CatBus

It’s been a while since I’ve posted one of my technical progress reports, so here goes.

This project has been through a few text renderers in its day. First, we had an entirely manual Windows-only renderer (easySUP), then a scriptable and mostly-but-not-quite cross-platform one (Pango). Currently, the project is using Chrome – or to be more accurate, Chromium, the open-source project behind Chrome and other Chrome-like web browsers. This has solved a lot of problems. It’s scriptable, it’s truly cross-platform, and it easily deals with the complicated technical requirements behind rendering some of our non-Latin scripts.

But there’s always something, and I’ll just come out and say it. I hate the way Chrome renders text on Windows. Firefox does way better at this. I hated Chrome’s text rendering even as I moved the project to Chrome, hoping it would someday get better. There are lots of bugs filed on this, all lumped under a single uber-bug here. The gist is this: Chrome’s text is too light, too thin, too spindly. Bold text looks more like semibold, semibold looks more like medium, medium looks more like regular, and so on. That doesn’t mean that text is bad or unreadable or even unpleasant (some people prefer it this way, and that’s okay), but it does mean that the appearance of the text differs from the intent of the person who chose that font and weight. And for subtitles, that’s important.

With subtitles, you want your text a little on the thick side, so they don’t get lost against a busy, moving background. Some people use bold subtitles, but that’s a little hardcore for my tastes – I prefer to ease it back one step. In my opinion, semibold is the ideal font weight for subtitles. Thick enough to really stand out, but not so thick it draws too much attention to itself. But, for the past few releases, Project Threepio’s subtitles have been a touch lighter than that, and I just tolerated it because Chrome solved so many other problems for me. And the difference is honestly subtle – most people couldn’t distinguish Medium from SemiBold, and I knew this was the sort of thing that was likely bothering only me. I could have switched everything to Bold, but the result was still slightly thicker than SemiBold on Windows, and it’d screw up non-Windows platforms, where Bold is Bold and SemiBold is SemiBold.

But if you follow that link to the Chromium bug report, you’ll see that progress has been glacial. This does not seem to be a Chromium project priority. Edge implemented a fix called enhanced-text-contrast and it works as advertised. But not only is that fix unavailable on other Chromium-based browsers, it’s still experimental on Edge and turned off by default. The default state is very important to me, because when running in headless scripted mode, you can’t always configure esoteric options – you mostly just run with the defaults.

So, while researching my options, I stumbled across an old fork of Chromium, called GDIChromium. The reasons for creating this fork were somewhat different than what I was looking for, but the resulting text is definitely what I wanted. The fork is old and doesn’t look maintained, so I would definitely not recommend it for day-to-day browsing, but it’s new enough that the headless scripting works. I’ve tried it out, and things look very good. Ideally Chromium will get around to fixing its text rendering on Windows, but until then, I think I’ve found a fine stopgap solution.

So, to make a long story short, I’m re-working the subtitle rendering script yet again, and the next release will likely have very slightly, perhaps imperceptibly to most, thicker subtitles.

pittdawg70 said:

I’m curious, have you started work on the Wookiee subtitles yet?

I was just curious which direction it’d go: whether they’d subtitle what the Wookiees were supposedly saying, or whether they’d subtitle everyone else into Wookiee howls. I wouldn’t have been disappointed by either.

Fneufneu: PM sent.

lorddoofenshmertz: Check your Private Messaginator!

PM sent.

PM’s sent. Yes, absolutely, Project Threepio contains Spanish subtitles.

Williarob said:

In New Zealand, it’s 50 years. Here in the US I think it’s 75. So in New Zealand, American Graffiti should become public domain this year, and Star Wars in 2027.

And here I thought people were moving to New Zealand for the scenery. They’re just reserving a spot in line.

fmalover said:

As I’ve learned more about the photochemical process and having seen a few 35mm film print scans, I must admit that I am very skeptical of official home video releases these days, as they very often have drastically different colour gradings, lowered contrast, excessive DNR, etc.

For what it’s worth, the contrast and the color gradings are both part and parcel with going back to the negatives. Every stage in the optical duplication process boosts contrast, so by the time you get to a 35mm print, the contrast is much higher than the negative. Similarly, the color on the negative may have little relation to the color on the print.

So if you go back to the negative, you’re going to have to make some choices about contrast and colors. Most leave contrast more-or-less unchanged because the negatives still have a pleasant and natural contrast – albeit unlike a print (i.e. it’s not a choice to reduce contrast, so much as a choice not to boost it to match), but colors are where bad stuff happens. Even with the best of intentions, it’s HARD to reproduce digitally color timings that were initially achieved photochemically. And people are often not the best about checking references. But yeah, sometimes/often it’s way worse than that.

MonkeyLizard10 said:

One thing though is that plenty of home video releases are NOT the pinnacle of image quality.

Absolutely. And a corollary argument that could be made is, even IF you accepted that Lucasfilm could release the original trilogy, would you actually want them to? Because Lucasfilm has been fucking up the trilogy on home video since there was home video to fuck it up on. Don’t make me whip out the four-eyed stormtrooper again!

I am of the opinion that even if a miracle happened and they made their best effort for a modern home video release of the original trilogy, it would still only be good in terms of supplying better raw materials for fan preservations. But something you could just watch straight? Unlikely. It would have 93 audio, 81 crawl, heavy DNR, and some dreadful color correction, and that’s your best-case scenario.

Part of waiting for copyright expiration for an official release (other than I won’t be around to see it) is that some shoestring public domain operation like Laserlight could release it, and they can’t afford all the video processing required to mess it up.

Thanks for the context – that helps a lot.

I think the idea of fan restoration is still pretty edgy, and unheard of among “normal” people. When people finally hear about it, they might think it’s some garbage-quality project, or worse, that it’s a scam and people are passing off upscales and regrades as film scans. People can get really defensive when they’ve had an idea fixed in their head for 26 years and suddenly someone challenges it.

The best you can do is expose them to it and wait for it to sink in. You’ve done your bit. The rest is up to them.

But I agree that as far as officially-released versions, we’re waiting on copyright expiration – Lucasfilm/Disney have made their choice. The idea of unofficial releases just blindsides the sad Eeyore Star Wars fan, or the Lucasfilm party-line fan, or whatever these guys are trying to be.

I’ll be that guy. Because, in many ways, I AM that guy.

But first, I apologize if I took the thread the wrong way. I’m here to answer the question as presented. If this was just a matter of venting frustration, just skip my response, because it’s really not going to help.

“Disappointment” is defined by expectations. If you expect something and don’t get it, that’s a disappointment. Now a lot of people who love 4K77 want to re-live the original Star Wars experience, as it literally was when watching it in a real theater back in the day. That very specific expectation is met, in spades. Those who want that will not be disappointed.

But a funny thing happened between 1977 and 2018. People’s expectations changed. Classic films are regularly restored from negatives and other source materials that have far more fine image detail than a projection print, and by the time 4K77 was released, people had been enjoying films that way for over a decade. How many acclaimed high-def releases are based on projection prints? None. And there’s a reason for that. If someone scanned a projection print of My Fair Lady and released that on UHD, people would say “What is this crap? The old UHD is way better!” Especially if it was a 35mm reduction print. And you could say “But the projection print is how it looked in the theater!” until you’re blue in the face, and you would convince essentially nobody. Because the My Fair Lady UHD looks, in a word, loverly. And that really defines the significant split in expectations: some want movies to look like they did in the theater, and some want them to look not only better, but significantly better – at least in terms of fine image detail.

So, when your random person on the Internet hears that there is a 4K restoration of the original Star Wars, there may be an expectation that it has the fine image detail equivalent to 4K restorations of other classic films. And, let me be very very categorical on this point, 4K77 doesn’t have that. Now that’s a bit of an unfair expectation, because Star Wars was first of all not a large-format film like My Fair Lady, and 70’s filmstock kind of sucked, and it’s rife with optical composites, and so on. But even then, they may have that expectation, and it will not be met. A more realistic expectation, given all that background, would be for it to have the equivalent level of fine detail of a 1080p restoration or 2K upscale. But that expectation is also not met, because people forget exactly how much detail is lost simply in the optical duplication process that creates projection prints. In fine image detail equivalency terms, what you’re really talking about is less than 720p and more than 480p, most of the time.

Is 4K resolution wasted on a projection print? Not at all. Resolving grain well is important, and supersampling is actually an extremely important principle when trying to digitize things for posterity, which is exactly what 4K77 is doing.

But when you tell people that there’s a 4K restoration of the original Star Wars, that gives a certain impression to those who aren’t versed in all this technical background. Or to those so steeped in industry trends for the past few decades that they simply expect a certain minimum level of image quality at 4K. But with this expectation, 4K77 can’t help but disappoint. It’s unfair of them to say it’s no better than the GOUT, certainly. But let’s be clear – in terms of fine image detail, it IS a lot closer to the GOUT than to the My Fair Lady UHD.

Now, I can’t make people on the Internet less rude or anything, but you do have to take people’s perspectives into account. If this guy really does work in the industry, he is probably MORE likely to have these high expectations for fine image detail than your average person. He probably considers projection print restorations as the sort of thing done for “Manos: Hands of Fate” caliber films. He likely doesn’t care about the dedication or resourcefulness that 4K77 demonstrates, only the final product. He may truly want a 4K restoration of Star Wars, but simply not this one.

PM sent.

Forgot to include one bit of coping that I’d dreamed up, because it’s already been thoroughly dashed. I too was thinking about a Buffy revival, some sort of reboot or franchise-ification™ of the property. Not because I was excited about what they’d do with the Buffyverse (meh), but because it would improve the odds of a studio cash-in on the originals.

The thinking was Veronica Mars. That has got the be the g****mned easiest show on Earth for such a cash-in. It’s already available in HD, so just have an intern mock up some disc art, press some discs and bam. Minimal effort going in, and it’s like printing money at that point. And then something actually happened, they made the movie! That was the surest, easiest, product tie-in possible… except they didn’t. The movie came, the movie went, and you’re still stuck with DVDs for the series. And Buffy is a considerably harder property to do an HD remaster for than that.

Chances were already slim back when Joss was a golden boy. This is, sadly, “just” a TV series. For whatever reason, even under the best of circumstances, studios treat TV series as nostalgic time capsules for limited sets of fans, never like the “timeless classics for generations” treatment that full-length films get. And Buffy isn’t in the best of circumstances. Fox, and now Disney, was rarely one to give any TV series the full “Freaks and Geeks” treatment in the first place. They have a huge TV catalog, and the very limited amount of HD restorations prove the rule (X-Files, Simpsons, can you even name a third?). It was honestly never in the cards. Fox deciding to cheap out with a fully automated scan (the only way to explain their seemingly random cropping decisions IMO) is probably the MOST effort they were willing to put into it, not the least amount. Yes, I’m talking about the widely-panned and objectively crap HD remaster.

Because I’m such a fan, I can always talk myself into scenarios: So many talented people were involved in Buffy, they’re not all untouchable, right? And even then, they still release Roman Polanski films, right? And HD releases of TV series do seem to be entirely random, so Buffy could just luck out, right? Or Shout Factory or some third party could swoop in and save Buffy, right? With so many possibilities, it seems like it really could happen, right?

But… hold onto your DVDs. For the long haul.

azayrahmad said:

Hi Catbus, this looks like a wonderful project. Could I get the download link? I especially interested in both English and Indonesian subs.

I skimmed the thread and it looks like the subtitles are in SUP and SRT formats. Do you by any chance have the subs in a more VLC/SubtitleEdit friendly ASS/SSA format? And if not, have you considered working in it?

Thank you!

PM sent. As for formats, I try to keep content and formatting separate (like HTML and CSS). SRT is pretty much content-only, and formatting is applied programmatically to produce the formatted PGS/SUP files. This really helps when managing so many languages! So for that reason, a more advanced text format does not appeal to me – I would not use the advanced features anyway.

Keep in mind, I always recommend using PGS over SRT for playback, whenever possible, because of the formatting. PGS files are designed for disc, but they are definitely compatible with VLC. The only problem is that the media needs to be 16:9 (with black bars) for the subtitles to look correct. However, the newest version of Project Threepio contains utilities that allow you to modify the PGS files to work with cropped video.

AdmiralWasabi10191 said:

Would be a fine BD25, since BD50s are still too expensive. Not the DVD9 or AVCHD. Why would I want to DVD5? I’d rather use those for random bonus feature or older tech preservations.

FWIW, the AVCHD is sized to fit on a DVD9, but also burns to a BD25 or BD50, which could be necessary depending on how many additional audio tracks you include. It’s still an HD release. AVCHD is just a way to describe this funky method that some Blu-ray players have allowing for HD content on DVD media, which was a bigger deal when Blu-ray burners were rare, DVD burners were common, and people still wanted to burn HD media.

DVD5 was for those who didn’t even have a Blu-ray player – again, more of a relic of an earlier time when this was more common, but Blu-ray players are even today still not pervasive in all parts of the world. DVD5 was preferred to DVD9 for the SD downscale because you could avoid the layer change, which complicated the burning process and also sometimes made the playback experience worse (again, old tech).

Because Despecialized is older, it’s also a bit of a time capsule. Just ignore the older bits you’re not interested in. Personally, I always burn it to BD25.

AdmiralWasabi10191 said:

Kyp_Astaar said:

I can finally rewatch Star Wars without any embarassing CGI shenanigans, i could never thank each and everyone that took part in this project enough.

May the force be with you all.

4K77 is superior.

As with 4K83, there are disagreements. Neither really fits what I’m looking for, but the shortcomings of DeEd bother me less.

AdmiralWasabi10191 said:

Kyp_Astaar said:

I can finally rewatch Return of the Jedi without any embarassing CGI shenanigans (of which this particular movie is fuller than any other in the trilogy), i could never thank each and everyone that took part in this project enough.

May the force be with you all.

4K83 is superior. It’s a 35mm scan from film prints.

4K83 is impressive, but I personally prefer DeEd, YMMV. IMO the dividing line is between those who want a perfect recreation of the theatrical experience, versus those who are looking more for something like what a respectful Blu-ray restoration of the film to have been. Both are fine goals.

PM sent.

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