Leonardo

Ask Stuart Ashen (@ashens), he might know.

The other night I had grave thoughts.

I wished I were dead.

Well, Stanley, I'm glad to announce I now have the soundtrack.

I'm a total newb to multichannel audio, but I went and did it anyway: I took the italian Gout soundtrack, which (if the software didn't lie to me) was Dolby Sorround encoded, and upmixed it to 5.1 using TFM Audio Tool. I then married the result to Hairy Hen's LFE channel from his 70 mm mix, and the result is a strange hybrid that I'm going to test drive tomorrow morning and drive the neighbours mad!
If anyone wants to hear a sample, just ask and I'll upload one.

ALLOL!!!!!

bow chicka chicka bow bowwww

Political correctness? Well, that escalated quickly.

Who's a cute little carburator? Yes! Yes you are! :)

AAAaaAAHHH!! Get the freak!

Yes! Left hands rise up!

Take what's rightfully leftfully yours.

FTFY.

_,,,^..^,,,_ said:

I'm not sure about that... the italian soundtrack is (should be) Dolby Surround encoded, thus have the left, right, central and surround channels encoded into a stereo track; decoding those channels, is it possible to take only the central one and including it in the corrispondig place of, e.g., the english AC3 5.1 soundtrack; the quality will not be the same, as the best Dolby Surround ProLogic decoder has around 40db of separation, but should be sufficient to result into a better surround italian soundtrack than the original; the same could be done for the other languages... mmmhhh, you inspired me a bit...

I don't know, man, if you take the center channel out of the english 5.1 you can still hear the voices in the remaining channels.

_,,,^..^,,,_ said:

If only someone could (and would) fix all those soundtracks... at the end, I could think to release an OUT 3.0! (^^,)

You can't fix that. You can't "un-mix" stuff from a soundtrack. Unfortunately all those tracks are stuck like that, I'm sad to say.

About the subtitles, maybe I did something wrong, but the only one that seemed to work was the second one, the dubbing transcript.

Don't know... I've just played the file with Media Player Classic, and all the four subtitles (english and italian, forced and full) work well, along with the two soundtracks... what software are you using to play the file?

Windows Media Player and VLC. On the former I can turn them on, but I can't select the track, and the first one doesn't work. On the latter I can see all the sub tracks, but as I said only the second one works.

Well, I've sampled though some scenes for now, and I have to say: "Impressive. Most impressive." I didn't know laserdisc could look this good!

A few things to note:

we discussed about the audio, sounds like a bad remix. This was the THX VHS, wasn't it? Apparently THX has become a synonym of poor standards. Sounds like they took a music and effects track and mixed it with the mono italian soundtrack. Badly, because the music and effects are almost never in sync with the rest.

As a matter of fact, I was listening with headphones to the briefing scene before the battle of Yavin, and I could hear the lower end of General Dodonna's english voice bleeding though! If you pay attention, you can hear Luke and Biggs too. I think the problem is easier to spot in this scene because there are no sound effects or music to drown out the voices. I have never heard anything quite like this.

Of course, this is not a jab at you, my dear Andrea, this is just what you had to work with.

About the subtitles, maybe I did something wrong, but the only one that seemed to work was the second one, the dubbing transcript.

From chimpan-A to chimpan-Z.

                                "You see what you did?" ;)

"You've finally made a monkey.."

*snicker* Poor Master Yoda *snicker*
Oh well, at least he's the highest scoring player at the bowling alley. 

High five, man! :D

The subtitles are done. Last thing left to do is the audio and a special credits roll in italian, before (or after, still not sure) Harmy's Despecialized credits.

While doing the subtitles in After Effects I noticed the timing was identical to the german subtitles, and then something clicked. I searched for a picture I remembered seeing in this forum, this thread to be precise:

http://originaltrilogy.com/forum/topic.cfm/Greedo-Jabba-subtitle-text-in-other-languages/topic/13707/

Laserschwert, I think you'll have to re-do your German version. It's the same font! The video you identified as a "tv version" was apparently taken from the original print, these are the theatrical subs!

I think we can say for sure now, the european subtitles were done by the same house and have the same typeface and timing.

I'll upload the clips as soon as I finish the subs, I'll put them all in a comparison video. I understand your concern, and I'll check again just to be on the safe side, but I trust my nose on this.

There's no other possible color here but white.

His passing is very sad indeed, a great loss for the world of cinema, but at least it will prompt me to finally see one of his movies. I'm aware of his work, but I've only seen clips until now.

Well, they have to be white, right? I mean, I saw that clip over and over again and the colors looked fine to me, Star Wars isn't faded. ESB was completely maroon, but Star Wars was pretty much intact. Tatooine looks like Tatooine, the sky was blue, the stormtroopers were white... The only difference with Harmy's restoration is that his despecialized simulates the use of a 70's projector bulb, that gives the picture a warm tint, which the Ravenna print didn't have (at least judging from that clip). The main clue is the color of Greedo's head.

Ah crud.
Well, he was 92 after all. 

Yeah, you're right. BTW I just saw your request on typophile. That "hrant" character was really helpful, wasn't he?

Laserschwert said:

Here's how it looks in AfterEffects (although when placed like in the snapshots, the text won't be centered):

Looking nice already, about the centering do you think the perspective/optical warping of the handheld camera can account for that?

Changed it back to Johnston and updated the file. I'm currently de-warping the video from the screening to get the correct perspective that will allow me a more precise placing of the subtitles.