CatBus

And here’s the “best news” I referred to earlier – we now have a complete set of Catalan dubs.

So what’s so special about this? Isn’t it just another dub? No, not in my opinion. Not at all.

I don’t often wax poetical about dubs – I’m a subtitle guy myself – but I’ve found they fall into certain categories, at least in terms of audio quality. There’s your high quality dubs from Laserdisc or DVD of the unaltered trilogy. German, French, Japanese, and so on. Great sound quality, no Special Edition nonsense, the way Star Wars dubs ought to be. But there are only a certain number of these, and the list never grows. Then there’s your variable-quality captures of TV dubs – at best, never nearly as good as your high quality dubs, and at worst, pretty bad. Then there’s your Despecialized dubs from DVD and Blu-ray, which can have good audio quality, but you get the Special Edition material, which puts them dead last in my estimation.

And then there’s the Catalan dubs. Star Wars and Empire are made-for-TV dubs, Jedi is a theatrical dub, but all three were TV broadcasts, and that’s how we have them. In terms of translation quality, I have no idea how they rate. But in terms of overall audio quality, these equal the Laserdisc tier in my opinion. Mono, but top-notch mono. And no, they don’t use the mono mix, they’re just a mono fold-down of stereo mixes.

They’re not perfect, of course. There is some tape damage at the beginning of the first reel of Jedi that I was sadly unable to correct. The lip sync comes and goes but is usually pretty solid. And there’s some crazy made-for-TV business – I don’t know all of the sound effects that Lucasfilm made for these films and rejected, or only included in certain releases, but I have the distinct impression that some sound effects were added by the dubbing studio or TV station. And they are occasionally quite weird. In Star Wars, in the shootout immediately following Obi-Wan’s death, there’s… I dunno… EXTRA laser blasts. But not really extra Star Wars laser blasts, extra laser blasts made by some guys whacking a metal cable to achieve something one cut above yelling “pew! pew!”. And in the mission briefing, there’s extra robot noises. Are they from the robot next to R2? Or from the projection screen? I have no idea. But whatever they are supposed to be, they are now preserved in very high quality, and these strange moments are the rare exceptions to an overall excellent presentation.

So, if you or someone you know speaks Catalan, this is great news, because Catalan just jumped the queue to become a top-tier language for the whole trilogy. If you’re curious about some of these unusual dubs we’ve been collecting, but are put off by that lo-fi VHS sound, this is the one you want to try. Either way, you can PM me for links to the dubs or download them from the usual places.

And to top it off, Laozi has offered to produce full Catalan subtitles, which will be included in the next version of Project Threepio. These subtitles are still a work in progress, as he’s taking extra time to ensure the best translation from the English.

I’m pretty sure it’s a denoising artifact – think about using temporal averaging as a noise reduction strategy, and how that can go wrong with a very noisy source (if you consider grain to be noise, which such systems do).

Oh, it’s fun for 10 minutes. At the three hour mark, madness sets in.

Now I’ve got Torgo’s theme stuck in my head. Thanks a lot 😕

emanswfan said:

I’ve been watching other new 4K HDR transfers of classic movies on Disney+ and almost all of them look infinitely better than the original trilogy. For a movie shot on film, it’s depressing how the 4K version of the original Santa Claus movie with Tim Allen has better use of HDR and left more grain in tact than these transfers of the original trilogy. A silly 90’s family comedy has a better transfer than these legendary movies??? What the heck?

Manos: Hands of Fate has a better transfer than Star Wars.

I think the overall problem is that if it’s a “classic” or “big seller” title, it gets extra attention. A new color grade a la The French Connection, re-inserting some deleted scenes like Cinema Paradiso, or moar Maclunkey like Star Wars. I suppose the logic is: why would anyone re-buy this title a fourth or fifth time if it wasn’t radically different from any version they’ve ever seen before? Which is just a corollary to: Why would anyone buy a movie they’d already seen?

But if you have a niche/meh catalog title, they just hand it off to the intern, who runs it through the scanner and puts the result on the disk. Thus, Shakes the Clown seems to get more respect than Amadeus, when in fact it’s the lack of respect that saved it.

Like Kevin Smith said: in Hollywood, you fail upward.

At some point it becomes a personal canon question. Some people like the mono mix, some people like multi-channel. All of the original mixes are authentic, so it just boils down to which one you like best, as it would be with video variants (70mm, alternate credits, cloudy composite, and so on), regardless of which ones may have technically made it to the theatre first.

I think I personally didn’t feel any disturbance in the Force until the 93 changes, but they were something I was grudgingly willing to endure at the time. The 97 changes were several bridges too far from the get-go and would never be acceptable, and the later versions were just continuations of the 97 freakshow. Now that we have so many great fan-created options, I wouldn’t settle for the 81, 85, or 93 revisions at all. My tolerance for fiddling has definitely decreased since finding this site.

PM sent.

PM sent.

PM sent.

PM sent.

You were lucky. We lived for three months in a brown paper bag in a septic tank. We used to have to get up at six o’clock in the morning, clean the bag, eat a crust of stale bread, go to work down mill for fourteen hours a day week in-week out. When we got home, our Dad would thrash us to sleep with his belt!

Ah, thanks. Yes, activity date indicates he’s safe and sound, if not actually posting anything. The print? I dunno, there were giant fires not too long ago causing a lot of losses. But I’m relieved to see he’s personally still kicking around. And if this project is still going on, even better.

Rodney-2187 said:

Star Wars will be around longer than any of us.

The quest for the best version of Star Wars will be too.

These new 4K UHD discs are just another rung on the endless ladder. Collect as much of that ladder as you can while you’re here.

For many here, the best official release of Star Wars has been gathering dust for about 25 years, and has yet to be surpassed, even by the new 4K discs. The 4K discs represent new raw material for fan preservations, nothing more. I don’t see any scenario under which I would actually watch them, although I may buy them as required by the rules of fan edit ownership, should a worthy fan edit arise.

Watch the phrasing please. I have some serious concerns about the lack of updates. We all wish Poita well.

While “Star Wars: The Maclunkey Edition” has some appeal, I’m considering dubbing this version “Star Wars: Ultimate Hunter Edition”

ray_afraid said:

Rodney-2187 said:

ray_afraid said:

Chewielewis said:

ANH caps are up. https://caps-a-holic.com/c_list.php?c=5424

This comparison just shows how good the new ANH transfer is.

It shows how much better this transfer is.
It’s still not as good as it should be.

“You can’t always get what you want
But if you try sometimes you just might find
You get what you need”

Good tune, man! But, this set isn’t at all what I need.

Better than an on-the-cheap color-mangled DVD master from the early 2000’s ain’t good enough for you?

There’s no pleasing some people.

Harmy said:

I finally had a chance to properly check the new transfers out and I’d say the worst issue is the heavy dvnr. I’m surprised no one is complaining about it.

Agreed, but I figured you’d fix that for us 😉

ATMachine said:

Genuine question: does the FOV of the shot indicate that Yavin IV would be visible from the Death Star? An observer watching from a third point in space (like the camera here) might be able to look on either side of the Yavin gas giant to see both objects, but they might not be able able to see each other nonetheless.

I asked myself the same question when I saw this, but after looking at it a couple times, I’m pretty sure both the Death Star and Yavin IV are positioned such that it’s still a problem. The rotation itself means the camera can’t be too distant (i.e. with a zoom), or the perspective wouldn’t change that much when the camera turned.

PM sent.

CHEWBAKAspelledwrong said:

Relative to the Blus, sure. But that’s not saying much.

I like my film to look like… film.

Agreed. These are without a doubt the best raw materials for a preservation we have, but IMO they’re not really watchable in their existing form. But that’s okay, we can fix that.

FWIW, Harmy’s already pretty adept at using fake grain – the existing DeEd’s use it to grain-match sources. That would definitely be a major component of anything using this new source.

And I think the new source is worth using. It doesn’t have to be a great or flawless release, it just needs to be a better source than the 2011 Blu’s, which IMO it is. Also disappointed by the grain, but this a solvable problem. And besides, Harmy demonstrated at one point that the grain on the 2011 releases was fake grain anyway – so we’ve already been soaking in it for a decade, this is not a new problem.

SilverWook said:

I’m amazed that Jabba doing a Pizza Hutt ad hasn’t happened yet.

Soon you will learn to appreciate my Ultimate Cheese Lover’s® Pizza.

The standard Star Wars fonts in the News Gothic/Trade Gothic/Franklin Gothic families are all very close, but come up short on the “G”. Univers as well. So I don’t know, but I can say for sure it’s condensed 😉

Excellent work, Dre. 4K83 badly needed this. Are you working on any other color correction projects now? If not, could I interest you in color correcting the UHD’s?

I think I’ve mentioned before, but as someone who saw it in 1980, it was confusing/unexpected. Clearly Star Wars also dropped you into the middle of the action, but the crawl provided backstory to ease the transition – you knew who the good guys and bad guys were, why they were being chased, and so on. And the beginning of Empire largely followed the same formula. But this was different – the episode number ADDED to the things you didn’t know as the story unfolded. Now you know you’ve missed three of the preceding episodes.

In the end, kids made it work. Clearly a lot of action happened between Star Wars and Empire – Luke becomes a commander, there’s some sort of adventure on Ord Mantell, the Empire regroups, and so on. So retroactively, it became obvious that the three missing episodes were meant to cover all the action between Star Wars, which was obviously Episode I, and Empire, which was Episode V. We didn’t really expect the missing episodes to be filled in by Lucasfilm, so we just made up “Episode III: Rendezvous at Ord Mantell” and stuff like that. We figured the next movie would be called “Episode IX: Revenge of the Jedi” or something and the episode gaps would be designed for us to play around with in our own imaginations.

Which was actually a very cool and weirdly postmodern idea for a bunch of seven year olds to grapple with!

And then a year later, Star Wars got retrofitted with Episode IV, although many of us never learned about that until it came out on home video even later. But by then, our canon was already set: Star Wars would be Episode I forever, and then there was a bunch of “action figures in the backyard” adventures, and then came Episode V. By the time an official Episode IV rolled out, we didn’t need it – we already had our own by then.

And I’m glad they never filled in those missing episodes (kindof like I’m glad they never made any sequels to The Matrix), because there’s no way they could have measured up to what a crew of seven-year-olds came up with. Partially due to the fact that the head kept popping off my Luke action figure, so every episode involved a tragic beheading.