CatBus

Versions 3.0 and 3.1 are frame-complete, so they can share audio tracks with 4K83.

Many of us don’t mind the existence of a Special Edition or of several increasingly Special Editions. What we take issue with is that the originals aren’t available in a quality comparable to what we once had access to by simply by going to the theater and watching them. VHS, Laserdisc, and Laserdisc-on-DVD never measured up to watching it in the theater, but we tolerated them because we mistakenly believed that these format-specific problems would go away once the films were made available on a future format that truly captured the theatrical experience.

But of course, a lot of us find that the Special Edition changes are also bad, both in concept and in execution.

For me, the Special Editions work best as a freak show. A cautionary tale. Something to remind yourself of exactly why you shouldn’t ever even start going down the revisionism road. So for me, if I had to only keep one Special Edition change per film, they would have to be the wrongest, most jarring changes:

Star Wars: Obi-Wan’s yell (04SE onward, two different versions). Oh my God. It doesn’t matter which revised version you go with, it’s all an equal trainwreck. Just keep the rest of the movie untouched, with one of those new yells jumping out at you at the half-hour mark, and you have yourself a real WTF moment in an otherwise classic film. How often do you get the chance to say, “Why is that drunk guy yelling in the parking lot, and why is it coming through my speakers?”. Sure, I could have chosen Greedo shooting and strangely missing Han’s wobbly head (97SE onward), but… I just can’t. Even to make the movie worse on purpose, I simply can’t make Greedo shoot at Han. That would step over a line I wouldn’t even cross in jest. That change isn’t just bad, it’s profane.

The Empire Strikes Back: This time, it’s Luke’s yell (97SE only, removed later). Not only is it incontrovertible proof that “all of the changes I made were how I originally wanted the movies to be” has always been a steaming crock of an excuse, it’s just so impressively badly done. Contrary to the entire premise of the scene. And it’s not even Luke’s voice, it’s the Emperor’s voice from the wrong film. A complete failure at both concept AND execution. It’s… perfect. It’s the New Coke of film, pulled back off the shelf after baffling customers for seven awkward years.

Return of the Jedi: Could we do another weird disembodied yell by some dude who’s not even in the movie? Please, could we? Not this time, although one exists in this movie too. Much as “No! Noooo!” (11SE onward) has all of the WTF of Obi-Wan’s yell, and all the “Wait, whose voice is that exactly?” of Luke’s yell, I’m afraid there are better candidates. Jedi’s Special Edition is what we call a target-rich environment, if what you’re looking for is dreck. You could choose Hayden’s ghost (04SE onward). I mean, who doesn’t like watching an epic film trilogy only to be introduced at the very end to an entirely new actor, performing the role of the ghost of that dude from Shattered Glass appearing alongside deceased major characters from the trilogy, as if he thought he could just blend in and nobody would notice that not only is he there, but that the actor who played that major character who died just one scene ago isn’t. This scene is basically a posthumous Gumpian photobomb. But no. I’m afraid the winning awful scene for this film is… Jedi Rocks (97SE onward)! That scene is just Kanye at the VMAs perfect. You think you’re just watching a movie, and then suddenly, wham, you’re needing therapy. They don’t make scenes more jarring than this one, and for good reason.

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Grogu13 said:

Which actors who played Imperial officers, other than Mark Jones, were ever on Dr. Who? I don’t believe Tom Mannion was. Michael Culver wasn’t. Was Leslie Schofield, Julian Glover, Pip Miller, Alan Flyng, or Michael Sheard on Dr. Who?

Leslie Schofield: The War Games and The Face of Evil
Julian Glover: City of Death
Michael Sheard: The Ark, The Mind of Evil, Pyramids of Mars, The Invisible Enemy, etc

Not sure about the rest, may just be failing Google-fu or uncredited appearances. Certainly it’s probably more fair to say that Imperial Officers were on Doctor Who a surprising amount of times, not that all of them were.

8K is great for stills. In fact, one of the main reasons for 8K displays is that panels are made for televisions, computers, and digital signage in more or less the same process. Computers and digital signage will clearly benefit from 8K, televisions are sort of along for the ride.

A long time ago, televisions were driving resolution, and the new (at the time) 1080p standard caused much nerd rage for effectively rolling back/stalling PC display resolutions for a decade (obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/732/). I’m glad we’re past those days. But for movies, at even large display sizes, the benefit of 8K is dubious. That said, 8KTVs often have a lot of the newest tech that makes them very nice displays regardless, so you’re not going to be disappointed.

jtulli said:

Im getting an 8k Tv tomorrow, so you recommend I just upscale it myself to 8k.

IMO it’s very unlikely that your TV’s automatic 8K upscaler will produce an image that’s noticeably worse than a manual upscale. I’d recommend just watching it in 4K, letting your set take care of it. Should something be off about the scaler, manually scaling it could be in your back pocket as a Plan B.

jtulli said:

Thats surprising I would assume a 70mm blow up would be much closer to the negatives in detail. Wouldn’t it technically still be best to scan at 6 or 8k because when viewing on an 8k tv you would see more of the natural grain rather then the 4k pixel structure. even though there may be little to no more perceptible detail.

“Closer” is a relative term. Optical duplication reduces fine detail and adds another layer of grain. The more times you do this, the worse it gets. 70mm gets very slightly less loss of fine detail, and the added 70mm grain is finer and less noticeable than the chunky grain of a 35mm print, and it’s usually duplicated from a source closer to the OCN – so yes, a 70mm print is a nice resource, when you’re stuck with prints.

But you’ve still got baseline quality issues to contend with. I say that a pristine high-quality negative could be worth scanning at up to 6K. But Star Wars negatives are not that (it’s possible that the negatives may not be worth scanning at >4K), and even a single pass through optical duplication puts a serious limit on quality.

For example, that six-way Han image up in my first post – that 4K83-based image (bottom center and bottom right) was taken from an extremely high-quality 35mm print source that is duplicated from the same high-level sources as a 70mm blow-up. It’s also using better 1980’s filmstock that adds a less obvious layer of grain to the duplicated image. As far as 35mm prints go, this thing is a unicorn. The best possible source – it’s a wonder that we have it, and I’m delighted with it.

But if you look closely, you’ll see two things about it – one, that in terms of fine image detail, the only image it’s clearly better than is the DVD downscale. The other is that it does resolve the grain better. But there are some caveats about that grain observation – that the grain on the UHD-sourced images is fake anyway, so it’s impossible to do an apples-to-apples comparison on grain alone, and that while it’s a common refrain among film enthusiasts that “the grain IS the image”, that statement is less true the more you move away from the negative. By the time you’re dealing with a projection print, most of the grain is simply grain that’s been added to the image, and was never on the negative to begin with – this type of grain doesn’t create the image, it erases it – the grain added via optical duplication is just an analog form of fake grain – it’s arbitrary destructive noise layered on top of the real image (the real image has its own grain). Honestly one last thing you should notice is the toll taken by degraining the UHD source. This process did clearly wipe away a ton of fine detail on the UHD, but not enough to be equivalent to what’s lost with optical duplication.

What the six-way Han image tells me is:

• DNR is terrible
• DVD is terrible
• A 1440p-ish scan of the print would capture all of the fine image detail on this best-possible 35mm print, aside from maybe the grain, and the extra resolution of the 4K scan definitely takes care of that

You’re not going to see the 4K pixel structure upscaled to 8K. Even on a screen large enough to see the 4K pixel structure, no display’s upscaling process uses pixel-doubling, so it wouldn’t be visible at 8K (and even if it did, you could just upscale it better yourself and then display it at native 8K). At greater than 4K, any grain detail you’re theoretically capturing is purely grain detail, without any associated fine image detail. Yes, technically you could scan a print with an electron micrograph and see the molecular structure of the film. You would get more detail – there’s always more to see at higher resolutions. But none of that detail comprises the image captured on the film. That, I’d say, for prints of these films, tops out somewhere in the neighborhood of 1440p. 4K already provides a generous buffer on top of that.

jtulli said:

What if we got our hands on a 70mm blow up wouldn’t that have preserved far more detail ? Thus warranting a 6.5k or 8k scan.

A 70mm blow up print does typically have slightly more detail than a 35mm print, even though they’re both based on a 35mm negative, due to the quirks of optical duplication. But it would still not have enough fine detail to justify anything above a 4K scan, because optical duplication, even for blow-ups, loses a shocking amount of fine detail with every step. The three Star Wars 70mm blow ups I’ve seen confirm this.

The root problem remains the same: a pristine, 35mm negative of modern high-quality filmstock could be worth a 6k scan, but we don’t have anything near that. We already have access to extremely high-quality prints, we already have access to 70mm blow-ups. They just aren’t worth it, because even the best prints aren’t anywhere near the quality of a negative. Re-scanning prints with a better scanner, or with a multi-pass HDR scan at 4K would yield far more usable results than a >4K scan.

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DVD-BOY said:

It’s only worth it if ‘we’ found the original camera negative. 4k is almost overkill for release prints.

What I think a lot of people miss is that prints and negatives are very, very different things. The nicest Star Wars prints in existence weren’t worth scanning at more than 4K the day they were struck. A modern, good-quality 35mm negative could theoretically be worth 6K, but with Star Wars we have neither modern, good-quality nor do we have the negative. We have prints, which are great and I’m thankful we do. But in the hierarchy of film restoration sources, prints are trash.

Perhaps a bit controversial, but we’re at the point of seriously diminishing returns already. Typical modern 35mm negatives are frequently thought to produce usable detail for up to 6K scans, but that’s not because they have 6K of fine detail – a la Nyquist, a 6K scan is needed to accurately capture about 3K of fine detail. So a 6K scan of a pristine, high-quality 35mm negative could produce something that’s visibly better than 1080p, but doesn’t quite push the limits of 4K. But the OT negatives are neither pristine nor particularly high quality – and most importantly, we don’t have access to any of them. Instead, what we have is projection prints, considerably worse quality than negatives, the best of which struggle to have 1080p of fine image detail, and in many ways fail to match a 720p downscale of a higher-quality source, in terms of fine image detail – the grain definitely does resolve better at 4K, but so much has been wiped away by optical duplication that you’re not getting any usable image detail along with it. So IMO 4K scans are more than adequate for what we currently have access to. An upscale from 4K to 8K wouldn’t have any less fine image detail than an 8K scan, of these sources. Should we stumble across actual well-preserved OCNs some day, I’d be happy to revisit this opinion.

Cuervo said:

Hi! I just learned about the OT project and this subtitle effort for it as well. I can’t believe the amount of work that has gone into all of this. I’ve only ever seen the special editions with the added special effects, scenes and additional changes. I would love to enjoy the original as released movies, but I do need the subtitles as I am hearing impaired. Can you please send me a link to them.

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JulioBro said:

CatBus said:

Each player can choose a different way to display subtitle options. If you watch your MKV using VLC, you will likely see the names, as you expect – so the MKV is likely fine. The problem is likely that the Blu-ray player doesn’t read enough information from the MKV to display anything but numbers to choose.

Blu-ray players generally have very basic MKV support. If you try burning a Blu-ray disc, it may do a better job identifying subtitle languages, if they are tagged with the right language codes. Or you could connect your computer to the TV and use VLC, if that works better.

True enough, I could choose the subtitles on my computer.

I used Burnova to produce the blu-ray files, but the subtitles weren’t added.
It doesn’t accept the sups either.

Any app that just converts with all?

tsmuxer and tsmuxergui should be able to create playable Blu-ray files from an MKV, and supports SUP files.

https://www.videohelp.com/software/tsMuxeR

I’d recommend the nightly builds over the latest release.

dogesatiric said:

I wasn’t asking for predictions from people here I was just curious if he himself ever talked about it lol

Keep in mind, the “over one year off” prediction I referenced was made by Harmy himself for one of his earlier releases 😉

To the degree that anyone other than Harmy can be trusted to speak on this matter…

Harmy’s definitely done preliminary work on 3.0 for the other two films. That’s not anything near equivalent to saying substantial work is completed on either of the other two, or that they’re on some sort of parallel track, or anything like that. Some of that work was done in 1080p, before he’d decided to switch to 4K for the 3.0 series, so some of that work would need to be redone, probably from scratch. IMO Jedi 3.0 was prioritized simply because it was already closest to the finish line – the cost/benefit ratio simply favored that one. I suspect the same logic will be used to determine the next candidate film*

Historically, Despecialized has been a “release when it’s done” project, not a “release early and often” project. Not that there isn’t a cottage industry around guessing release dates, and even Harmy joins in the guessing from time to time. But the guesses, broadly speaking, are almost always not only wrong, but so badly wrong as to be totally misleading, and considerably less helpful than simply admitting nobody knows. Like, predicted release dates being off by a year, or more. So veterans often hesitate to repeat their mistakes by guessing new release dates. Also, I think it’s widely understood that Harmy has a lot less free time than he once did, which necessarily drags out his timelines more than ever.

* My money’s on Empire, but re-read what I just wrote about predictions

dogesatiric said:

has there been any talk of a timetable for when ANH and ESB 3.0 are coming?

Talk, sure. Answers, not so much 😉

We have top men working on it. Top men.

JulioBro said:

Ummm…downloaded Hammy’s SW in MKV and plays perfectly; fantastic presentation through my blu-ray player!
I tried adding the subtitles with the MKV indications, but I must be doing something wrong.

I added the movie and the .sup files to MKVToolNix, started Multiplexing and finished.
Played the file, which plays fine, and the blu-ray player movie info shows there are subtitles to choose, but doesn’t choose them.

They appear in numbers…1, 2, 3, etc., instead of the names for each.

Any suggestions or where may ask for help with this?

Each player can choose a different way to display subtitle options. If you watch your MKV using VLC, you will likely see the names, as you expect – so the MKV is likely fine. The problem is likely that the Blu-ray player doesn’t read enough information from the MKV to display anything but numbers to choose.

Blu-ray players generally have very basic MKV support. If you try burning a Blu-ray disc, it may do a better job identifying subtitle languages, if they are tagged with the right language codes. Or you could connect your computer to the TV and use VLC, if that works better.

SRT format has no layout or orientation data in it, so vertical subtitles are possible, but would depend entirely on the playback software. I don’t know of any software that does this, and I don’t see any way that it would be able to distinguish between the subtitles for onscreen text and dialogue. i.e. even if the software could do this, all subtitles would be vertical, or none.

PGS subtitles are another matter entirely, and I looked into this many times over the years. Back when I started this project, using EasySUP, vertical text wasn’t possible with that software. Later, using Pango, vertical text either wasn’t possible, or wasn’t possible on Windows (I forget exactly what the limitation was). Now that I’m using HTML, vertical text is easily doable using CSS writing-mode: vertical-rl. I thought I was about to be able to do something cool.

But now that it was possible, another problem revealed itself. Unlike the pan-and-scan versions of Star Wars above, 2.39:1 presentations simply don’t have very much vertical space to work with, if you want your subtitles to be CIH-safe (i.e. to display only within the video frame). Sure, if you knew that you would be projecting it on a huge theater screen, you could reduce the font to a tiny size and make it fit – but for something that would be legible on a standard TV screen – no, you just couldn’t make it fit.

So, in a nutshell, yes, it’s possible, but no, I no longer have any plans to do it. You’d have to extend the subtitles into the black bars, which would get cut off on some projection systems, or shrink the text so small that it would only work on a huge projection screen. Since my PGS subtitles are designed for playback on an unknown variety of systems, I can’t risk changes that would break things for anyone. However, if you want to do this yourself, it’s technically possible, if you want to make your own PGS subtitles and don’t mind writing the code to make it happen.

Martinbrianpanglernyman said:

Mr. Belbucus…i have written you a private message

Belbucus hasn’t been active here in many, many years. If you have a question, it’s better to ask in the forum where someone is much more likely to see your message.

PM sent.

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captainplanet said:

I would love a link for the sup files. Thank you so much for your amazing work!

You’re welcome! PM sent.

michaelsft said:

CatBus said:
I use tsMuxerGUI to make the folder structure, and ImgBurn to make the ISO. Using that, I can get the video and one lossless 5.1 track at 43.4GB. Add three more 384K stereo/192K mono lossy tracks and you’re at 44.5GB. You can fit a few more 192K stereo/96K mono lossy tracks and subtitles after that and get in under the wire, just barely.

Thanks very much for your reply! I just tried your method with only 1 ac3 audio track (190mb) and I still get a BDMV folder at 44.54GB - I wonder if it’s because I’m on a mac?

Hard to say. There could be tsMuxerGUI version differences (I’m running a dev version because of some issues with the latest release), and I do want to specify that I create the ISO via ImgBurn instead of letting tsMuxerGUI do it. But regardless, it is a pretty tight fit.

michaelsft said:

CatBus said:

Verified, I burned this to a BD-50 and played it back in a hardware player. It’s glorious.

Also, burning discs beyond BD-50 capacity is probably asking for trouble. Stick to BD-50 and avoid worries.

Hi CatBus, quick question, how did you manage to burn this without re-encoding it? Did you just use small audio files and avoid the DTS tracks? 46.57GB is (as far as I can tell) the limit for burning an iso and I can get a bunch of files that under this limit but when I use tsmuxer or any other authoring software to create an iso it adds like 3GB extra onto the file size. What authoring software do you use?

I use tsMuxerGUI to make the folder structure, and ImgBurn to make the ISO. Using that, I can get the video and one lossless 5.1 track at 43.4GB. Add three more 384K stereo/192K mono lossy tracks and you’re at 44.5GB. You can fit a few more 192K stereo/96K mono lossy tracks and subtitles after that and get in under the wire, just barely.

One caveat is that I’ve been doing this a long time, so I pretty much never use the audio that comes with any preservation. I already have my own preferred audio tracks, and really just use the demuxed video from any new release with them. So if, for example, the lossless audio in the release is 24-bit or has an unusually large lossy core, you might have trouble fitting it – mine’s 16-bit DTS-MA with a 1536K (default) core. Similarly, my Dolby Digital files are 384K for English, and 192K for dubs (stereo; half of that for mono). If the audio tracks are maxing out bitrates, you may have trouble matching what I see.

Keep in mind I’m also experimenting with menus, and just forget that nonsense. With menus, you can’t even get a single lossless track in, even with very conservative authoring options. So if you want a disc with menus, you’re going to need to use the 1080p encode (should be OK), or re-encode the 2160p encode (may also be OK, but makes me sad), or go with probably a single lossy track (I couldn’t live with this).

IMO everything would be a lot easier all-around if the 2160p encode was something more like 35GB, but the goal of the release was to sacrifice as little quality as possible, while still allowing barebones BD compatibility. It does that.

alpuche70 said:

Can I get a link please?

I only have .srt subtitles but I want the .sup files or PGS

Thanks in advance!

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