CatBus

I hope h_h is reading this so he knows we now have a very good quality original '77 fanfare...

How do we tell the difference?

I've given this a listen and here are my thoughts, particularly when comparing against Belbucus' reference level LD rip:

Wow, your Fox fanfare sounds MUCH clearer.  Night and day.  Are you positive this is the right one?

Your dynamic range also seems much higher.  While in general I like this, it makes volume normalization really difficult.  What gain values have you come up with?  +8dB seems to be pretty close for "normal conversation", but that can make it loud as hell on occasion, although it doesn't ever appear to clip.  Which I suppose is just fine, I just want to make sure.

Other than that, I'm not sure I hear a lot of difference (and I'm still listening, too), but a little better is still better.  Thank you very much for sharing!

PM sent.  Yes, they already sync to the Despecialized Editions, but they are FLAC, so you need to convert them to WAV or AC3 first.

Part 28 is the missing part.  I'd probably be able to manage with just that bit.

One part missing; parity files can't reconstruct it.  I try to build the RAR file without the missing bit (just in case it's not that important), and I get a 5 minute AC3 file.

I just discovered that these exist, but Usenet has a corrupt copy of the Star Wars dub–I can only get about 5 minutes of it.

Can anyone help?  Star Wars (Episode IV: ANH) is the only one I’m missing.  Unconverted straight from the PAL disc would be great.

Files uploaded and PM's sent.  Please let me know if you want links, if you spot problems (e.g. the laserdisc was known to have the wrong fox fanfare, or something like that...), or if you have anything else helpful to add.  Positive feedback is always nice too.

Okay, looks like there is some interest, so I'll be uploading them and sending PM's to mavimao and msycamore (and anyone else who wants them) probably later today.

Oh yeah, and if it wasn't clear from earlier, the 1983 ROTJ track that Harmy/DJ supply not only has the sync problem, but all of the same audio glitches from the Laserdisc.

Aside from the fixes, it's pretty minor.  My goal was just to have some lossless audio sources for these movies, since I could already find lossless versions for the Star Wars stereo/mono audio.

The '80/'83 tracks from Harmy and DJ seem a little softer overall, ROTJ a little more than ESB.  I think it's more than could be accounted for from just the lossy compression though, so I think whatever track Harmy and DJ used may have had some noise reduction and/or dynamic range compression applied to it, and mine must not have as much processing--or I'm imagining things.  i.e. if I make a lossy compressed version of my files, it still sounds a hair better than the Harmy/DJ tracks (again, ROTJ a little more than ESB).  That said, I still prefer hairy_hen's lossy 5.1 ESB track over my lossless 2.0 ESB track, so it's not the best thing out there.

The ROTJ fixups are pretty significant IMO.  The major sync problem in ROTJ starts at about 47:37 (just after Luke's last scene on Dagobah) and continues until 1:38:33 (after some Ewoks jump over a log), after which it becomes a minor sync problem for the rest of the film (technically it exists but you don't notice anymore).  Maybe it wasn't until I started doing subtitling, but now I can't stop noticing how badly off the lip sync is during that bad period, and ALL NTSC-based audio has the same problem.  My version is the first version I've heard where I don't wince on and off for 45 minutes whenever Han talks (for some reason, it's always worse with Han).  That said, if you don't make a practice of watching people's lips when watching the movie, you may not notice this at all.  There's also just little audio glitches, such as at 3:23.903 when the audio just decides to go missing for 4 milliseconds.  Again, it's not huge, but you can notice if you're listening carefully.

Anyway, don't mean to down-talk my own work.  Obviously I think they're worth it for someone or I wouldn't have made them.  But they may not be a huge improvement for most people.

EDIT: I will also re-adjust all of my subtitles to match this audio.  For unadjusted NTSC audio, it'll just mean subs will be a hair late (compared to the audio--if you watch lips they'll show up at exactly the right time), which is actually perfectly fine.  I just don't want them showing up EARLY, which is awful.

They are not uploaded yet, but I’m posting here to see if there’s any interest. They are in FLAC format, and therefore huge and non-trivial to upload/download.

I have the 1980 ESB stereo audio from Darth Mallwalker’s Laserdisc capture, synced to the GOUT.

I also have the 1983 ROTJ stereo audio, also from DM’s Laserdisc capture, synced to the GOUT but with some fix-ups.  I changed the timing so that it syncs better with preservations derived from the PAL GOUT (e.g. dark_jedi/You_Too and Harmy).  This audio appears to have had many glitches (millisecond audio dropouts, pitch changes), which I fixed using audio from the '93 mix.  Technically I don’t know how many of these errors were theatrical and how many were introduced during the transfer, but they all annoyed me and would have been fixed during a proper restoration, so I still consider it the 83 mix.  All of the modifications and fix-ups add up to a few seconds of audio throughout the movie, at most.  I do not have a version without the fix-ups.

After listening to them, I’d have to say I still prefer hairy_hen’s purist 5.1 mix for ESB, but maybe there’s a hardcore purist out there who just can’t watch the 35mm cut of ESB with anything but the stereo track it showed with.  For ROTJ, I have to say I actually prefer my mix to anything else I’ve heard, but it’s entirely due to the better sync and I have confidence hairy_hen will make my current preference short-lived.

I am not an audio engineer.  I’m a novice at best.  So if someone else synced these tracks already, they probably did a better job.  Nevertheless, I personally think they sound pretty nice.

Anyway, there it is.  Let me know if there’s any interest.  Thanks to Darth Mallwalker and others for getting me access to the raw captures, msycamore and others for pointing out exactly where the sync problem was located, and hairy_hen for making this project more obsolete every minute.

Yeah, it's not a problem so much as very slow going.  I practiced LD audio sync with Star Wars, but I guess the upside of having the GOUT just be a re-release of a laserdisc master means you usually don't have to resync more than once every 10 minutes or so.  A full quality film restoration puts extra frames all over the place.

I can do it, not to worry.

I'll leave the extras to someone else.  I'm strictly doing "just the movie", in a Blu-Ray friendly format.

Also, damn this audio is difficult.  The Black Knight scene needed to be resynced every few SECONDS...

Just to keep people updated, I have the Laserdisc tracks, but it will take me a while before I can do anything with them.  My plans are to make them into true single-channel mono tracks (plays from the center speaker instead of the fronts on a surround system), sync them, and probably encode them all as DTS-MA lossless tracks with a 192k core, even though, to be honest, I don't think these soundtracks really benefit from being lossless.  But why not, you know?

Then send the Japanese track off to a translator friend and make another subtitle track, and then... done!

Who would be a good person to contact for checking my work?  i.e. someone with a history of being able to spot minor sync problems and glitches at scene transitions (which is where I feel most problems would be).  I have a lossy ESB encode based on Darth Mallwalker's LD rip I can share to see if I have any future in this business.  I'm afraid I'm far too easily sucked into the visuals to spot these things reliably during normal playback.

Ah, looks like there's a reference to both dark_jedi and Darth Mallwalker potentially doing this.  It's certainly worth doing IMO.

I'll continue marching ahead on my own for a bit, just to see how nasty it gets if nothing else.  If I end up with something usable, I'll share.

Thanks. I'm trying to make/have good lossless masters for all of the original 77/80/83 audio.  Mono was easy, and I haven't downloaded 77 SW yet, but at least right now, I'm using Darth Mallwalker's 80 ESB and 83 ROTJ captures.  Did Belbucus upload original stereo mixes for ESB and ROTJ too?

The DM captures sound fantastic, but they're split into three captures apiece, making GOUT sync a little hairy.  I'm also trying to accommodate the couple-frames of sync difference in ROTJ for PAL-based preservations, which makes things a touch more complicated.

Okay, one last question...are there any GOUT sync guidelines for these (particularly ESB and ROTJ), or just any general guidelines for how to make a good sync?

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.