Guspaz

ScruffyNerfHerder said:

Hey Harmy, 

    It sounds as if most Blu-ray authoring programs have a limit of eight audio tracks. I don't know if anyone has suggested this, but if you can't put every language on one disc, why not make a couple of customized, regional versions like Hollywood does? 

    You could create, say a "North American Edition" with:

1. 5.1   DTS-HD-MA   [English]        (1977 70mm six track mix)
2. 2.0   DTS-HD-MA   [English]        (1977 35mm stereo mix)
3. 1.0   DTS-HD-MA   [English]        (1977 35mm mono mix)
4. 2.0 Dolby Digital [English]        (1985 Laserdisc mix)
5. 2.0 Dolby Digital [English]        (1993 Laserdisc mix)
6. 1.0 Dolby Digital [Spanish]        (1980 Latino dub)
7. 2.0 Dolby Digital [French]         (1977 dub)
8. 2.0 Dolby Digital [English]        (2004 DVD Audio Commentary)

   

    And a "European Edition" with:

1. 2.0 Dolby Digital [German]         (1978 dub reconstruction)
2. 2.0 Dolby Digital [French]         (1977 dub)
3. 2.0 Dolby Digital [Spanish]        (1977 Castilian dub)
4. 1.0 Dolby Digital [Portuguese]     (1980s Brazilian dub)
5. 2.0 Dolby Digital [Italian]        (1977 dub) 
6. 2.0 Dolby Digital [Polish]         (1995 Voiceover)
7. 2.0 Dolby Digital [Czech]          (1992 dub)
8. 2.0 Dolby Digital [Hungarian]      (1984 dub)

   

    Or something like that. A third version could have Japanese and the commentary tracks, etc. You could still include all the subtitle tracks on every version.  

    Releasing the Blu-ray this way would also make the file sizes smaller, as people won't have to download languages they don't speak. 

    I know this suggestion isn't exactly elegant, but I do hope it's helpful. =) As always, keep up the great work! 

I was going to point out that the flaw in your plan was that the second largest French-speaking city in the world is about a 40 minute drive from the state of New York, but then I noticed the fine print for audio track 7 said "French" :P

Quebecer here, you never see it referred to as anything except "La guerre des étoiles". It's definitely not just for the 70mm or 1977 release, its the normal name of the whole franchise. But then you will see "Star Trek"...

1985 here, and I grew up wearing out a copy of Star Wars that my father taped off TV before I was born. He died when I was very young, so all the tapes of science fiction movies that he had recorded off TV were one of the most concrete things I had to remember him by when I was growing up. Unfortunately when it came time to buy a copy for myself, the special edition was all that was available, but it wasn't what I had grown up with. I can't help but think of my dad whenever I watch one of Harmy's versions, even though I was young enough not to really remember him.

I don't want to sound all depressed or anything, my mom remarried just after I left elementary school, if memory serves, and my stepdad took me to see all the special editions on the big screen when they came out in theaters again. Changes or no, seeing it on the big screen for the first time was really something.

The local megaplex actually does this regularly now, basically showing blurays of older films on their megaplex screens, and I got to see a lot of movies on the big screen for the first time because of this. It's a fantastic program. One per month (voted by customers) called "Most Wanted Mondays" followed by an annual film festival called "The Great Digital Film Fest". I saw Jurassic Park on the big screen for the first time just last year :) still going to see it in IMAX later this week though. 

Am I the only one around here who enjoys having both the theatrical release and the special edition releases to watch? My problem with the special editions was not the changes that were made, but that the theatrical versions were not given equal effort for release on new mediums (DVD, BluRay).

I grew up watching a 1980s copy of the film recorded off TV shortly before I was born, and enjoy both versions. 

In fact, I feel that there would be little opposition to the special edition if they had been accompanied by restored transfers of the theatrical versions each time they were released. As in, the bluray would have been accompanied (not necessarily in the same package, but available for sale) by a bluray GOUT.

When I remuxed 2.1 into MKV, I put the SUP files in there too. They play fine in MPC-HC both playing the AVCHD disc and the MKV file. They do take a while to kick in after seeking, but once they do, they work fine. 

Out of curiosity, what was the reasoning behind DeEd being 720p instead of 1080p? My best guess is that it was a compromise between the FHD source material and the SD source material in order to not make the difference between the two as visually jarring.

Sure, I mean, I already have the a copy of the thing, I just thought it would be fitting seeing as how many commercial movie releases have behind-the-scenes documentaries, and including a fan-documentary with a fan-edit as a bonus feature would be neat.

Here's an idea, as a special feature on the bluray, why not include a fan-made documentary about the film? Jamie Benning's "Star Wars Begins" filmumentary would be a perfect fit, I think:

http://vimeo.com/32442801

It's feature-length, and the flow follows the movie itself, but putting in behind the scenes footage, on-set audio, behind-the-scenes shots, pre-effects shots, commentary from cast/crew, deleted scenes (like Biggs' original scenes), captions discussing behind-the-scenes facts, all sorts of good stuff. It's fantastic.

It's 1.4GB for the version that's on Vimeo (you can download the original 720x576 m4v from there). Could Jamie Benning be contacted to get permission to include his documentary on the bluray? It's one of the best documentaries on Star Wars I've ever seen, second only perhaps to Empire of Dreams.

Hmm, I don't think it's so cut and dry. In comparison.mp3, some scenes are better in the first version, some scenes are better in the second version... All of the second versions of the scenes have a TON of clipping, much more than the first versions, but that could just be an artifact of the conversion from AC3 to MP3. The "I find your lack of faith disturbing" scene stands out as being enormously better in the first version to the point where the second version is so muffled and lacking in treble that it sounds broken...

Assuming that the terrible clipping isn't inherent to the soundtrack itself, I think the second version is better in the larger number of cases, except for that one scene I mentioned.

Thanks for the explanations. Where does the 5.1 1977 mix come from? It sounds like you're saying the original three were the stereo, the mono, and the 70mm, with the 70mm not being one of the three 1977 mixes included in the MKV?

I find all the different audio tracks a bit confusing, to be honest. Not complaining about having them, just want to know what the differences are so that I can figure out which to use. Using the v2.0 MKV as a reference here:

There is three 1977 tracks, the difference seems to be the number of channels. Is there a difference between these three? I could understand why there could be a 5.1 and 2.0, but what is the mono track for? Is it different somehow?

What is the difference between the 1977 and 1993 tracks?

Why is does one of the "isolated score" tracks have a bunch of the sound effects and dialog, but only some of it, and the other doesn't?

I guess ultimately it boils down to, should I be listening to the 1977 or 1993 tracks?

yoda-sama said:

The right speed color wheel can do a lot to get rid of the rainbow effect, and admittedly my W1070 is 2000 lumen, but it is as bright of a home projector as I've seen, it can be seen pretty well in a lit room, and I'm throwing around 140" - 150", and could easily see this going beyond 180" without looking shabby...

BTW, which anime convention are you referring to?

Otakuthon. Our experience with 2300-2700 lumen single-chip DLP projectors on 180" screens was... suboptimal.  They were 4:3 projectors and screens, though. The limitations of what we've got have stopped us from trying anything larger with our 4300 lumen projectors. Our new Epsons might be able to push it a bit bigger, though... If memory serves, we are looking at getting some 16:9 screens in the 200-220ish range this year, we'll see.

I've got 290" screens in my main events room, but we don't buy the projectors for those, we rent big 14,000 lumen units that take two people to move :P

There's this wall of price, for projector brightness. Once you hit around the 4000-5000 lumen range, the price stops increasing linearly and jumps up. For example, I can do 4200 lumen for under a thousand bucks, but to double that brightness it might cost me ten times more.

I suppose with the right colour-wheel, single-chip DLP can be OK. You'd still have the rainbow effect... The problem is most single-chip DLPs are designed for office use, so they boost white brightness at the expense of everything else by putting a clear segment in the colour wheel. It's great for powerpoint, terrible for everything else. And by necessity you're losing brightness because the projection system works by using colour filters to block out light; in the simple case of an RGB colour wheel, you're blocking out two thirds of the light at any given point in time. Three-chip DLP splits the light rather than filtering it, so it maintains brightness. That said, my frustration in that regard comes from me trying to light 180" and larger screens, not home theatre screens.

We've got a bunch of single-chip DLP projectors for our convention. Some Viewsonics, some Optomas, some Dells, some Acers, some BenQs, some Vivitek, and I might be forgetting some. They all uniformly have terribly colour, no matter what buzzwords they put or how well they claim to do. We put 'em up against one of our newer Epson 1940W, and the Epson just kicks their ass even when the Epson has a lower brightness rating.

That said, there is one disadvantage to 3LCD; it's not an LCD panel with RGB strips, so 3LCD tend to have a convergence issue; the red/green/blue subpixels don't line up perfectly well. You never notice this for film, but it makes them less than ideally suited for powerpoint.

I must admit, though, that I've never looked at a specifically home-theatre intended single-chip DLP projector, so my views may be skewed. It may certainly be true that they can have great colour when designed specifically for that task. The problem is that most of the projectors we're buying these days are over 4000 lumens. There are no home theatre projectors of any kind in that brightness range, only office projectors and in that range 3LCD beats the heck out of DLP office projectors.

Oho? Pictures of Harmy's work up on our projection screens? Can do :)

I burned the AVCHD to a DVD, popped it into my PS3, and paused on this scene:

For the "lights off" shot, I set my camera white point to 7500K to match my projector's white point setting of 7500K. Not sure if that's right, but the picture looks right to me.

I don't think my screen is as big as lpd's :P This is an 80-inch Da-Lite TheaterLite display, with the WidePower surface (2.2 gain, 45 degree viewing angle, so maybe I should have taken the shot closer to center). The projector is an Epson PowerLite 8345, which is a 1080p 3LCD projector. 3LCD is the way to go for HD projection at a reasonable cost, single-chip DLP is cheaper but totally unsuitable for any home theatre use. Single-chip DLP are great for powerpoint in offices, but terrible colour and they lose a lot of brightness due to using colour filters (3LCD uses prisms to split light into the colours and runs it through three monochrome LCD chips). I speak from experience, I manage something like 30 projectors for an anime convention, most are single-chip DLP (the costs-more-than-a-car ones are 3-chip DLP, and for our smaller ones I'm starting to migrate to 3LCD) It was a budget setup; the screen was something like $240, the projector about a thousand bucks if memory serves.

Thank goodness this projector has such a short throw distance. I have a tiny apartment that is less than 11 feet wide, and the projector (which isless than 9 feet from the screen) could easily handle a 100 inch image at that distance, if they had made this screen in that size :P Yes, it's a bit silly having an 80" screen in an apartment this small, but I don't care :P

A theatrical release of Phantom Menace seems like a waste of Harmy's considerable talents. Getting to see Jar Jar in all his theatrical glory is not something I particularly feel a need to do :P

Looking good on those last two! Poita has a good point on doing the colour first and worrying about masking the details later.

Usenet might be a nice bonus, but it's not very accessible because people have to pay for a subscription just to get it. So it gets posted there on top of somewhere people can get without buying a subscription, great, but it shouldn't be the only place.

A torrent that you keep seeded works, since trackerless torrents work well these days. A lot of the free sites have limits of some kind (50GB storage is typical). For paid solutions you could use dropbox (which lets you give public URLs for files). That's a buck a gig a year, with no limit on bandwidth but they'll temporarily limit access if you transfer too much via a public link. There are sites like MEGA (500GB storage with 1TB transfer for 10 euro per month), you could look into those. There are VPS servers with lots of bandwidth that you could look at, but they're more expensive since you're renting a VPS rather than just file hosting.

Maybe somebody knows a decent free solution that can handle 150+ GB of data and lots of transfer? All I can think of for free is BitTorrent.

Out of curiosity, does v2.1 correct the jittery shimmering of the removed cellblock extension just after an hour and ten minutes in? Like in the special edition they extended it digitally, so Harmy replaced the original set extension, but it shakes a round a bit independently of the rest of the image in v2.0.

I'm not so sure about the colour correction in the speederbike shot. Overall, I like the change in colour in the shot, but there are a bunch of details that are changed/removed:

- The buildings (the triangular ones on either side of the frame) are badly rusting in the original, but the rust is turned into slight dirt smudges in the colour-corrected version

- All the red aircraft warning lights have been entirely removed

- The flames on the left-hand part of the frame appear unnaturally blue in the colour-corrected version

So, the problem with the shot is that the general change in colour cast is nice, but it damaged/removed a bunch of the detailed stuff that shouldn't have been colour corrected (or at least not as much). When you take all this as a whole, these sorts of changes can change the audience's impression when viewing the scene. Different implications about the context and state of the city.