

He yells what??

The thing is, the mask hides a lot.  It's a blank slate upon which you can write your own personal interpretations and wishes.

He looks at the Emperor, thinking, "I do not want to take this guy on alone. That's what I brought Luke here for.  Part muscle and part cannon fodder."

He looks at Luke and thinks, "This guy is not turning. He is not fighting back. He's gonna die and then I'm stuck subservient to Pruneface forever."

He looks back at the Emperor, thinking, "Screw it, it's now or never.  Maybe I can get him over to that convenient pit before he fries the bejeezus out of me.  Beats the alternative."

If he yells "NOOO" it's pretty much a non-sequitur any way you look at it.

SilverWook said:

For Vader to be protecting his son for the wrong reasons, Luke and Palpatine have to be totally wrong about the internal conflict they both sense in him.

Have we really become that cynical and jaded?

Or, going off my pet theory which is almost certainly wrong but still delightful, the internal conflict is simply over something else.  Yes, he's conflicted about Luke, but the conflict is over exactly how to achieve all his machinations without either Luke or the Emperor finding out.

And hey, speaking of cynical and jaded, since the (gah!) "saga" is supposedly all about Vader now, don't you think it's appropriate that it's all about this guy who spent so much time destroying things, but who manages to whitewash his own history and convince people into thinking he's a good guy, and that this was his plan all along?  I'd say it's inspired!

I opted for es-419 over es-ar for kinda the same reasons I opted for zh-yue over zh-hk for Cantonese.  Languages don't stop at political borders (some moreso than others), and if there's a code that reflects that, I'll use it.

But yeah, it's odd, but apparently it's a real code.  And at least according to the Internet, it's possible to do "neutral" non-country-specific American Spanish, and that's what I want for these if possible.  They might not be there yet ;)

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.