CatBus

abcde said:

PM sent.

Likewise 😉

LexX said:

CatBus said:

Broom Kid said:

but after copyright expiration

I’m not at all convinced this is ever going to happen, and currently have no reason to believe it ever will.

While I agree copyright extensions are already to ludicrous levels and may get worse, never is a very long time. It’s just my opinion, but I think they’ll give up before they hit 10,000 years. Also, the fact that copyright terms are codified into so many multilateral trade agreements actually makes further extensions a lot more complicated than they were only a decade or so ago. Not impossible, but certainly more expensive.

Unfortunately, at that point no-one cares. The film is owned by the one company that’s notoriously one of the reasons of updating the whole copyright law and already none of their films have been made to public domain. With limitless money you can change the laws.

By “before 10,000 years” I suppose I should have specified that I’m predicting considerably less than 10,000 years, but you know the Internet and sarcasm tags. I think they’re standardized at around lifetime+90 now, I’d say lifetime+120 is the limit before ludicrous turns untenable, at least on a global scale (all it takes is one country holding out and the whole extension house of cards collapses, with global trade and the Internet making imports not the hurdle they used to be). And at lifetime+120, there will be plenty of Star Wars fans still in existence. We won’t all have evolved into Eloi yet. I, however, will have evolved into mulch – I’ll grant that much.

Broom Kid said:

but after copyright expiration

I’m not at all convinced this is ever going to happen, and currently have no reason to believe it ever will.

While I agree copyright extensions are already to ludicrous levels and may get worse, never is a very long time. It’s just my opinion, but I think they’ll give up before they hit 10,000 years. Also, the fact that copyright terms are codified into so many multilateral trade agreements actually makes further extensions a lot more complicated than they were only a decade or so ago. Not impossible, but certainly more expensive.

yotsuya said:

Nice to hear from him after so long, but kind of depressing that nothing is going to come of this.

We don’t actually know this. Lucasfilm/Disney isn’t interested, but after copyright expiration, public-domain outfits like Laserlight may be. They’re always looking to… well… do things on the cheap (even moreso than Lucasfilm), so a pre-made preservation of a previously-unavailable popular classic film would, I’d think, attract quite a lot of interest from them.

Sure, it’d be Mike’s grandkids inking the deal and our grandkids buying the discs (or cranial implants or whatever), but something could still come of Legacy, even if it’s nothing more than a new copy of the film for the Library of Congress (which, frankly, is enough in its own right IMO). It’s always been about the long term goal of preserving history for future generations, not the short-term goal of watching it in our lifetimes. Although I think everyone involved thinks that would have been nice too.

yotsuya said:

To be blunt, this is the same thing they did with the GOUT. They took what they had lying around and put no effort into it.

Same could be said for the old masters for the unreleased 3D conversion they just had laying around. Or in 2011, for the old DVD masters they just had laying around. Lucasfilm has a cheapness about home video releases that’s still very much alive under Disney.

Very cool. Yes, IMO 1080p subs are the best move for compatibility. Right now, I treat 2160p subtitles as more of an archival format – useful for special purposes, but not for most direct applications.

Complain all I want about the state of Blu-ray subtitles, they are very cool in that they allow stuff like what you’ve just done. Old school DVD 3 regular colors + 1 full transparent color would look more like an encoding glitch than a reel change marker.

Other uses I’ve seen for non-text subtitles include alternate aspect ratios, where the underlying video is open matte, but with “black bar” subtitles, you can reimpose the matte and get a theatrical aspect ratio.

oohteedee said:

I’ve successfully created pgs subs that contain the original reel change markers for 4k83. This allows you to see the original reel change markers for projects that have had them removed (v1.2 and up).

That’s a really cool, creative use of subtitles. I just wanted to say that before I went on to the technical stuff.

I’ve only created a 2160p version for now but I notice when muxed into a 1080p file they scale down to the proper size and location.

CatBus is there any advantage to having native 1080p and 2160p pgs subs? The 2160p work in both.

The only difference is player compatibility. Most (all?) subtitles for commercial UHD video are 1080p, and I don’t know if there are any players (and I’m talking hardware players here) that simply don’t understand what a 2160p subtitle is – the detailed specs for UHD subtitles aren’t publicly available, AFAICT. Certainly some 2K-only players (regular Blu-ray hardware players) would balk at 2160p subs.

Also when I timecoded it I assumed the first frame would be at 0. The markers were one frame early. Is it the standard for the first frame to be 1 during playback?

Thanks for the tools which allowed me to do this.

I swear the timing of PGS subtitles was codified by my archnemesis. There are actually a lot of issues with this whole topic, but the short answer is you just do what works 😉

Just a side note but when rendering them it gave a warning that the duration for each was less than 500.5ms. I overcame this by adding a blank marker to the end of each set, otherwise the last marker displayed for around 500ms.

If you’re using BDSup2Sub, there’s a command line option (–minimum-time) to reduce the minimum display time.

https://github.com/mjuhasz/BDSup2Sub/wiki/Command-line-Interface

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Puggo - Jar Jar’s Yoda said:

Peter Cushing, hands down.

Yep.

IMO it’s something even worse than simple personal loyalty to George, it’s an ideological deference the the expressed wishes of the perceived creator of any property. The reason that distinction is important is that once George dies (this is speaking in terms of an unavoidable timeline), personal loyalty evaporates – he’ll never know, right? – while the ideology of deference to the wishes of the creator will continue.

It’s a small niggle, but it’s why we won’t see the OOT in any official releases until the copyright expires and public-domain outfits (who are, let’s face it, in for a quick buck and have no delusions of artistry) can get a crack at it. And that’s why (sigh) projects like Legacy that take the longer view are still important. Lucasfilm might bury Legacy, but Laserlight will jump at it. In a century or so, Mike’s grandkids can seal the deal and my grandkids can watch it.

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That looks great. Is it really 1.85:1? The Japanese Blu-ray (what this is clearly based on) is 1.78:1. I noticed that the hospital scenes in particular had ragged/wobbly top/bottom edges, and trimming it to 1.85:1 would fix that.

Also, wasn’t there a mono mix from Laserdisc floating around?

PM’s sent.

So far, just screencaps. We also haven’t heard anything from poita for over a year, although he’s still around.

ChainsawAsh said:

Power windows are extremely common in almost every single modern restoration of any film that was photochemically graded. If the goal of this is to make the “official Blu that never was,” power windows would really just make it even more “accurate” to that goal. I don’t see an issue with them, frankly.

In general, yes, but there are some specific atrocious examples. I believe Harmy already dealt with a brightened Vader in a hallway shot on the Blu-ray. I imagine that any alteration that just plain looked bad would be worth fixing. Just like a wipes might not be redone in general, but a wipe would be worth redoing if it showed the SE version of Ben’s hut, for example. There’s a lot of judgment calls, and Harmy’s standards are always more stringent than my own, so I’m good with whatever he does.

Oh, Harmy, you’ve got to snag 44rh1n’s FOTR regrade, it’s excellent!

Quoted for truth.

CHEWBAKAspelledwrong said:

Harmy said:

I am now in contact with oohteedee and we’re talking about collaborating on v3.0 using his D+xy versions as a basis and despecializing them further.

the focus of Despecialized can shift to being what a modern transfer of the movie

That said, will original opening logos still be preserved? I know some (not all) studios use newer logos on restorations of classic films, but I think for the despecialized crowd original logos are important.

I think it’s more along the line of: Harmy used to walk a fine line between making the Blu-ray release that never was, and preserving the theatrical experience. Now with the existence of 4Kxx, he doesn’t have to do that anymore.

I don’t recall the logos were ever a judgment call, but there were plenty of others. Harmy wrestled with adding burn marks to Tantive 4, ultimately landing on the “Blu-ray” side and not adding them. He once added a hair to a shot that’s in all the prints*, which is on the “Theatrical” side. He cropped rounded corners onto Empire Strikes Back, which again was for a theatrical feel. And so on.

What we get with the “Blu-ray release that never was” approach is not trying to make it look like a projection print when it’s not. You mostly won’t notice anything at all, except it will just seem crisp and clean (but not degrained, thankfully). I can’t see big things like the logo changing.

* I believe this addition was eventually dubbed the “space pube”, but I could be wrong.

Harmy said:

I am now in contact with oohteedee and we’re talking about collaborating on v3.0 using his D+xy versions as a basis and despecializing them further.

I have said before that now that we have 4K77 and 4K83 as 100% true theatrical preservstions (with 4K80 hopefully coming soon) the focus of Despecialized can shift to being what a modern transfer of the movie, if the SE never existed, could be. This is why I don’t think power-windows, not 100% theatrically accurate grading or redone wipes and such are really a problem.

Which one’s first up? You’d mentioned Star Wars was your new focus at some point, is that still true? Very glad to see it coming together.

PM sent.

SilverWook said:

And they took it out for the next version anyway, how do the Flannelheads™ rationalize that reversion?

I suspect it’s because we’ve always been at war with Eastasia.

SilverWook said:

I don’t even want to imagine the pro Maclunkey arguments now. 😉

I personally have a soft spot for the arguments supporting Luke’s scream in Cloud City. One of us! One of us!

Just in case Harmy doesn’t recognize 44rh1n from other parts of the forum, he knows his stuff. DrDre would be a good contact as well – he may already be well on his way to an already-color-corrected UHD source.

Well, my offer still stands on the UHD front. And I suppose I can mention, in relation to other ideas being circulated, that my offer definitely comes with no conditions. You can do whatever you like with them, I don’t care.