CatBus

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...

You could also slightly decrease the brightness of the initial stars (which would be a shame since they look hot).  Or, alternatively, you could have the brighter stars become progressively less bright as they go down--right now the transition is a very obvious horizontal line, maybe it'd be less of a problem if it was a less distinct boundary between the two brightness levels.

SilverWook said:

And the usual suspects show up to comment.

How many pseudonyms can Katie juggle?

OMEN!-_-! said:

I haven't seen all those sources so i can't make a judgement on that but even if the starfield was that bright and numerous, the fact remains that a continuety problem is created which is very noticable in the clip. If Harmy were to brighten the stars in the background when the Tantive IV passes to match the stars in the scroll background, there would be no problem whatsoever and everything would be seemless. As it is, the difference in star brightness between the two backgrounds is very noticable and IMHO very distracting.

I see what you're talking about but I'm not sure if it's within the realm of acceptable variation (judgement call), based on variation in the film source (fidelity), or just an oversight.  Certainly worth pointing out, it can't hurt.

It's certainly possible the stars become dimmer in the film as the bright planet comes into the frame.  If it happened in the theatre, I want it happening in the DE's too.  I also want unrealistic skin tones if they were unrealistic in the theatre too, so maybe it's just me ;)

EyeShotFirst said:

I just wonder what it will take to piss off the elite fans like the ones at TFN.

Just when is Lucas going to finally cross the line with them?

There is no line more egregious than the one crossed in 1997.  If you can handle those changes, you're quite likely good with Harrison Ford being digitally replaced by Howie Mandel, as long as it's still blessed as the Original Vision[TM].

From what I've seen of some 35mm film scans of ESB, the starfields in the film are both brighter and seem much more populated than what is apparent in the GOUT.  I imagine it's also the case with the other films.  Harmy often uses film scans and theatrical photos as references, which is why his versions often deviate from the GOUT.  Certainly there's also a lot of guesswork, but the goal is to re-create the theatrical version, not the GOUT.

Actually I don't know about the PAL GOUT.  It could be there and nobody's grabbed them.