CatBus

thecolorsblend said:

This is about an artist's moral right to not have his/her work tampered with. 

And what I'm saying, perhaps too obliquely, is that the only way an artist can actually achieve that is to never let anyone else see their art.  Tampering through interpretation happens the second another human eyeball sees it.  Tampering through more direct means (editing, co-authorship) happens with such pedestrian regularity that most don't even consider it tampering most of the time.  If an artist has the moral right to not have their work tampered with, it is very much like the right for men to give birth to babies a la Life of Brian.  Yeah they've got the right but it never happens.

If you put a work out in the public space, it will be parroted, parodied, sampled, remixed, etc.  If you're lucky, because that means it has meaning to someone else.  As long as it's not some sort of attempt to fraudulently pass something off as the original, I've got no problem there.  You can even parody it yourself twenty years later, just don't pass it off as the original.

EDIT: This means that IMO fan edits are EXACTLY the same as the Special Editions, by every moral measure except fraud (except that there's the special case for Star Wars of it being just rude to fan edit what may someday be a lost film).  They only differ in quality.

Sure, and history is full of authors who died 95% of the way through a book, etc, having their work completed by a relative or someone hired by the publisher, spurring raging debates over author's intent, etc.

I hate to get all post-modernist on this thread, but the whole idea of authorship in art is much less relevant than people give it credit for. The meaning of a work to society is frequently not what the author or authors or executive producers or publishers intended it to be. And who's right when there's a disagreement between the creator and society? IMO the readers, viewers, fans, etc, are always right. It's society who gives a work its real meaning, which is how the meaning of a work can change over time, and successfully become timeless... or fail to do so.

So it doesn't MATTER who edited what when and for what reason, really. What matters is that a big chunk of society saw this hodgepodge collective work and fell in love, probably for hundreds of completely different reasons. And it became a cultural force of its own at that point.

And that's what's important, the cultural impact, and that's what we're trying to preserve. All the discussion about author's intent and definitive versions and crap is beside the point.  Not that we can't have opinions on those, naturally.

Fan edits aren't a "retelling" in that same sense though.  They're an edit of a largely intact, existing story.  They're more like a bowdlerized edition of Romeo and Juliet than West Side Story.  And frankly reading a bowdlerized version of Romeo and Juliet before reading the original is something I CAN place a moral value on.

And I enjoyed having the opportunity to use the word "bowdlerized", thank you.

Luke Skywalker: Crispin Bonham-Carter
Princess Leia: Jennifer Ehle
Han Solo: Colin Firth
Obi-Wan Kenobi: Benjamin Whitrow
Darth Vader: David Bamber
Lando Calrissian: Adrian Lukis

Let the head-scratching begin!

none said:

Getting the phuck out then and going over to the 'Head of the Class' with Order66 shake up casting!

Dennis Blunden as Lando Calrissian

Arvid Engen as The Emperor

Kimberly Russell as Luke Skywalker

Simone Foster as Han Solo

Carlie Moore as Yoda

and that's right Theola June 'T.J.' Jones as Mace Windu

and Tannis Vallely as Darth Vader

affectively rebooted.

The future's so bright, I gotta wear a blast helmet...

walking_carpet said:

this is looking more and more like a green hornet one and done

The Star Wars juggernaut no longer has the capacity to recognize failure, even retroactively.  My personal prediction is that this 3D rehash will be the world's slowest and most predictable train wreck for the next several years, and afterwards, the usual suspects will deem it to be a success by measuring against whatever goalposts they manage to have constructed by then.

Yep, this is just the equivalent of a drunk guy at a party trying to make the Star Wars fan mad because it's fun.  The arguments are neither cogent nor consistent.  That is not the point.

Gotcha.  And I only noticed when someone pointed it out in advance ;)

That is good news.  Also, for the "missing frame" is it possible that the AviSynth "flow" solution you used for the cantina could be used to take it from "barely noticeable" to totally unnoticeable?  I haven't seen the corrected frames so I'm not sure how good it looks now.

Baronlando said:

I have to admit I have no idea what "turning to the dark side" even means now. I guess it doesn't happen until you change your name or something.

While the content of the PT waters down the meaning of the phrase "turning to the dark side" to the point of meaninglessness, they are, themselves, an object lesson in exactly what it means.  So what he said was true, from a certain point of view.

zombie84 said:

Eddie Murphy: entire cast.

Yes! Except the kid from the Golden Child shows up as Yoda.

generalfrevious said:

I would boycott the BDs, because the OOT is not on there (which should be a no brainer). If there was a good fan preservation on Blu, I would probably get it; but has anyone made one. The GOUT is not presentable, yes, but they will have to do. But that's not the point.

The problem is Lucas. That is why I am so angry and melodramatic here, because he is an untalented hack who took credit from others, and is arrogant to the point that we have to resort to fan preservations to see the originals. I should be able to get the OOT at my local BestBuy or Amazon right now, like every single film ever made since 1895. The SW trilogy are the only films we don't have legally, because of one man's psychosis.

The point I guess I'm trying to make is that you can separate the moral issues of Lucas-is-bad from the practical issues of can't-get-OOT-must-despair.  Frankly you can already get the OOT in better quality than the GOUT--that's a given, right now.  IMO opinion you can already get unquestionably-better-than-GOUT Empire in HD (AVCHD, not Blu Ray unless you remux it), and pretty soon you'll have the option for unquestionably-better-than-GOUT-and-pretty-much-Blu-Ray-equivalent Star Wars.  Blu Ray equivalency in the OOT from non-official sources is inevitable as far as I'm concerned.

Which doesn't mean Lucas suddenly isn't a bad guy anymore.  It just means he gets demoted from a "destroyer of cultural works", to a mere "yet another jackoff who attempted to destroy cultural works, but failed".  Which makes him a forgettable footnote in history, which I think, long term, is just perfect.

generalfrevious said:

Why should we pick only two? Every single film except the SW films allows you to have all three options. But no, GL is such a psychotic monster that he forces you to choose between official and presentable. That is fucking unjust and no person should have to subject themselves to GL's pretzel logic.

Okay, let's try out this prioritization test.  Which of these statements to you feel the most/least sympathy for, or are you equal on all three?

1) Boycott the official BD's, because they aren't the OOT.

2) Boycott the GOUT discs, because they aren't presentable.

3) Boycott fan preservations, because they aren't official.

My guess is, perfectly justifiable indignation aside, you're already well on the road to resolving this issue to your own personal satisfaction.

generalfrevious said:

Well, Lucas is still alive and making money, and Katie is being groomed to take over her father's position. We are still no closer to getting the OOT in an official and presentable release than we were 10 years ago, so getting over it is not really an option right now.

1) OOT

2) Official

3) Presentable

Pick any 2.  I will be perfectly satisfied with 1 & 3.  I'm honestly not sure what option 2 gets you, so perhaps you may someday determine it's not that important to you either.

Chicken Boo said:

Sorry, really novice question that was probably covered, but is this going to be 24p or is it the normal PAL framerate?

 23.976 fps (24p)

Good point, none.  FWIW all of my subs all use the same timings, except where part of a line isn't subtitled.  i.e. "Uh, slight weapons malfunction." might be subbed in another language as "Slight weapons malfunction.", and I'd try to shift a foreign sub like that so that the subtitle doesn't appear on the "Uh", unless the line is spoken so quickly it's not relevant.  Mine were definitely all timed to go with English audio--foreign dubs were not considered except that I made forced subs (crawl+alien only) available for them.

But yeah, if you have some sort of transform function from GOUT->other, I'm sure you could convert them to other formats as needed.

leo87 said:

Can't wait for this new release, it's looking good. So only Star Wars is getting a v2.0 right?

Nope, last I heard Harmy's planning for the whole set.  Although I hope he gives himself a vacation after this one.

Mielr said:

 

CatBus said:

Mielr said:

On a side note, I know of someone who has all 3 SW films on 35mm (he collects 35mm films).

If he has a copy of non-SE Jedi, ask him if he'd sell/loan his print to someone else to make the transfer.  If he would, I bet we can find one hell of an interested party right here.

I doubt it. I haven't spoken to him yet, but the fact that he works at a place that has a telecine and he hasn't used it for that purpose yet, says a lot. He could go in there in the middle of the night and do it without anyone knowing, but I gather he's just not interested.

Plus, I'm not 100% sure they're even the OOT, but I will definitely ask next time I go in.

 

There's a lot of plausible deniability in having someone else do it that you don't get when you do it yourself.  It's really worth a shot.

Thanks.  That's exactly what started this--a deaf friend who couldn't watch a fan preservation due to lack of SDH subs, and it all kinda spiralled out of control like a lot of geek projects tend to do.

Midnight_Trooper said:

I watched it and everything despecialized looks great!

I personally strongly dislike the color timing. In certain shots things are so washed out and/or green that it is jarring. I thought your DeEd 1st Workprint was far superior. Someone with the skills should throw up some comparisons.

Certainly this was markedly different than I'd seen Star Wars look recently, and I was also taken by the washed out appearance of Tatooine, which I think reaches its peak as the sand crawler crests the dune after the "Look Sir, droids" scene.  That scene practically looks as blown out as a Hoth scene it's so bright.  But then I watched it again thinking that this was the desert with the sun glaring down all the time.  Suddenly Uncle Owen's squinty eyes fit a lot better, a lot of stuff did.  It's just blindingly bright out there!

Anyway, that was how I came to love the new color timing.  But it is very very different.  And as far as I'm able to tell I guess I did see it looking like this a long time ago.

Current status as of April 29th, 2025: Project files updated to version 15.1

Supported Languages: English, English SDH, Mandarin (Simplified & Traditional), Cantonese, Hindi*, Urdu*, Spanish (American & Castilian), Arabic, Metropolitan French, Canadian French*, Indonesian, Malaysian, Russian, Bengali, Portuguese (Brazilian & European), German, Japanese, Iranian Persian, Afghan Persian (Dari)*, Tajik (Cyrillic)*, Swahili*, Turkish, Korean, Vietnamese, Italian, Thai, Polish, Ukrainian, Uzbek (Latin)*, Burmese, Romanian, Dutch, Azerbaijani (Latin)*, Serbian (Latin & Cyrillic), Croatian, Bosnian*, Greek, Hungarian, Czech, Swedish, Bulgarian, Hebrew, Albanian*, Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, Slovak, Catalan, Georgian*, Lithuanian, Slovenian, Macedonian, Latvian, Basque, Estonian, and Icelandic.

Subtitles for languages marked with an asterisk (*) are partially or completely based on machine translation

If you want to get the subtitles, check for downloads on MySpleen, thestarwarstrilogy.com, find the secret decoder ring with my name on it, or PM me for a download link. This will be the complete set of project files, so it is a big download. If you need help, send me a PM or post your questions in this thread and hopefully someone will be able to help you.

PROJECT THREEPIO SUBTITLES

The goal of Project Threepio is to provide high-quality subtitle options for preservations of the Star Wars “Original Original Trilogy” – Star Wars, The Empire Strikes Back, and Return of the Jedi in their unaltered forms – and to provide a framework with which anyone can add or change subtitles as needed for any other purpose. I hope that this will broaden the appeal of our preservation efforts beyond the English-speaking world.

Project Threepio’s subtitles work best with audio and video that have the following characteristics:

• All films synced to the full theatrical releases of the trilogy, or within a few frames of that
• For all films, English opening crawl text, English audio, and burnt-in theatrical English subtitles for alien dialogue
• Video format: 2160p(4K)@23.976fps, 1080p@23.976fps, or 720p@23.976fps
• Aspect ratio: approximately 2.37:1 (35mm) or 2.2:1 (70mm), letterboxed in a 1.78:1 frame

Examples: Harmy’s Despecialized Editions, 4K77–4K83 35mm Preservations, D+77–OTD83 Theatrical Reconstructions, SW Silver Screen Edition v1.6, ESB 16mm Duplication Print, Harmy’s ROTJ Grindhouse 35mm LPP

Utilities and detailed instructions are included for modifying the subtitles to work better with audio and video sources that have different characteristics, such as non-theatrically-synced film scans, international versions, cropped video, DVD video, etc.

SUBTITLE IMAGE GALLERY

All images below are based on Harmy’s Despecialized Editions using Project Threepio’s PGS subtitles. The appearance of subtitles when using SRT subtitles can vary a great deal.

Subtitles are moved to the top of the frame for titles and crawls, to prevent overlapping onscreen text as much as possible.

Subtitles for multiple speakers are formatted to align along one side.

Translations for burnt-in alien subtitles are also moved to the top of the frame. In rapid back-and-forth dialogue, the entire exchange is shifted to the top to prevent the viewer from having to repeatedly switch from reading the top to the bottom of the screen. If your video doesn’t have burnt-in alien subtitles, Project Threepio contains utilities that allow you to shift these subtitles back down to the bottom of the frame.

SDH subtitles use a dark background for increased readability.

Included utilities can resize subtitles, while retaining all formatting and layout (i.e. for large projection screens).

You can even use subtitles in two different languages simultaneously.

Specially-designed “matching” subtitles mimic the appearance of theatrical subtitles (first screenshot has theatrical alien subtitles, second has Project Threepio’s matching subtitles).

FUTURE PLANS

English-only preservations don’t do much to help many of the people out there who want to be able to see Star Wars, but are instead afflicted with the Special Editions. I would love for every new Star Wars preservation to include these subtitles by default, to increase the international accessibility of these historic films.

At just shy of five dozen languages, Project Threepio still lags quite a bit behind its namesake. I am always accepting contributions of good-quality subtitles for additional languages, and improvements to existing subtitles.

THANK YOU

I’d like to thank the following Star Wars fans for their contributions to Project Threepio:

Feallan, Sadako, schorman13, pittrek, ArdaYlcn, Laserman, a contributor who wishes to remain anonymous, none, morgands1, williarob, Teesel, You_Too, laozi, RashadShehadeh, bttfbrasilfan, LexX, Kaz47, Rina, roback214, Leoj, Hostmaster, Rondan, kylefan, spaceghost, lexsanor, msycamore, IronMagus, Harmy, daboka, Laserschwert, csd79, ZIPC, B2D2, thxita, hot noodles, pmc3, Leonardo, Anuj, stormpack, aserdaryakut, sf999, carlosmon, frater, lucaslslopes, coolman756, Kloky, jl8, wayphat, carlosmon, DevilWing, Faithwyn, ChainsawAsh, CAL0901, alexp120, negative1, Doctor M, dahmage, marvins, bilditup1, Chewtobacca, Darth Mallwalker, towne32, Diego, TheHutt, Mavimao, TV’s Frink, Possessed, and Collipso.

LOGOS FOR PRESERVATION PROJECTS

Also included in the Project Threepio resources folder are some high-resolution logos for various preservation projects, suitable for T-shirts or whatever you like. Preview images shown with a solid black background are provided with a transparent background for more printing flexibility.

Official Project Threepio Images (album art mashups: The Clash and Operation Ivy)

May the Force Be With You in multiple languages (white, black, or yellow text)

Unofficial Images For Other Preservation Projects (album art mashups: The Police, Negativland, and Pink Floyd)

walking_carpet said:

TPM is the worst movie ive ever seen.

This is not necessarily hyperbole.  I know there are a lot worse movies out there than TPM in my book, tons of them--heck, I can barely even remember what happened in TPM except me playing with the light on my watch during the racing scene, and I know it gets way worse than that.  Tedious is easy, it takes some measure of talent to make something truly grindingly awful, and none of the PT has that.

But most people have some sort of mental filter that says "that sounds terrible! why would i even want to see that?" and that prevents them from seeing truly bad films.  Which means the worst ones they have ever seen are not the worst in existence, they are just ones that managed to fool the mental filter into seeing it anyway.

I thought it would be fun to drink a lot of beer and watch Battlefield Earth.  I failed to take into account that there is not enough beer in the world.  TPM just makes you wish you were doing something else.  Battlefield Earth makes you wish you were dead.

You_Too said:

And finally, in the "look sir, droids" scene, the hatch in the background is grey.

Can't believe I missed this.  I'm handing in my card right now.

DominicCobb said:

Finally someone defending TPM: http://movies.ign.com/articles/121/1218394p1.html

I actually agree with most of the article. Now, don't get me wrong. I don't love TPM, and I still think it's the worst of the saga. But I feel like it get's a lot more hate than it should, especially from this website.

Also, truth be told, I was a kid when I first saw TPM so... 

The article's mostly okay except leaning a little hard on a few strawmen for counterarguments.  Our favorite hyperbolic child-crime claim makes a showing, of course, and  then there's this disingenuous bit: "I don't understand the rationale that something existing separately tarnishes the impact or greatness of the original."  They must not have had enough room to include the text "except for when the original is taken away and hidden in a dusty vault for eternity, never to be seen again."

That said, it's better than most editorials along these lines.

Mielr said:

On a side note, I know of someone who has all 3 SW films on 35mm (he collects 35mm films).

If he has a copy of non-SE Jedi, ask him if he'd sell/loan his print to someone else to make the transfer.  If he would, I bet we can find one hell of an interested party right here.