CatBus

darth_ender said:

The prequels aren't exactly Saving Private Ryan, The Godfather, and Schindler's List.

Someone's clearly a Spielberg fanboy.  I mean Schindler's List was pretty good, but it certainly doesn't measure up to the Godfather.  And Saving Private Ryan?  Aside from the Normany landing... *spits*

Thread successfully derailed, you're welcome.

ray_afraid said:

Alexrd said:

STENDEC said:

the fact that no one is saying he can't edit his movies,

We both know that that is not true at all.

I've never met anybody who cares about the changes he has made or even future changes he might make. Doesn't mean everybody likes the changes, but if he'd release the original along with his new version, everybody would be happy.

I think this belief stems from the ambiguity of the word "should".  I certainly say "he shouldn't make changes to his movies" all the time, but I really mean "It's not advisable that he make changes to his movies (because he always makes them worse)".  But certainly some could misinterpret such a statement to mean "It it morally wrong for him to make changes to his movies"  This is compounded by the fact that people (including me) definitely feel it's morally wrong for him to suppress the original films.  A "should" in one statement right next to a moral issue in the next sentence is pretty much asking for a misunderstanding (and that's if you even bother to separate the two issues into two distinct statements, which most people don't).

So I can see how Alexrd (and perhaps Lucas himself) thinks people are saying he can't edit his movies.  It's a sad fact that language is ambiguous, and that leads to misinterpretation.  They are still wrong, but I can understand how they got there.

LexX said:

CatBus said:

OK got all my answers.  FWIW all languages except French are okay to use leading ellipses as far as I can tell, so I'll follow that rule regardless of what the burned-in subs did in those languages.  And all languages including French can italicize ship names.

Depends on what are "all languages".

Yeah, sorry.  "All languages" in that post means "the four languages listed in the OP".

Also I already have the Castilian Spanish subs from the GOUT, no worries.

OK got all my answers.  FWIW all languages except French are okay to use leading ellipses as far as I can tell, so I'll follow that rule regardless of what the burned-in subs did in those languages.  And all languages including French can italicize ship names.

doubleofive said:

Harmy said:

That looks good, way better than the official one, I'm considering ditching it and using these instead.

Thanks Harmy, I'd be honored to have provided your covers for the official release! If you or anyone else wants the PSD file to maybe remove my snark or the Ronto Ass, I can upload it somewhere.

Actually the Ronto Ass is the only side-by-side photo I really like.  I think for Empire I'd have chosen a heavily cyanified Hoth shot (I think there's a good one with the probe droid and a walker in your Picasa album), and for Jedi I'd have chosen the Hayden ghost or created one showing Lapti Nek vs. Jedi Rocks, preferably using the ridiculous waggling uvula shot.

doubleofive said:

He also said he's fine with us as long as we let him make his Special Editions. Crap.

Wait, wait.  I see a lawyer-sized hole.  He says we could release the 1977 version as long as we don't put his name on it (maybe he'd also like to be scrubbed from the credits, unsure about that part).

I think Star Wars fans are just fine with those terms, sir (I'm sure the credits scrubbing will cause some whining but we can manage it).  Alert Mike Verta!  Get Lucas to make this statement legally binding and we're all set!

Maybe we could balance the concession of taking his name off the film with being able to charge money for it, since he wants nothing to do with it...

Just to verify, is this what you're planning?

1) Lower-bitrate AVCHD DVD9

2) Higher-bitrate MKV

3) Possible Blu Ray (same encoding as MKV, maybe with some extras)

I'm also assuming that, if I download the MKV, I could demux the streams and make my own barebones Blu Ray that I can live with until the fancy one comes out, and #2 and #3 would have the same video quality.

Is that how you see it happening (at least right now)?

jabbo5150 said:

I have an Oppo BDP-93, which seems to be able to handle this format. Is this burnable to a disc though? Would I need a Blu-Ray burner?

mkv format that is. Meant to include a quote in my reply

My BDP-93 plays AVCHDs and mkv's just fine.  Note that mkv is just a container format and if you put weird enough streams in it, it won't play.  I'm assuming Harmy's mkv would be fairly standard.  However I will probably choose to burn to Blu Ray regardless of what Harmy makes available, just because I like physical media.

I am using the DVD subs as a template (I have to since I don't know the languages), but I'm correcting problems as I see them and style-matching the other subs is something I'm considering while I'm at it.  I know a little German too and have corrected a couple lazy subtitling problems toward the end of ESB for example, and OCR can do some pretty weird things to the subs, so manual cleanup is not really optional.  It sounds more difficult than it really is.  I'm pretty much done with all of the languages except Portuguese and am just doing "finishing touches" right now, which is why I'm asking weird questions like this.

See this post for why I want to OCR them instead of just using the existing graphical overlays (if you have text, you can do cooler effects when you render the graphics): http://originaltrilogy.com/forum/topic.cfm/Looking-for-people-who-speak-German-French-Spanish-or-Brazilian-Portuguese/post/547180/#TopicPost547180

So by "not a standard", does that mean it cannot be italicized, or it can be italicized or not and doesn't matter?

Laserschwert said:

At least we don't in the subtitles... uhm... are there any ship names in the Greedo/Boushh/Jabba subtitles?

If I remember correctly some German translations of EU novels put ship names in italics. It's definitely an option and not forbidden by some crazy law.

I'm doing subtitles for everything.  I'm just trying to match style with the Greedo subs whenever possible.  So the real question is, do you italicize ship names in everyday German, in newspapers, etc?

Excellent, thanks.  Do you italicise ship names in German?  i.e. <i>Millenium Falcon</i>?

msycamore said:

There are people that have been upset by the four dot ellipsis in the A long time ago preface and IIRC the three dots in the crawls for being typographical incorrect. ;)

Uh, no!  That wasn't me! I never get worked up about such things!

OK thanks.  I'll check some generic language style rules and go with that.

In the English subs for Greedo/Jabba, they include leading ellipses for continued dialog.  As below in the second subtitle:

He has no time for smugglers…

…who drop their shipments at
the first sign of an Imperial cruiser.

What I want to know is, for other languages (specifically: German, French, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese), do they also use leading ellipses in this way?  Would it be incorrect style to use leading ellipses in any of these languages?

Thanks.

If the burnt-in subs are finalized yet, I'd like a screengrab of Greedo's two-line subtitle in SW, and one in ROTJ of the "You may have been a good smuggler..." line.  I don't care if the image scaling/color grading issues aren't resolved yet--if the font size and placement are final, that's good enough for me.

Just to update everyone with the resolution of this issue: I've managed to modify and compile vsfilter.dll on my own and it actually works (and I am feeling like SUCH a bad-ass right now)!  Thanks to everyone for their pointers.  This DLL will be included as part of my upcoming subtitle project.

Alexrd said:

CO said:

This was the first fatal plot hole of the SW movies when Darth Vader's name appeared in ROTJ.  If Luke was hidden from his father, why the hell would they use his same last name???????

Who said Skywalker was such an unique name?

...and Kenobi, same problem there ;)

Star Wars is now a very successful direct-to-video franchise.  With that model in mind, there's no reason to release anything on video that people have already seen before.  Every future release will contain changes until the copyright expires and we can finally end the madness.

OK, good to know.  I managed to get what I think is the source code for vsfilter.  I think I'm bound to this particular DLL for my functionality because easySUP solves a lot of my other problems, and I'm trying to make a simple(ish) solution for the masses and easySUP gets me 98% of the way there...

I'll see what I can do.  The code looks ... not simple ;)  Hopefully the forums may yield something.

Actually I'm now not certain this is an official AviSynth project DLL.  Looks like it's actually DirectVobSub (unrelated?).  I found the project page here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/guliverkli/files/VSFilter/

Not sure how to get to the source code from here (let alone modify it).  Pointers?

So here's what I'm trying to do.  I'm using a GUI utility (easySUP) which uses AviSynth's TextSub function (vsfilter.dll) to render text subtitles.

My problem is that all of the rendered subs are center-aligned.  I would like the ability to include markup in my text subtitles which tells TextSub to render the subs left-aligned.  Not left-aligned within the entire movie frame, just align all text so that they line up with the longest line of text along their left side.  (This would be used for double-dialog, so the hyphens at the start would line up, for example--but the subtitles would still be toward the center-ish of the movie frame)

This change wouldn't be relevant for single lines of text, and I have no plans for more than two lines of text, so the logic would go something like this:
1) If there are two lines of text AND
2) Markup is detected at the beginning of both lines, THEN
3) Calculate the position of the longer line as normal, and
4) Calculate the position of the shorter line as normal, except the the leftmost X coordinate should match the X coordinate of the longer line.

The markup could be anything, even just a single non-frequently-used ASCII character like a pipe character, I don't care really.  The markup would be stripped out before rendering naturally.

Any ideas how I should get started on this?  I feel this is outside the range of my technical abilities, but I could probably make it with some hand-holding (or a generous spirit willing to write and compile it).  I know some members of the community have compiled custom AviSynth DLLs before, so I'm hoping this is doable!

Harmy said:

Yeah, that might also have bothered Lucas. It would certainly explain why he had them change the sky in the SE ;-)

It might also explain why he keeps changing them.  If he scatters the changes over a few decades, it's a lot harder to keep track of which inconsistencies were there from the beginning!

lurker77 said:

BTW, Lucas is not an artist - he's a businessman. He'll release the original versions when he's done milking the others.

He's a businessman who THINKS he's an artist... maybe not.

Harmy said:

Um, what else good was there apart from the poorly presented deleted scenes?

The best extra is the unadvertised one--included with every set is the free license to own HD Star Wars fan edits.  That extra truly priceless.

Zing!

I don't know about cropping, but on fine detail, I thought the consensus was the opposite--that's why dark_jedi and harmy both use the PAL GOUT instead of NTSC.

I've pretty much decided that if my kid wants to see any official Lucas Star Wars stuff outside the trilogy, that's fine, but we should do it chronologically.  So it's Holiday Special, Caravan of Courage, etc, and lastly Revenge of the Sith.  And he'll have to watch the last three on his own.  I'll sit through the whole Holiday Special with him, but I'm no masochist...