Helvetica is the closest match I can find, maybe Neue Helvetica. The lowercase “f” looks more like Akzidenz-Grotesk, but then the uppercase “R” is very wrong in that font.
Is this site being kept current with what you’ve found, or is there a better/browsable version we can see?
https://starwarsviscomp.wordpress.com/19se/
It’s a pretty small list of changes, which has me suspicious. For example, this strikes me as a recomp, but it’s not listed:
IMO it will take several months to have confidence we’ve identified all changes unique to the 19SE and come up with LUTs for a theatrical regrade. The UHD’s will be released at just around the time we’d be in any position to do anything useful with the 19SE, even if we work our asses off from now until then.
And this is all assuming the UHD’s do not contain even more changes. But since at this point Disney’s in charge of the content (and the timeline would be pretty much impossible anyway), I think the crazy revision train has finally stopped. The Maclunkey cuts are the final destination. Welcome to Travesty: Population 3.
Maclunky 😕
Hey there, everyone, I don’t believe this has been discussed, I see Harmy only quoted it. If it has, just ignore me.
Apparently in the Disney+ release of Star Wars, which I hear looks excellent because of a new 4K scan or something, they once again altered the scene with Han and Greedo. Greedo still shoots first but now they added the line “Maclunky” that Greedo shouts right before he dies.
This is the discussion thread for that:
Why, in the name of the force, would they do that? Unbelievable.
Apparently it’s supposedly for greater tie-in with the prequels. Supposedly some prequel character says “Maclunkey” and if you’re cool and in the know about crappy prequels you too can know the meaning of Greedo’s dying words. Or like everyone else you can just pretend it never happened.
All of these changes are from the Reliance 4K project, which was done under Lucasfilm/Lucas for a 3D release that never materialized, so that sort of thing mattered to them. Disney just used the films they bought.
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As of this week, I finally have a proper Star Wars-worthy surround system, so obviously I’m going to take advantage of this development soon.
I have some questions for people more familiar with surround setups:
I calibrated the new speakers using MCACC Pro, which seems fine for the speakers, but seems to have effed up the sub levels. I’m assuming that if I use an SPL meter, I can produce a 60Hz test tone from my fronts, mark down that level, and then produce a 60Hz test tone from my sub and adjust the sub’s volume knob until it matches the same level as the fronts. I’d also try to zero out any receiver-driven adjustments before doing this. Seems sensible, but is it correct?
Eventually I may determine that I want to boost the center channel in an attempt to further improve dialog clarity. Obviously this is a blunt tool for a subtle problem, so what’s the safe range for adjustments?
Should I admit to hairy_hen that I’ve been enjoying his mixes downmixed to stereo until now?
Do you have favorite bits of the trilogy as far as the surround presentation is concerned?
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Hard to say–while the new official 4K sources seem very good, they still ultimately need to blend with the 4K77/80/83 sources used for despecialization as well. Since IMO the 4Kxx releases still only resolve less than 720p of image detail, it would be hard to blend with the new 4K sources at greater than 1080p resolution without making the seams show between the two sources. Not that it’s not worth trying – there’s lots of tricks you can do with sharpening and fake grain that may help it blend.
As for the “edge over 4Kxx”, have you compared ROTJ:DE at 720p to 4K83 at 4K? While 4K83 is certainly amazing and looks great, ROTJ:DE already has the clear advantage in fine image detail (and IMO also in color, at least until DrDre is done with his 4K83 regrade). The advantage of negative/IP scans over projection print scans is already apparent right now at a lowly 720p, but could become moreso using the new 4KSE release – and that advantage could present a problem to despecialization efforts.
As for the Atmos track, the original films only ever had six audio channels at the most, and IMO preservations will only have six channels at the most too. Otherwise you’re just adding SE audio elements back in.
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Nothing fancy for me – I think DVD quality still gives this material plenty of headroom. I’d like to see the optional MST3K crawl handled as a menu-navigable chapter stop. Watching just the Holiday Special by jumping to a chapter in the stream, or watching with the MST3K commentary by playing the stream from the beginning. I suppose if you went with HD this could be seamless branching, but a chapter stop would work there too, at least in disc form.
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Just realized during his recent video that if Harmy had a large, curled mustache, he’d look exactly like one of the two barbers I work with.
It’s uncanny.
Harmy, ixnay on the urveillancesay! E’shay ontoay ouyay!
Not exactly. The letters of the matching subtitles fonts are designed to very closely match the 35mm theatrical appearance of every letter as it appeared in the trilogy. For example, the letter “z” doesn’t show up in any of the English subtitles, but the German prints used the same font and I grabbed a “z” from there, and that’s how I have a mostly complete lowercase Latin alphabet, some uppercase, punctuation and even some diacritics.
The font I based this on is Franklin Gothic, which has even more characters than those that appear in the Greedo/Jabba text in any language. I used those characters to fudge any missing Latin characters and punctuation, using the appearance of the others for a best guess, and now I have a complete usable Latin alphabet, some diacritics, and a decent amount of punctuation.
That font also had Greek and Cyrillic characters, so technically, yes, you could use it to create Greek text. But – and this is important – that text will not match whatever font was used on Greek theatrical prints (because I don’t know which font was used, if any – the French and Italian prints for Star Wars used entirely different fonts, only Jedi used the same font we see on English prints) AND even if the Greek letters are kinda-sorta in the same style of the English matching fonts, they don’t have most of the customizations I did, because I only did that to the Latin characters.
So if you use the matching font, the Greek letters will look like a semi-bold Franklin Gothic Demi Condensed font, which is honestly probably pretty close to what you want. But the Greek letters won’t have the custom inter-letter spacing or rounded corners which really give that theatrical feel. But the punctuation will, and so will Greek letters that the font just references from the Latin characters, like “E”, “í” and “o”, which might make it look a little sloppy and haphazard when the two styles are all mixed together, even though they’re close.
You’d probably have a more consistent appearance by just using an unmodified Franklin Gothic font.
http://fontsgeek.com/fonts/Franklin-Gothic-Demi-Cond-Regular. It’s almost as good and certain to be more consistent.
Honestly your best non-technical route is to just change your playback software to use this font for subtitles. Size, position, and drop-shadow may not be right – but trying to render Greek subs in this new font and get the size, position, and drop-shadow just right is going to involve not only running all that custom code, but diving into the Python code and modifying some of the variables too. It’s not for the faint of heart.
But your question isn’t too far out there. We just had a situation where someone needed to render Greedo’s subtitles using the matching fonts in Navajo, and that was all custom work. But it was from an easier starting point, since Navajo uses Latin characters and just had a few diacritics that needed to be Photoshopped to match.
Now, if you have any idea what the Greedo and Jabba subs looked like in theatrical prints shown in Greece during their initial theatrical runs, then you might be able to help me (if you have photos/scans/bootlegs).
Seems like a fine place to post this. Harmy doesn’t post here too frequently these days, but if a bunch of people chime in with their own thank-yous, it’ll be a nice thread for him to return to. And frankly he could use a little more thanks and a little less “Could you adjust Han’s skin tone in this one scene?” if we’re going to convince him to keep doing more of this work 😉
Now on to important questions. Is Dr. Vader a medical doctor, or does he have a doctorate degree? Or is it more of an honorary title like with Dr. J? Or is it more like Dr. Pepper?
Please refrain from beating up the newbie. He’s been quite chastened enough.
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