CatBus

Project files have been updated to version 1.1, incorporating many suggestions from msycamore (original post has been updated as well).  Please check tehparadox for the updated link, it is NOT the same as the original link.

Rough summary of changes:

Minor language changes to English subtitles for SW and ESB (fidelity improvements).  These changes involved slight timing/other changes that also affected other languages, so subtitles for all languages for SW and ESB have been very slightly changed.  ROTJ is unchanged.

Harmy said:

I still want to re-render reel 2 as well.

Did you figure out where the flicker was coming from?

Theoretically, you might think a movie will be bad, but upon watching it, think it's good.  And you might think a movie will be good but it turns out to be bad.  The latter scenario happens all the time, and certainly part of that is due to the fact that you actually go and see the movie when you think it will be good, and only then can your expectations be dashed.  If you think it will be bad, few will go through the trouble of watching it to confirm the fact.

But a movie is not a black box.  You get some idea about what's in the movie from other channels--previews, reviews, friends, knowledge of the writers, or directors, or actors, etc.  So in my experience when you think a movie will be bad, you are almost certainly correct.  Unfortunately the inverse is not true... at least not for me.

Are you suggesting Jar Jar is a Cylon?

xhonzi said:

CatBus said:

Donate $200 and get a coffee mug with an image of Greedo saying "I've been looking forward to this for a long time".  Fill it up with hot liquid and it changes to Han saying "Yes, I'll bet you have".

Now that's an idea!

Not that it will be half as popular as the metal bikini one, but at least it's classier.

Oh, come ON.  You were thinking it too...

I'm afraid we need to accept the terrible, terrible truth.

George was a TREKKER the whole time.

May God have mercy on our souls.

Donate $200 and get a coffee mug with an image of Greedo saying "I've been looking forward to this for a long time".  Fill it up with hot liquid and it changes to Han saying "Yes, I'll bet you have".

That is a topic for its own thread, probably in the technical how-to's forum.  FWIW I tried and failed to de-muffle the audio.  Certainly the EQ needs balancing as the bass is boomy and the treble is subdued, but everything I threw at it ultimately made it sound worse.

Is it September already?

March 15th 2012 at 08:32:12.004 GMT.

Do you REALLY want another wrong prediction (sorry, Harmy)? Just be satisfied knowing it's getting closer every day. We're all impatient, but we'll have to wait a little longer and nobody can say how long that will be.

ww12345 said:

'Cause that ain't how the CatBus rolls. He wants his BluRay now! lol

Pretty much.  A small amount of effort for a big improvement in video quality while waiting for the Blu Ray.

Harmy said:

@CatBus: That's interesting. It's definitely true about the noisiness, I noticed it with my BD player, though I don't understand why that is. Can anyone explain? It seems logical to me that if you have the film compressed to fill a disc of the same physical size, the information required to show say one second of the film should take up the same size physical area on the disc, only on DVD it will be less actual information but the rotation speed should then be the same.

I honestly don't know why, but it's not the same physical size.  8GB on a AVCHD is the whole disc.  8GB on a Blu Ray is a narrower band towards the hub, not even the whole disc.  My assumption is it's related to data density.  On a Blu Ray you can get more data per square inch so to speak, so you don't need to rotate as fast to get the same bitrate.  But I don't know that for sure, I'm just thinking out loud.

EDIT: Ah I see what you're saying now.  Maybe it's just those magic blue lasers.  I have no clue.

Cobra Kai said:

Interesting, i didn't know that about AVCHDs.

Try one out on your player first.  It's highly variable based on player and I'm awfully damned particular about player noise, so don't rule out AVCHD entirely on my account.

Stinky-Dinkins said:

retartedted said:

CatBus said:

I bought one specifically for this purpose.  These may be the only Blu Rays I ever burn, and it would still have been worth every penny.

 

You don't need a Blu-ray player to burn AVCHD DVD9 discs.  They are just dual layer DVDs that more or less use the same video streams as a Blu-ray (to oversimplify it).

He was talking about burning the made-for-BD version, the two people above him were talking about not being able to burn it. We're on the CatBus now motherfucker, and you don't get off until it gets you off, and I love it.

How Stinky knows my family motto is a complete mystery.  Aunt Marge?  Is that you?

Actually I plan on burning the MKV to Blu Ray.  It will be better quality than the AVCHD, and for you video snobs in the room, AVCHDs need to rotate much faster than Blu Rays which makes them relatively noisy even on normally quiet players.

OK I'm assuming no more changes for Star Wars or Empire, so I've now re-rendered the overlays for these movies using the new text.  All I'm really expecting at this point is suggested changes for Jedi or possibly updated Portuguese subs.  After that, v1.1 will be uploaded/released.

So much for not planning any updates to the files ;)

I bought one specifically for this purpose.  These may be the only Blu Rays I ever burn, and it would still have been worth every penny.

Kurgan said:

Perhaps some folks on the forum with good voices would like to put together a "fan audio description" of the movies? It wouldn't be a preservation, but it would sure be cool.

There's a joke in there somewhere about faces made for radio...

If anyone has the audio descriptive tracks for ESB and ROTJ, and the normal non-AD counterparts of the Blu set, I could take a stab at extracting the description and splicing it into a GOUT stereo track (no promises, could be a miserable failure...).  But I'm not doing any narration myself, sorry.

Yeah, I get that.  I was genuinely worried you'd convince me there was a "but" in that other line... and my whole sense of that scene would be shot.

snicker said:

Hopefully this illustrates what I'm talking about a little better.

It would be more helpful to compare against still from the workprint.  We already know the Blu Ray colors are wrong, and Harmy's workprint doesn't look much like the Blu Rays anymore.  Are you sure there's even a problem to fix anymore?

Ah yes, I knew it was variable, but I was thinking of the Senator screening as an "average" amount of cropping, not as an extreme edge case.  Good to know.

I think one showing how much was cropped in projection would be good, too, just to show the GOUT cropping wasn't bad at all relatively speaking.

I only changed these:

"Well" -> "We'll"

"do my job" -> "do my job in the most..."

Thanks so much!  The "but" was always a really tricky line for me because it really dramatically changes the meaning of the statement.  With the "but" it's a more straightforward interpretation, but it seems unlike Han to place sentiment (friendship) over guile (trust).  Without the "but" it's a sarcastic comment that any friend of Han's is by definition untrustworthy because Han hangs out with thieves and lowlifes.  I personally prefer and hear the latter statement, but it's hard to subtitle that sort of sarcasm--italics can't quite do it justice.

EDIT: Oh, and regarding "sit down" vs "silence".  Boy you'd think it would be easy to distinguish these words, wouldn't it?  But this is one of those cases of very unclear enunciation combined with unhelpful mixing levels that show up pretty regularly in these movies.  What I hear is compatible with "sit down", and that seems to be the most common translation of the line, but that doesn't make it definitive.  I think "silence" doesn't quite match Han's normal diction, but these movies are not consistent in that either so that doesn't mean much.  So I'm sticking with "sit down", but that doesn't mean you're wrong! ;)

Okay, for those keeping score, I'm applying all of msycamore's suggested changes EXCEPT:

I really think Han says "You probably don't", which I interpret as a suggestion that Leia doesn't even know her true feelings.

I'm leaving out the barely audible gibberish.

I'm taking the gundark change, but not capitalizing gundark.

And that's it!  It's a lot of small changes, but I think, like with Star Wars, it's still a change in the right direction.  Thanks for everything so far.

I'm still listening and figuring which of these changes I'll be incorporating, but you've been just the right amount of pedantic ;)

As for single-word vs two-words, I just picked one and tried to be consistent.  I've seen it both ways too, but I think two words is more modern.

Is it my imagination, or is the flickering in sync with the runtime counter in the corner?  I guess it would have to be since the counter changes every frame, but it got me wondering if there's some sort of auto-contrast or palette problem related to that overlay.