Darth Tater said:
Looking great as usual, Harmy (the movie's not bad either, you handsome devil! :P)!
We're gonna need a bigger room...
You also have Brazilian Portuguese!
Seriously, though--if you take a list of the most widely-spoken languages on earth, and filter based on latin alphabet, Portuguese is #3, after English and Spanish. It's a good one to include!
I guess I didn't specify: I just need an e-mail address to send them to. They're not big.
EDIT: Okay you have the files now.
You're going to need to PM me then. Also I have some interesting tweaks you can use for the graphics if you're interested.
Also it turns out I can do BDN+XML. It's not the format I've already rendered, but it won't take much time to re-render them.
You_Too said:
They'd have to be SRT for us to be able to convert them to BDN+XML format, which the guy making the menu for the BD said he will need.
Okay, I can do SRT. For each foreign language, I have both "forced" and "full" variants. Forced is designed to work with the matching foreign dub (just crawl text and alien subs), and full is for the whole movie, to accompany the English audio. For English, I have standard and SDH. PM me with which versions you want and they're so small I can just e-mail them to you if you give me an address.
These are not the verbatim GOUT subs. Most of my changes involved making subs appear onscreen longer, but you may also see other tweaks and corrections here and there, particularly some formatting differences. Also, when I say they accompany the English audio, I mean the original surround mix, not the mono mix or later revisions.
Well I can package up my SUP files and send you a link, which you can opt to use or not. I may not have this ready for a few days, though.
There might be some utility that would upscale DVD subs to BD subs just by scaling the graphics, so you would not have to OCR and re-render. I've never seen anything like that before though. And you'd lose sharpness, etc. I think you have to use text files at some point in the process.
The PAL GOUT has subs in those languages, and they are available on the newsgroups. However they are in graphical format so you need to OCR them, and OCR is very hit-or-miss, requiring manual correction unless you want the occasionally incomprehensible subtitle. Also some of the GOUT subtitles are simply wrong.
I'm waiting for Service Pack 1 before I deploy it.
Hells yeah.
Hey DJ, if you're still interested I think we may still be able to do something. SUP files with PGS contents definitely work on Blu Ray because I've made test discs already. However, they might not work with all authoring software--that might be the problem. I'm just using the free stuff: tsmuxer and multiavchd, and I haven't done any menu interactions at all, but I can definitely say it works with Blu Ray, using the remote's "Subtitle" button to switch around.
I also have "regular" subs that are traditional mostly-below-the-frame Arial subs (non-English subs have to be like this). Also if you don't like the fonts/placement I've used, you can plug in different values and generate your own SUP files. The workflow is pretty simple, and I designed it to be a framework anyone can use. Basically you plug in an SRT file and out pops a nicely rendered 720p subtitle.
My project really has its own priorities and they might not mesh 100% with yours. I'm not terribly intersted in fidelity to existing home video subs for example, and I make changes whenever it met some other goal, some as having the text onscreen slightly longer, etc. Let me know if you're interested in any part of this, I'm flexible and would not be offended if you wanted my process but not my files, etc.
I still want those screencaps tho ;) But I'll wait.
Also, I've got workflow documents for how to make subs with new languages (e.g. Swedish), but I ain't doing them myself. Sorry I'm a bit burnt out after three films in five languages...
The format is PGS, and the file extension of the files I create is .SUP (very different from the DVD .SUP format though)
I am making 720p subs in five languages to accompany your project. Are you interested? ;)
Basically once I have some screenshots of your alien subs (once those are finalized), I'm releasing my project to the world. If you need them before my project is released, I can arrange that too.
EDIT: The languages are: English (regular & SDH), Spanish, French, German, and Brazilian Portuguese. And trust me, the screenshots are relevant, I'm doing something weird involving matching the English subs to the alien subs and it happens to look awesome IMO.
Bah, apparently marking it as forced does absolutely nothing--at least for DVD--you would still need to use some sort of menu logic to turn them on and off when you changed audio tracks.
MultiAVCHD looks promising for HD encoding, perhaps they work differently, although my hopes are low at this point.
I plan on demuxing the MKV and remuxing it onto a proper Blu Ray. As long as your streams are compatible with that (e.g. maintain 16:9 black bars, etc), I'd be happy. And that's probably a good yardstick for general compatibility too.
Regarding fan edits, I feel much the same way about Star Wars as I do about endangered animals (let's say a cute one like a Panda). Fan preservations, we can all probably agree, actually save the pandas. That's all good. I feel the same way about Lucas as I do about someone who not only plans to hunt down and kill every last panda, but to grind them up and turn them into hamburgers that don't even taste good, and sell them at a premium as "Panda Burgers". And you don't even want to know how he recycles them and sells them back to you again a little bit later (and tasting a little worse), but let's just say the plumbing in his restaurant's bathroom isn't exactly up-to-code.
...er, where was I...
Oh yeah, fan edits. Fan edits are like a guy who knows a lot about pandas, loves them, and has a ton of resources that could be put toward saving them. But instead he flies to China, takes a picture of a Panda about to get shot by Lucas, and puts a LOLCATS caption on it. The fact that I don't have to watch it is beside the point. There's just something disrespectful about it, like laughing at a funeral.
Maybe I'd feel better about fan edits once I don't actually think the films are in danger anymore. I certainly don't care one way or another about fan edits of other films, so that's probably true.
Ah, missed that. Nevermind.
Are you using these for anything other than color correction? I can think of a certain hangar shot based on a sub-SD source...
When I am putting a subtitle track into a DVD using muxman, I see the option to mark it "forced". What exactly tells the DVD player to display the forced subtitle? Does it just automatically happen when the language marker of the forced track matches the language marker of the current audio track, or does it have to be selected via some menu logic?
How do you mark a subtitle as forced for HD playback? I see no such option in tsmuxer. Does some other software do this? Free, preferably.
Harmy is rightfully wigged out over suggestions like mine. I shouldn't have suggested it and don't recommend it. Sometimes people spend decades in jail before they successfully prove they had no right to be arrested in the first place. Steer this discussion somewhere else.
Harmy said:
Yeah, I really don't like the idea of getting arrested, looking good or not...
We'll bake you a cake with a file in it. Okay, decent point.
I really like the idea of a massive coordinated showing of the Despecialized Editions in independent theatres, with voluntary donations going to support some cause nobody could possibly object to. Follow all the private showing rules: no concessions, etc.
Then, a week into it, switch from voluntary donations to a standard admission price, with 100% of it still going toward said charity, and start serving concessions. Whatever happens after that, from the best case to the worst case, we look good and Lucas looks like an ass.
EDIT: Convincing him is next to impossible, I agree. But public shaming is a powerful motivator, as is the fact that I suspect this could become hugely profitable for the independent theatres. And the large chain theatres may start asking where their audiences went, etc, etc...
Mike O said:
Most of all though, this can't just be about Blu-Ray, because as other formats come, we need to stress the need for a release of it in all future formats.
Actually, I disagree here. Once a (35mm, 24fps) movie has a good Blu-Ray release, it's effectively preserved for posterity. Sure there are plenty of screwups with DNR and cyan/teal and all that, but assuming a PROPER transfer were done... that's it. I'm happy. Forever.
And that's part of what needs to be straightened out too. Lucas has successfully painted Star Wars fans as impossible to please. We need to illustrate that it's actually just the opposite. There's a movie out there called "Ernest Scared Stupid". It probably has fans. But those fans don't plaster the Internet with rage because you can get that movie on Blu Ray, and it's the exact same movie they would have seen in the theatre. They are satisfied. Star Wars fans are no harder to please than any other group of fans. They are just more dissatisfied than any other group of fans because the expectations they have--those same really easy-to-meet expectations all fans of all movies have--have been frustrated for well over a decade now. Fans of Star Wars envy fans of Ernest Scared Stupid.
If something like that were done, you would have to simplify the message to the only thing everyone agrees on: just release the originals.
If you complicate the message with things like not liking prequels & changes, it becomes subjective and easily dismissed, and it doesn't even truthfully represent the views of all fans.
I would avoid like hell any even slight implication that he doesn't have the right to alter his films, because that's red meat for his counter-message. In fact, we should try to disarm him by explicitly stating that he does have this right and that we fully support it. It might complicate the message a bit, but it would be worth it to state it unambiguously.
EDIT: Argh, beat to the punch by... well, everyone.