CatBus

Unfortunately I get mixed info on aspect ratios depending on where I look, and I don't know how to interpret the confusion, and I don't see any source being more authoritative than another.  The US theatrical ratio was definitely 1.85:1, so maybe the sites reporting that as the OAR are just being US-centric.  But then the aspect ratio on the film itself was definitely 1.66:1, so maybe the sites reporting that as the OAR are just using "original" to mean "on the film" rather than "in the theatre".

Hard to tell.  It's also common practice to soft-matte a film to 1.85:1 or 2.35:1, but then when the film is released on disc, to open the mattes back up to whatever was on the negative, resulting in a taller aspect ratio.  Frankly given my cynical take on Blu-Ray mastering (and the fact that other MP films are 1.85:1, why would this one have been presented differently?), I am still inclined to believe this is what happened with the Holy Grail.  I certainly could be wrong though.

Can't help you with the Japanese ;)  Still, feel free to consider this thread a dumping ground for all related developments.

I can't believe the Dingo scene was inserted that long ago!  That was a useful link for deciding where to make the cut.  Also, I'd be interested to know what the European theatrical ratio really was, if there's any way to find out.  I'd always assumed the 1.66:1 framing was just chosen as a convenient way to shoot film that could be alternately framed as 1.85:1 or 4:3 depending on whether it was for theatre or television.  If it was actually shown in any theatres like that, I may not mind so much.

Looking for an “easy” first project for learning how to edit, this one seems a good match.

Things to change: Remove deleted scene where Dingo asks if the scene should be cut (never liked that addition).  Revert to original mono for default soundtrack.

I think I can probably learn how to do this slowly through trial-and-error, but I definitely need help on one thing–where exactly to cut the Dingo scene out.  Can anybody provide a reference for the last theatrical frame before the Dingo scene and the first theatrical frame after the Dingo scene?  I’m assuming there’s a Laserdisc or early DVD release out there that doesn’t have it…

Thanks in advance for any help (and if anyone has already done all of this, that’s good info too…)

EDIT: OAR was a point of contention, but I’m sticking with 1.66:1.

You could probably PM You_Too about the font and stretch characteristics, as well as other custom edits.  Regardless, the only downside of burnt-in subs (other languages) already has a workaround, so I'm not sure of the value for this particular purpose  Nevertheless, if you want to create a custom font for this, create a new thread and I'd be interested (complete font if possible, not just selected characters sampled from the subs).  I'd also make a personal pitch for a version with no drop shadow if you can swing it.

The fonts used on the theatrical subs cannot be recreated using any existing font--they need to be hand-modified in Photoshop, so a straight SRT-to-subtitle conversion is simply impossible if you want good-looking results.  It would be possible to make the burnt-in subs available as separate graphical overlays using the Photoshop files, but it would add complexity--users would need to know to enable them, and many software players still don't get PGS subs right even when enabled.  Better to have them burned in, at least for the moment.  There's no real downside to burned-in subs except for other languages, and I believe Harmy provides sub-free files to the authors of other projects in other languages, so that's taken care of already.

BMadden said:

What's even more amazing is that one man, Harmy, is doing all of this and not a team of people like ILM. Impressive, most impressive.

Although Harmy deserves the bulk of the credit, there are a lot of people involved in providing Harmy with the sources he uses.  Upscaling the GOUT footage, rendering the credits, and audio are all mostly or entirely done by others.  Let alone identifying the things requiring despecialization.  That doesn't make it the least bit less impressive.

Thanks a lot, Jedi definitely got the least proofreading (and is really difficult in spots), so this is helping a lot.  Very good work!

FWIW I fixed the Threepio "It's restricted." grouping in SW (except in the SDH subs where it's unchanged) and also capitalized Hell. ;)

Taking all of your last ROTJ English changes, except below:

Not sure about "Into the pit with you".

For the dead animal line, I'm not sure Han says "I mean"...it sounds more like "Nah" or "Aah" to me.  Not being sure exactly what it is, I'm leaving it alone (but included the "Hey").  Han makes a similar "Aah" sound before shooting the trash compactor beast and I didn't subtitle it either.

I also decided for consistency on alien languages to take out Jabba's "Oohh!" lines since they are pretty much equivalent to Chewie's howls.  So they get subbed in the SDH subs but not the normal ones.  And the "... Jabba du Hutt ..." line is now "... Jabba the Hutt ..." because I'm subtitling what you are able to understand, not the literal sounds (which is more like what you're doing).  And I grouped Lando's lines together "That blast came from the Death Star/That thing's operational!" and got rid of the "Oh!" sub for his copilot, since I never really liked that grouping either.

So I guess sentence grouping isn't off my radar after all...

EDIT: It occurred to me that since you're subtitling alien languages, you'd be able to subtitle "Lapti Nek", which might be neat!  You could even do the little musical note symbols ;)

I landed on non-capped, but considering how I drifted around on it, don't consider it a permanent decision yet.  It's definitely a proper place name, but I read around to get a sampling of real-world usage and it appears (at least for "Go to hell!" which was the phrase I checked), it's trending lowercase, possibly because the people who use the phrase don't even consider that they're talking about traveling to a location, it's just a kind of mass of words with a single meaning.  I like doing things the "proper" way, but when proper and contemporary usage differ, I go for contemporary (e.g. "gonna").  Also I'll be gone for a few days so nevermind the radio silence for a bit.

Ah crap you convinced me.  OK re-rendering SW and ESB now...

Too late for that, I probably won't change mine anyway.  For things like that I go off the implementation of subtitles on discs I think are done with some attention to detail (this is how I decided on the rules about leading ellipses, etc).  That may vary from, say, how a newspaper handles it.  And they could very well be wrong, but I'm at least consistently wrong now ;)

If you have an M2TS file (AVC+AC3), can you trim out a tiny chunk in the middle, then splice the two larger pieces back together, without re-encoding?  If so, which tools could you use for this?

I'm very new to anything remotely video-related, so assume no knowledge of existing tools.  The reason I'm asking is that if this can be done significantly more easily than re-encoding could be done, I would forgo the other possible edit which would definitely require re-encoding and just do this easy one.

xhonzi said:

Why do you think that Yoda and the Emperor were never implied to have lightsabres in the OT?

Why do you think that changed in the PT?

There are many reasons Yoda didn't have a lightsaber in the OT: Plot-wise, he knew Dagobah to be a safe hiding place so he had no need to carry one.  Storytelling-wise, it would have been a dead giveaway for this anonymous crazy swamp creature to be carrying a lightsaber (Luke: "Oh jeeze!  I shoulda known you were Yoda!  The lightsaber!  Duh!") And just visually, Yoda would have looked ridiculous with a lightsaber so it was left out of any design consideration.

Similarly with the Emperor: he knows he is always safe in his surroundings, and the "reveal" of his powers would have had less impact if he didn't seem physically defenseless before.

My PT memory is foggy, but neither of them are in "always safe" surroundings, there's no mystery about their powers or identity (there was a mystery about the Emperor's identity to other characters, but never to the viewer), and looking ridiculous was no longer sufficient reason for excluding something from the movies.

I'm assuming SW and ESB have no more suggested changes, so I'm rendering these now so that I can upload the changes faster.  I'm holding off on ROTJ for now.

By the way, I made a discovery today that syncing the wrong subtitles to the film can occasionally be hilarious.  For example, Vader can become a wisecracking action movie villain:

I don't think negative1's going to give up his award for Most Weirdly-Formatted Post very easily!

EDIT: Oh dang, I liked it so much better before it got cleaned up.  It was kindof Dada Postmodernist.

red5-626 said:

Question 2. Do I have to buy the hole 9 disk set or can I just buy the 3 disk set?

The 3 disk set will do a better job of keeping my table level? LOL

 

The 3 disk set works better to level a table, but the 9 disk set can't be beat as a doorstop.  I'm hoping for a super-deluxe 3D release which can work as a boat anchor.  We are so lucky to get so many options, unlike fans of other movies!

DuracellEnergizer said:

Bingowings said:

my late dad was a brilliant practical joker, for years after he died I still thought babies came from men having sex with women

WTF?

It's a cruel trick some parents do, when they are uncomfortable talking to their kids about storks.

Ack!  Thanks for the assist on the burnt-in sub, definite big mistake there!  (the native file was created by deleting lines from the full file--not enough it seems!).  The priority for getting out an updated version now cannot get any higher!

For your alien subs, you may want to italicize the unintelligible words so that the intelligible ones at least stand out more, or maybe just italicize them in their entirety to indicate they're another language.  Not sure about that but I think it might look OK.  Also you may consider subtitling the parts with burnt-in subs...but subtitling the alien language.  i.e. when the burnt-in subs say "Going somewhere, Solo?", your subs could say "Oota goota Solo?" (or whatever it is).  That's another element that definitely makes it incompatible with my idea of subs, but it still could be neat in a different set.

Also, I added the "... my lord ..." line, as a double-dialog with Jabba's groan (following the timing of the SDH sub).  Luckily this was easy to translate into the other languages without having to worry about grammar.

...and I backslid on "Hell".  I am nothing if not circumspect...

"Partially-intelligible alien language" subs are what I call these.  I got the idea for how to implement the partial subs from the official Spanish subs (or at least I think is was those...).  They did ellipses, then the Spanish translation of the intelligible bits, then more ellipses.  Seemed like a pretty elegant solution to the problem, so I borrowed it and used it for all five languages.  I do think the partial subs are necessary in at least a couple of scenes (esp. if you're hard of hearing, have the volume down, or don't speak English), so I don't feel leaving them out is an option.

I know there's some atmospheric value in seeing these invented languages in action, but there's also just the fact that each of the subs for these movies are simply in one language and that language is not Huttese.  Even if I wanted to do the Huttese transliteration, it wouldn't necessarily be the same for English as for other languages to achieve the same sounds.  Whatever solution I come up with has to work in five languages, maybe more in the future--maybe even with non-Latin alphabets!  Not much value comes from seeing the gibberish written out, and you lose quite a bit in the way of readability.  It's just not a match for this project.

That said, msycamore posted some "additions" a while back where people could take those changes and make the English subs match the mono mix.  Certainly you could do something like that for Jedi so that people could see the alien languages written out.  But it's not being incorporated into the main project.  I'm firmly decided on that.

I finally have a reference disc for how to handle Portuguese subtitles.  Looks like I will remove the leading ellipses for the Portuguese subs so continuing dialogue will work like the French subs.

Okay, I made the following changes:

"going to" -> "gonna"

"Besides we'll" -> "Besides, we'll"

I also ended up going with "Terminate her... immediately."

EDIT: And I've finally convinced myself that "Hell" should be capitalized in ESB.  Sure it's "just an expression" long-divorced from its mythological roots (especially in this universe spoken by this character in particular!), but nevertheless it's a proper place name being used as a place and not just an interjection.  So capitalized it is!

IronMagus said:

What's your timing on it now, so I can edit mine to match?

The new line looks like this (line break is also different):

01:06:31,522 --> 01:06:33,858
You know, between his howling
and your blasting everything in sight...

Also, I'd like to add that even when I'm not taking some of your suggestions, you are going over the exact same sort of spots that I also agonized over for far too long doing this project.  So you're definitely doing exactly the right level of analysis IMO.

Also, what do you think of "Terminate her. Immediately!"

Okay, I'm caught up on text suggestions...

Right now I'm going with "Terminate her... immediately." unless I think of a better way to write it.  Definitely no comma, maybe two periods.  Feel free to lobby me on this issue.  I accept checks.

I'm also not sure what I'm going to do about "What the...".  I could go either way.  There's another one of these in ROTJ, so if I change it here, I should change it there, too.

I'm doing "You know, between his howling" and I was also able to adjust the timing back a few milliseconds for the new words.

Hell isn't always capitalized, and I don't think this usage qualifies.

Regarding the "Go for the legs" quote, give the man a cigar!  It's Dak onscreen, so Luke is not speaking over the radio, he's just offscreen.  Not only did I remove the italics, but I added an SDH cue due to the offscreen speaker.  For the record, some subtitles will italicize all offscreen speakers, but I don't do that.  I italicize radios, recordings, and ghosts--basically anything that ever would get distortion applied, even if it doesn't have distortion applied right then (Obi-Wan's ghost isn't consistent, but I make him always italicized).

Sticking with "We'll set harpoon", checked against the script.

Ellipses vs dashes is sometimes a tough call.  I'm sticking with ellipses because it's understood he actually continues speaking unaware he's been cut off.  I could see it either way though.

3-2-7 is changed to 327.

All others are unchanged, doesn't mean I wasn't tempted.  Thanks very much!

Okay, got it.  People are less attached to shiny disc formats than I imagined, gotta get my brain out of the 20th century...

Also, yes, there appeared to have been a codepage problem with the following characters: apostrophes, double-quotes, and German-style quotes ("little goose feet").  I've updated them all to Unicode, which should improve non-Windows compatibility in the next release (the priority of getting this new version out there has been bumped as well, so as soon as I get all of IronMagus' suggestions, I'll start rendering/uploading).  If you see problems with additional characters, let me know and I'll look at them.

Still haven't looked at your suggested text changes, but regarding italics and punctuation, the general consensus in those cases seems to be that punctuation should be italicized.  I think I went through and made sure all question marks and exclamation marks were moved inside, but I doubt I was consistent with periods and commas because you can barely tell the difference if they're italicized.  I may go through and clean those up, but it's low on my list.

Okay, maybe it's just me, but why is everyone using the SRT files?  Why aren't they just using SUP files which are already pre-rendered graphics and so don't require any fiddling at all?  Okay, I'm done ranting.  It just baffles me that anyone is using the SRT files at all.

I'll take a look at the quotes/apostrophes.  It's possible I'm using the CP1252 codespace for these characters instead of the Unicode codespace, which might cause errors on non-Windows platforms.

It looks like I may need to adjust some of my assumptions about this project.  I always considered the SUP files to be what everyone would want, and the SRT files as this weird intermediate text-only format that was only good for making new SUP files.  It looks like the SRT files may be something people want as a final product, and as such I'll go through and close any italic tags left open, just to help with compatibility.  This may also mean I'll break the downloads up in the next release so that you won't need to download all of the huge SUP files just to get the tiny SRT files.

Haven't had a chance to go through all of this yet, but numbers, yeah, numbers are where it gets weird.  Numerals are always easier to read than text, and numerals should be broken up into groups of three or four at the very least as well.  Except... I just can't do it.  Yeah, I'm violating my own cardinal rule about readability here, but I'm just that way.  In English, you should spell out numbers less than 10-12, and use numerals for larger ones.  In addition to that vague area in the 10-12 zone, there are a ton of exceptions and one-offs, such as when numbers comprise a good chunk of the sentence they're in, spell it out, and so on.  And then there's the longer numbers... I just can't add dashes to a number unless I know it's SUPPOSED to have dashes.  So I look around at scripts and official subtitles and try to find something authoritative which tells me whether or not to put dashes in there.  But if the authoritative sources all say just dump a row of seven numbers all together with no spaces, that's what I'm going to do.  I'll take a look at each of the ones you pointed out, but I'm just saying there's no satisfactory answers on this front.  If in doubt, I won't, and numbers are full of doubt.

As for the text changes, I still need to listen for those.