CatBus

To quote Frink: "SHUN!"

Admittedly, I prefer his earlier, funnier movies ;)

L0conut said:

What's the difference between Project Threepio and Harmy's versions, if you don't mind my asking? 

Project Threepio is an ongoing subtitle project not tied to any particular preservation.  When Harmy wants subtitles for his project, he gets the latest subtitles that are available at the time.  So Harmy's subs in DeEd 2.1 are equivalent to Project Threepio 5.1, which had the problems I was talking about earlier.

There have been two versions of Project Threepio released since DeEd 2.1, and DeEd 2.5 will include those updates (including fixes for the VLC issue).

You can click the image link in my signature to see the discussion thread, including release notes for each version.

If you're using VLC to watch 2.1, there was a VLC-specific bug in the subs (flashing for one frame) which is fixed in the latest version of Project Threepio.

To see the ones in 2.1, you'd need to use MPC or a hardware player.

roback214 said:

When will the version 2.5?

Very soon.  But it's been "very soon" for a while ;)

Beyond that, we just don't know.  Would love to hear that file, thanks!

roback214 said:

hi!

I Have the first spansih (mexican) dubbing... sampler here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubTVG1imwYo&feature=youtu.be

I live in Chile, South America, sorry if my English is not very good. I have the audio of the 3 movies. I'm adjusting to the versions "Despecialized"
hopefully be of any use.
The audio comes from old betamax tapes recorded at the time that the television broadcast here in Chile.

 

That's great--many prefer the Latin American Spanish dubs over the Castilian ones!  Once you have synced audio for all three movies, send me the links!  I'd love to hear them!

EDIT: And if you finish syncing audio for the first one before the others, let me know too.

Well I can imagine who the "Matt" he's thanking for help is...

That said, I'm curious what the actual adjustments anyone used to improve this disc were.  Heck, an avisynth script would be great...

Laserschwert said:

Since I'm gonna need the credits for TESB and ROTJ anyway (unlike SW the German versions of those still had the English credits), I can recreate them. If someone has proper captures of the VHS releases to use as templates ;)

GOUT isn't good enough?

EDIT: You mean German credits, right. Okay, following now.

I think if I recall correctly, Laserschwert did the main work/rendering and the rest of the OT.com community provided anal-retentive copy editing and color commentary.

Also, was the one on your Jedi 1.0 authentic or re-created?  Would it be omitted in a 2.x?

red5-626 said:

This is looking good.
ESB first? OK.
I will ask this.
With ROTJ in the works
is there a chance of getting
Lapti Nek and Yub Nub cleaned up
 early so Harmy can use them?

 And Vader's eyebrows.

timdiggerm said:

Is there also an advantage for people with 2.0 setups (like me) in that there's no downmixing going on? The mix was designed for 2.0, and thus will sound better than 5.1 downmix?

Well, in the sense that the 5.1 upmix often involves some audio shenanigans (it's rare that a soundtrack gets a tasteful conservative upmix).  So when downmixed to stereo it still has all the other stuff they did to it, whereas the stereo track doesn't have all of that.  A tastefully upmixed 5.1 track should sound about the same downmixed to 2.0--it's just that that sort of thing is pretty rare.

That said, Laserdisc 2.0 tracks aren't perfect either.  They can have somewhat compressed dynamics (the so-called near-field mix), dropouts, etc, but the audio guys simply didn't have all the tools at the time to be so tempted to make little changes all over the place so easily, so there's at least the semblance of theatrical fidelity.

Molly said:

It's that weird bend around the neck point.

But what is it?  A deformed extra vertebra?  An invisible multidimensional parasite?  It is starting to seriously freak me out.  Can't stop looking.

timdiggerm said:

Can I get an explanation of the advantages of using these soundtracks over whatever's on their blurays?

I can't vouch for all of them, but I'd say the goal is to get something that more closely resembles the theatrical audio.  The problem is, in many of the above cases, the soundtracks are a relatively small problem on the Blu-ray compared to the video (Back to the Future, Alien/s).  But, lacking a correction for the video problems, they're the best we can do.

poita said:

Davinci Lite is free and is great for high bit depth work, and is apparently used by pretty ladies. 

Something... wrong... with her ponytail.  Can't figure it out.

PM sent.

AntcuFaalb said:

Can someone upload this somewhere else please?

I'm getting terrible terrible speeds with MEGA.

Thanks!

You need to delete some PM's ;)

captainsolo said:

The only big color criticism off the top of my head I have with WB overall is the Superman films

He is the "Man of Teal" after all.

Thank you, thank you, I'm here all week.

Video schmideo.  The next version of Project Threepio will have Braille subtitles.  It may not sound like much, but it actually works really well in 3D.

Will we finally have Lapti Nek in HD?  Could it be?

dvdmike said:

It's like working a project in Nazi Germany!

In Soviet Russia, the terms define YOU!

Yeah, I'm taking a lot of my cues for "preservation" from the physical art preservation and historical preservation world, where things do in fact get regularly restored because otherwise natural processes will slowly destroy them.  Even digital files may need restoration if they come from partially degraded analog sources.

I think you're going to run into a few problems here.

Even if you get agreement from a few people here, there's just no way to enforce consistency or get anyone to buy into these definitions.  People can't even agree about the name of that movie that came out in 1977 ("It's A New Hope!" "No, it's Star Wars"), let alone more arcane technical definitions.  Every definition here potentially overlaps multiple terms.

Even assuming we allow for great flexibility, these terms are hierarchical.  Some are subsets of others.  Some are distinct.  Some are partially overlapping and partially distinct.

Anyway, here are my personal definitions not based on anything authoritative other than lurking around here for a while and seeing the sort of things that go on here:

Fan Preservation can be used to describe ANY attempt to preserve a particular version of a film for posterity.  It can include unaltered preservations of a single rare release, it can be a remux of different releases, it can be a reconstruction of an original version from multiple sources... it could even be a reconstruction of a particular modified-for-television broadcast version of a film.  It could just be transferring an old VHS bootleg to DVD.

Fan Restoration is a subset of the above.  It's an attempt to restore a particular version of the film that is otherwise unavailable, in a way that involves a lot of processing to bring out qualities that weren't present in the unaltered source material.  Project Blu would qualify as a single-source fan restoration, the Despecialized Editions would be multi-source.

Fan Reconstruction is a subset of the above, and it's the multi-source version.

Fan Extended Edition is a subset of Fan Edits, where the primary goal of the project is to add material to the film.

Fan Remux is a subset of Fan Edits that overlaps Fan Preservation (if the goal of the remux is to preserve a particular version), but can also include making unique new versions.

Fan Edit overlaps Fan Preservations and Fan Restorations, and is a superset of Fan Reconstructions, Fan Extended Editions, and Fan Remuxes.  Basically it only means the fan did some editing to the sources.  It does not imply what the purpose of that editing was.  It could have been to make a home video release like the theatrical version, it could be made to shorten or lengthen the film, it may have been only audio editing, but it wasn't a simple VHS-to-DVD transfer, for example.

Workprints and Bootlegs should be separated out.  Workprints are film elements from the official process that produced the film that didn't make it into the film itself, while bootlegs are unofficial audio or video recordings of a particular "performance" of the film.  In-theatre tape recordings, VHS tapes of TV broadcasts, etc.

Fair enough, you can feel nostalgia for anything.  For me, though, these screencaps almost bring back the nostalgia of watching VHS tapes on an old CRT, with the glaring exception of the compression.  For others, they may successfully bring back the nostalgia of a different viewing experience, such as you described.

Having seen the VHS transfers more often than any other transfers of these films, I think I understand the aesthetic you're shooting for here, and I think you've mostly hit the target.  However, I think the one thing that's "off" is the compression.  Everything about these screencaps exudes nostalgia for those happier times when the SE's didn't even exist... except the giant blocky compression artifacts that are straight from the glory days of YouTube videos of cats falling off television sets.

Both aesthetics are extremely cruddy, I grant you, but they are from two very different cruddy video eras, and combining the two is a little anachronistic (the screenshot in the preceding post is the worst offender).  NTSC VHS, for all its many faults, had zero compression artifacts.  If needed, a softening effect can be created using a blur filter instead.

droidekas said:

Hi,

is there a german audio track available for this release?

 

Thanks!

Of course! We're not savages here ;)