CatBus

Project files have been updated to version 1.3, incorporating many suggestions from IronMagus and greatly improved Portuguese subtitles thanks to bttfbrasilfan (original post has been updated as well).  The new download links are NOT the same as before, and tehparadox is being problematic, so please just PM me for the links.

Rough summary of changes:

Minor improvements to English subtitles for ROTJ and Portuguese subtitles for ESB.  Enormous improvements to Portuguese subtitles for ROTJ.  I am now much more confident that all foreign subtitles are more-or-less of the same good quality.

I am uploading changes now.  Incidentally, it appears tehparadox has become a terrible place to post links.  Does anyone have any other suggestions?  Otherwise I'll just rely on PM's.

I got it, thanks.  I'm about halfway through my first pass on ROTJ.  God, that was a mess.

Found and fixed the last video issue (I think).  FFmpeg and software based on it creates open-gop video by default.  Due to how the cuts worked, I needed to make it closed-gop, and now it plays back fine.

Now on to the audio again!

Yeah, I'll see what I can do.  I'm not of the YouTube Generation so seemingly simple things sometimes baffle me.

I'm running into some technical difficulties but I'm not sure they're insurmountable.  Basically I can get a perfect cut, but when I play it back, every player plays the inserted section too slow (even though the framecount is correct).  I think it's because the original video has a certain cadence of keyframes and the edited section interrupts that cadence in a bad way.  I think I can work around that by fiddling with keyframe settings, but I don't have anything working yet.  I'm not sure how long this will take me.

Just confirmed my current ROTJ Portuguese subs are a complete trainwreck.  Thanks bttfbrasilfan, these will be greatly improved in the next version!

Good news on the video front.  I realized I was an idiot and found a better way to handle the cutting.  Basically I do the early cut, a middle cut, and the end cut.  The middle cut is just from the "oh" to the "bad", and all I need to do is trim and re-encode that one-second segment, which my hardware can handle just fine.  The beginning and end cuts are untouched.  All in all only eleven frames will have any quality loss, and I doubt it will be noticeable.

bttfbrasilfan said:

CatBus, please  use only my Portuguese subs. The internet subs have too many errors and they have "original names" where it shouldn't have.

For example (this "names" are only a prequel trilogy problem), in Attack of the Clones, Master Jedi Sifo-Dyas is Zaifo Vias in Portuguese subs because Sifo-Dyas sounds like "F*-Your-Self" in Portuguese. And there is another one, Dooku in Portuguese subs is Dookan because Dooku souns like "Something-That-Came-From-Ass" in Portuguese. No offense.

Mostly of the internet Portuguese subs are fan-made, so they didn't corrected the "dirty" names.

Sorry about my dirty words, but this is very funny.

I am using your subs--definitely not the fan ones when I have an option--but I am including the sort of changes that are in the other foreign subs (such as subtitling when people say "Luke" or "No", which sometimes gets left out).  As for foreign vs. original names, the only differences I saw were Tauntaun->Tonton and tibanna->tibano.  As discussed earlier, I'm going with original names where possible unless people may not understand the original names.  I did capitalize Tibanna to give a better indication it's a foreign word.  Let me know your thoughts on this.

Not to worry, though, I have no plans to do the prequel trilogy.  And Dooku has the same problem in English...

The early cut doesn't have enough room for the audio, so I'm going with the late cut, the question being how best to handle the extra half-second.  Low-level brown noise actually seems like a good match in this scene.

EDIT: Wow, I actually got great results by mixing in the "chattering women" background noise and other tweaks.  It now flows really smoothly.

Watching this, the only really noticeable problem is that Dingo is clearly about to say "bad" and instead it cuts to her saying "naughty".  Pretty much unavoidable considering the late cut.  Other than that, I'm a bit shocked how well it works.  Not theatrical, but close.

That said, I think this means alternate soundtracks are going to be a real bear if they're even possible at all.

Bingowings said:

You know those stuffed animals that are popular today with the mega-oversized cloying eyes?  He's their leader.

Status update: as expected, my current video encode failed.  I'm pretty sure I simply lack the hardware to do a re-encode (and maintain a usable PC for other family members), so I'm looking at solutions that do not involve re-encoding (on the upside, the resulting video quality would be better if I avoided this anyway)

The downside is that I can cut without re-encoding only on i-frames, which means a frame-perfect cut is impossible.  The actual, theatrical, cut is here:

"...evil zoot! oh, sh[CUT]e is a bad..."

...and I can get an i-frame cut positioned on either side of that:

"...evil zoot! oh[CUT], she is a bad..." (early)

"...evil zoot! oh, she is a b[CUT]ad..." (late)

The cut at the end is right on an i-frame, so everything will be frame-perfect on that end.

I will keep marching forward with this for my own amusement, but I'm no longer even trying to be perfect so I won't blame anyone for losing interest at this point.  I will try to use the "early" cut point because it seems more natural and it also doesn't include any frames from the non-theatrical insertion, so you could convince yourself that a real cut-and-spliced projection print may have looked just like this ;)  However, the early cut may not give me as much headroom for splicing in the audio, so I may have to settle for the late cut depending on how that works out.

So far, not much in the Brazilian ESB subs have changed (I'm only 1/4 done, but so far it looks like what I had before was mostly good).  I actually fixed a typo that's in mine AND the GOUT, where "Rogue" is spelled "Rouge" once, and that's just because I'm going through it again and am catching things like that.

As for fonts, I'm not looking to match the GOUT font, size, or position.  The non-anamorphic nature of the GOUT gave them a lot more black bar area for use with subtitles, so they were able to make different choices.  Also subtitles for VHS and early DVDs were larger and they've gotten a little smaller over time, as the average TV size has increased.  I'm really targetting something completely different with these (16x9 and modern size), so I don't mind that mine look different.

EDIT: I should add that I doubt I'll be so lucky with the ROTJ subs; I am most suspicious of those.

That should do quite nicely.  However, unless something changes soon I think I'm going to report bad news on the video front and start another approach, which may also take a long time.  VideoRedo doesn't seem to be cutting it (no pun intended).

Since you kids are on my lawn anyway...

Blu Ray will not be the final physical format, but all of its successors (including 4K Blu Ray) will be, at best, seriously niche players.  Not niche like Laserdisc, niche like SACD.  New physical formats require new hardware purchases (let alone new media purchases), and very few will think any difference above Blu Ray will be worth the cost.  MAYBE a new format will succeed in the very long term if it's backwards-compatible and cost-competitive with Blu Ray (people would buy 4K players to replace a broken Blu Ray player, but continue to play 2K Blu Rays, in much the same way some people buy Blu Ray players just to play standard DVDs today).  Basically I see Blu Ray as a terminal format the same way CDs were.  Yes, there were successors but 9 out of 10 people couldn't tell you what they were.

Streaming is already the new rental model, and it may eat into purchases a little bit more than you'd think.  Parents used to own stacks of VHS tapes and DVDs that their kids would watch over and over.  They bought them so that they wouldn't have to keep renting them, not because they thought they were worth collecting.  Now if you have a Netflix subscription you can watch Thomas & Friends once a week for five years, and then, mercifully, you can stop.  People will still purchase Blu Rays (and DVDs), but not like they used to--only for the things they really, truly love.  I really, really don't see how purchased-streaming plans like UltraViolet make any sense in a world where people already have Netflix-like subscriptions for rental-type streams.  If you already have the subscription and you want to stream it, just save the cash and stream it from Netflix.  Who cares if you don't own it?

I think there's already a consumer fatigue with revisionism and gimmickry related to media upgrades, which will dampen any enthusiasm for a new format.  Not everyone is as worked up about Star Wars as we are, but really, let's say you actually own and like the Blu Rays--are you really going to upgrade to 4K just so you can watch Alderaan shoot first, or watch it in 3D, or with pre-rendered interpolated frames for a 48fps presentation?  What about other films--a few more deleted scenes, a different shade of teal & orange?  Nobody cares.  I can find lots of faults with most modern Blu Rays, but most of them could be fixed without changing the Blu Ray format itself (better transfers, less compression, less DNR, etc).  More resolution and the things that would require a new format may help, but they're not even in the first 10 pages of improvements I'd typically like to see.

Of course I suppose I should mention I have a history of being a complete Luddite and missing many very important trends.  I didn't see much point in cell phones until they started removing pay phones, for example.  So there you have it.

doubleKO said:

I can't believe "No Pants Day" has been going for over 10 years and I only just heard about it!

doubleofive said:

How I'm celebrating:

Thank you for not posting a full-length photo, 005.

Argh forget what I wrote about the Green Squadron, that was a different line.

I checked against the script and it's supposed to be "Pressure's steady." with an alien response from Nien Nunb.  The script says the navigator says it, so I added an SDH cue.  As such, it's clearly within the cockpit and shouldn't be italicized.  Also, for the other suggestions I only added Leia's stutter for I want to be alone.  The second doesn't sound like a "No" or a stutter to me--just some nonverbal noises she makes.  That's all I changed, so I'll sit on these changes for a while and see what else someone might see before uploading.

Just one last thanks to you in case I don't hear from you again--you've been very, very helpful!

IronMagus said:

01:40:09,278 --> 01:40:11,078
Pressure steady.

^^Who says this?

Thanks, I'll take a look at all of these, but the "Pressure steady" is a weird line spoken by someone in the Green Squadron who doesn't ever say anything else and just flashes onscreen for a second.  It is a definitely weird line, I'm not even sure what it means, but there it is.  It's spoken onscreen, so it's not italicized.  I sure hear it, and it's even in the official subs.

Thanks SilverWook.  By the way, the "progress bar" on the video end shows more time remaining than when I started, so it's slow-going.  I suppose this is why people buy real computers, but that's too late for me!

SilverWook said:

Mono sound was 192kps, although the sound seems lower than on later releases.

I'm hoping even though this is lossy (so is the Blu Ray's mono track for that matter), this one will be the best match in the event I need to splice in a sample from another source.

I have a question for subtitle-minded people.  Some foreign versions of Star Wars use altered character names in their dubbed versions (see this thread for an example: http://originaltrilogy.com/forum/topic.cfm/Preserving-French-Original-Trilogy/topic/14168/).

Now, as I've stated before, my foreign-language subs are designed to go with the English audio (not dubs), so what should I do about character names?  At the moment French is inconsistent--Darth Vader is Dark Vador, but all other characters use English names.  I believe all of my other subs use English names.  Should I switch them to all English so that they match the English dialog better?  But if I do that, will I confuse people who aren't familiar with the English versions of the names?

My inclination is to use all-English names in the "full" subs, and all-foreign names in the "forced" subs, because full is designed to accompany English audio, and forced is designed to accompany a foreign dub.  Any thoughts on that?  Would having them be different be even more confusing?  If you have a list of foreign versions of Star Wars names use in the opening crawls and burnt-in subs (in the languages I have subs for), that would be helpful too!

FRENCH EXAMPLE

Princess Leia - Princesse Leia
Han Solo - Yan Solo
Jabba the Hutt - Jabba le Forestier
Luke Skywalker - Luc Courleciel
Hoth - Hoth?
Darth Vader - Dark Vador
Tatooine - Tatooine?
Chewbacca - Chiktabba

Actually, having browsed some foreign-language Wikipedia entries, I'm now thoroughly confused and inclined to leave things in their current state: Dark Vador being the only translated character name.

bttfbrasilfan said:

The font is "Cookies" but every single letter was customized.

Wait a sec.  This was a reconstruction?  I think we can do better than that.  We take a two-pronged approach: Team A uses the video and rotoscopes it, and Team B scours the landfills around Harmy's hometown attempting to find the original paper element.  We have no time to lose, people!

We need You_Too.  Stat!

(Harmy, we are very much joking)

I'm using VideoReDo right now because the cuts were not on I-frames.  I think it's re-encoding the whole stream (or else I really don't understand why it's taking so very, very long...).  Looks like Womble doesn't do AVC.

Great project, I wish you luck.  Regarding audio, the French audio from the NTSC discs is the correct speed for syncing with Harmy's video and the correct pitch for matching the French theatrical prints.  PM me if you're interested.

You may want to work directly with the German group, as they may have some scripts and suggestions for how to do things like the crawl text.  Also you may be able to ask Harmy for a sub-free version (please give him time first to finish v2 though!) so you can add burnt-in French subs.  Are the French credits different?

And I also want to put in a plug for my own subtitle project (Project Threepio, in this forum), which you may find useful.

timdiggerm said:

Recreated logos? Sounds like we're getting into Star Wars Preservationist Preservation!

 Can anyone tell what font that is? ;)