CatBus

It looks like the ESB and ROTJ files are there, but the Belbucus SW stereo link is too old for my provider (and my provider keeps things for years and years...)

Maybe I'll wait to see what audio schorman13 has come up with in the other thread.

Got it now, thanks!

Okay my Usenet issues are sorted and I found Belbucus' 77 stereo, but I could not find anything under "diGital SOUND".  Any other possibilities for ESB and ROTJ?  Thanks for all the help so far!

Usenet mysteriously stopped working for me a while back and I never bothered to sort out why, because I stopped needing it about the same time.  Maybe I'll try to get that fixed if I can't get the lossless stereo any other way.

I'm going to do my best to answer these, but keep in mind that I have less knowledge about this than many other here, so if you get conflicting answers, defer to them.

Film Questions

1. I'd actually use Harmy's workprints for his Despecialized V2 project, and eventually his final V2 product.  AFAICT all home video versions of Star Wars have their color pretty badly mucked with.  Harmy's actually using high-quality film scans as a reference, but since he cannot share those references, you can still benefit from them by using Harmy's project as a color reference.

2. Some contention here.  I believe it's a recreation, but a really really painstakingly good one.  Not significantly different.

3. I don't think so, aside from the weird John Williams spacing issues that weren't even present in all TR prints.

4. I believe so.  Again for TR correctness, I'd go with Harmy's V2 workprints or his final product.  Or you could contact You_Too, who created them.

5. I believe after.

I can't even try to answer the tech questions.  I am a complete AviSynth novice.

A downloadable link is best, but I assume I could manage a series of really, really big e-mail attachments.  I suppose a snail mail CD would be a last resort if all else fails.

Please PM me with either a download link or a request for whichever sort of address you prefer.

I joined a little late to see all the action around Belbucus’ mono restoration, so I don’t have a lossless version of his mix.  Can anyone lend a hand?

Also, if there are lossless versions of the original theatrical stereo mixes, I’d appreciate those as well.

And I’ll just wait for hairy_hen’s newest 5.1 mixes before I look for lossless versions of those…

Project files have been updated to version 3.0 (original post has been updated as well).  The new download links are NOT the same as before, so please PM me for the links.

Rough summary of changes:

Added five(!) new languages: Italian, Swedish, Finnish, Danish, and Norwegian.  Huge thanks to You_Too for making the Nordic languages possible, and for doing manual corrections on the Swedish subtitles.

This version marks a change in the philosophy behind Project Threepio.  The Nordic languages do not translate every single line of dialogue, so I was not able to do my traditional "match the English timing" adjustment on them (I was able to give the Italian subtitles my full traditional treatment).  I did make some minor formatting changes and OCR corrections to the Nordic subs, but the timing and text is pretty much unaltered from the GOUT--I only changed the timing around the alien subtitles to avoid weird-looking overlaps.  This philosophical change will hopefully allow me to more easily include completely indecipherable (to me) languages in the future.

I am now extremely pleased with the current state of Project Threepio.  I consider the 2012 Blu-ray of Casablanca to be the gold standard for how a classic film should be treated, and it offers the very same ten language options (edit: it looks like it doesn't have German...weird).  Knowing that fan preservations of the Star Wars trilogy can be in this same league makes me very, very proud.

That doesn't mean I won't add more languages later, though...

This is a long shot, but is there anyone reading this thread that can proofread (mostly just fix obvious OCR errors, nothing fancy) for any of the following languages?

Finnish, Danish, Norwegian

If so, PM me.

EDIT: Never mind, I think I found a way to correct the OCR errors.  The files were actually quite good to start with and just needed some minor fix-ups.

So I have a question about the original Japanese-back-to-English track.  I'm only familiar with the DVD/Blu-ray, where it only shows two scenes (holy sake cup & bonsai).  Does the Laserdisc show any more than that, or is that the full extent there as well?  I'd like to stay faithful to the Laserdisc translations wherever possible.

captainsolo said:

Snake reflection was still gone

Too bad.  I know it was a longshot, but I really thought there was a chance Spielberg had learned his lesson after his E.T. reversal.  Oh well.

Actually if you detect any noise issues, maybe I'd still like to use it, and replace just "bad areas" from other sources.  Just let me know where the bad areas are if you notice any.

The reason is that I suspect the "sync drift" (if there is any: lose a frame here, gain a frame there, etc) will follow the exact same pattern for all tracks from a single source.  If I figure out and compensate for the pattern once, I'll just repeat that process two more times.  If we bring in a track from an entirely different source, the pattern may be different.  I may be overthinking things (not all sources are as ill-treated as Star Wars), but I just want to be sure.

Okay, I'm putting together a laundry list for 2.0.  Basically I think there's not much more to be done in the way of text changes, so I'm working on a major overhaul of appearance.

Here's the current list:

- Ensure a minimum gap (a couple frames) between subtitles.  This will prevent the appearance of subtitles "melting" into the next subtitle, which can be very bad from a readability perspective, esp when the subtitles look alike and you might not know to even read the second one.  Basically just the duration of an eyeblink between adjacent subtitles, to clearly indicate to the viewer, "Hey, the subtitle is changing"

- All subtitles in all languages will be CIH-safe, at least in the 720p version.  The means all subtitles will be entirely within the frame of the movie, which will make it projector-friendly.  Individual subtitles will be moved to the top of the frame to avoid overlap with onscreen text (e.g. crawl text, alien language subs)

- If the DVD subs are not made CIH-safe, at least make them text-safe for overscan.  This means one line of text in the frame and one line of text out of the frame, like a lot of commercial subs.  It turns out more displays have insane amounts of overscan than I thought, and I don't want overscan to be an issue for anyone anymore.

- Because all subtitles may now be CIH-safe, the subtitles that match the theatrical subs will just be called "matching" instead of "CIH".

- SDH subs will be displayed with a black rectangular background for better readability, at least in the 720p version.  There will no longer be "matching" SDH subs for this reason.

- Improve timing for subtitles of alien subtitles.  Previously I had timed these pretty closely to dark_jedi's V3 (these vary from one preservation to another, I just picked my favorite one).  But now that V3 is soon-to-be-obsolete, and accurate theatrical references exist for all SW and some ROTJ subtitles, I've timed them to match Harmy's V2 workprint for SW and Harmy's V1 for ROTJ.  The ROTJ timing may need to be changed yet again once we get completely accurate timing for all Jedi subs from Puggo.

I think that's about it.  The end result should be subtitles that more closely resemble professional commercial subtitles in their appearance.  The only real difference between my subs and professional subs will be that, in English, mine will contain accurate dialogue rather than approximate dialogue, and I won't be changing that.

Well now I'm starting to have second thoughts about the lossless mono track.  I suppose if you're going to be grabbing the others anyway...

However, I'm only going to replace the existing mono track if I can get a perfect sync without too much screwing around.  I'm skeptical that this will happen, but you never know.  A great sounding track with drifting sync may be fine for commentary or a dub, but I don't want imperfect sync on the primary English track.

If it works, I'd probably encode it as 448kbps Dolby Digital.

Okay, we now have a German subtitle track for this project.  Because the Blu Ray just didn't have enough language options!  I tried to match the font/size/position/style of the existing subs, and they look great.  I don't follow my own guidelines from Project Threepio, so they flash by a little fast for my tastes, but they use the exact same timing as the official subs, and that's what I want to go with in this case.

I also learned a bit about how to easily move single subtitles up to the top of the screen to avoid onscreen text, which I may be able to incorporate into my other project as an "all languages are now CIH-safe" update someday.

EDIT TO ADD:

I just verified BD-compatibility, so unless someone spots a problem on the clip, I'm going with this encode.  The complete x264 encoding options I used were: --preset=veryslow --tune=grain --bluray-compat --fps=23.976 --force-cfr --vbv-maxrate=25000 --vbv-bufsize=30000 --crf=1 --level=4.1 --open-gop --slices=4

I'd be interested in that.  Since I believe I need to apply the exact same adjustment to all frames, I believe I would just need to find some frames with solid colors from Source A and Source B to get a good result for the whole thing.

I'm considering using avisynth to make color and contrast adjustments, which I believe will be constant for the entire film.  Assuming I can provide a frame from the bad source (A) and a frame from the correct source (B), is there any software that can just tell me what sort of changes avisynth needs to do to convert A to B, or is it just a matter of guessing until you find the adjustment that works?

SilverWook said:

Thanks for uploading the file, it took a long time to download though. I need to rewatch it again, but it looks like you nailed it.

Are you saying you know people who could translate Japanese?

I'm falling behind on some other things, but I think I can get back to capturing the LD's  this week. Are you sure you don't want the original mono track uncompressed as well?

Yes, I indirectly know two people who did Japanese translation for a living, and have weird senses of humor.  I could probably rope one or both into this.

As for the original mono, I just don't feel the need.  I'm sure you don't need to bother.  Even if it's slightly better, the amount of improvement is likely much less than the risk of sync drift (and my occasional failure to completely correct for it) I'll be contending with when trying to sync an entire LD audio track to the BD video.  The audio quality wasn't very good to begin with and I don't see much indication they mangled anything on the BD release.

It's way easier than that.  Leia is evil.  Luke set her on her path before the Emperor and Vader died, so no lack of balance ever existed.

The re-encode went smoothly and I am very impressed with the results. It now plays without so much as a stutter in all media players I throw at it, which I take as a good sign. I haven't burned it to BD-R yet and tried that, but BD compatibility is definitely a goal. I will verify this before I'm finished.

I'm in the process of uploading a clip, please PM me for the link. It is a BIG file for such a short clip, because it's a full-resolution M2TS, with all audio and sub streams too. That way, you can see the actual video quality, and also how I handled the cut on alternate tracks and subs. MPC is able to switch audio and video streams through the "filter" menu, FWIW.

As far as things left to do, there's a better Japanese and commentary track I'd like to have (in fact, the current Japanese track is so bad I probably will not include it in the final unless I get a mono replacement), and I'm toying with the idea of adding a German subtitle track because that's something I feel I can manage. A Japanese-back-to-English track would be great too, and I may just know a couple of people who can fill in any gaps.

Bingowings said:

Do you think an upscaled GOUT blu-ray will be the latest of George's stinging nettles disguised as olive branches?

Blu Ray supports video at 720x480@29.97i natively, so no, I don't think upscaling would happen even if it were released on Blu Ray.

If you do the right thing for the wrong reasons, is it still right...?

Minor update:

I've discovered that video playback quality varies depending on the playback software (decent-but-not-perfect in MPC, poor in VLC), right at the edit point, which seems to indicate a problematic encode.  So I'm back to trying to re-encode everything, this time using the x264 command-line, rather than a GUI tool, and things seem to be going a lot more quickly this time around.  Hopefully this will get rid of the video hiccup without losing too much quality.

Other than video, the following have been converted over:

- Original English mono

- French, Portuguese, and Japanese dubs (just the BD versions mixed down to stereo and chopped at the edit point, I'm hoping to replace some of these, e.g. with the mono Japanese and maybe mono French dub)

- Commentary tracks (BD versions mixed down to stereo and blended with the English mono at the edit point, I'm hoping for a better mono version of the Gilliam/Jones commentary)

- Subtitles for English, English SDH, Chinese (Traditional), French, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish, Thai, and English for People Who Don't Like the Film (and not a single line of dialog lost, but a few seconds of dialog don't get displayed properly at the moment in any software I've tested, I'm assuming because of the video glitch)

- Chapter stops

I'm assuming my troubles merging the h.264 video files were due to the fact that they were encoded using different encoders/settings and then spliced together, and that re-encoding everything with the exact same settings will work much better.  If anyone has any experience in the matter, feel free to chime in with advice.  I'm trying my very best to preserve video quality--I'm currently using vbv-maxrate=25000, crf=1, tune=grain, and preset=veryslow (among others) for my first complete re-encode, and may adjust things if I don't like the results.

Complete Japanese mono would be fantastic.  I'm not sure I'll use the Gilliam/Jones track, but it's worth a try.  I don't need the complete English mono track, the bit you provided earlier is fine.

I believe one of the early DVD releases (before the 5.1 mix) also has a French dub, maybe others are out there?

EDIT: Oh yeah, and chapter stops.  I need to remember to convert the chapter stops.