Mavimao

The French language uses articles - definite and indefinite - all the time, unlike in English. Indeed, the singular, feminin article La is needed. 

Starfix is a magazine geared towards hardcore fans, and I think they chose an English title to make it sound cool. Afterall, can you think of one science fiction film from France since the days of Méliès?

Although, it should be said that the French are using La Guerre des Etoiles less and less and using the English Star Wars more and more. I could be wrong, but I think the French title is used to refer to the 77 film only. 

yoda-sama said:

So, knowing the French people were smart enough to figure it out, they didn't think twice about naming a magazine "Starfix", but someone thought a world wide box office smashing film titled "Star Wars" would be confusing?  Always weird how hit and miss translations are on these things.  Something very relevant, now that I think about it, is Eddie Izzard's standup bit about how it makes sense that the Keanu Reeves movie "Speed" would be translated to the French word for "Speed", but instead they inexplicably just left it as "Speed".

Oh, and I love (at least from this scan) how it seems Luke has a red saber and Vader has a blue one.

EDIT:  LOL, Google Translate won't translate "Star Wars" to "la guerre des étoiles" unless I specifically type "The Star Wars", otherwise it just spits out "Star Wars".

Even weirder is that sometimes they will take an American film and give it a new title...in English. 

Example: Silver Lining Playbook -> Happiness Therapy

The Hangover -> Very Bad Trip

Varsity Blues -> American Boys

No strings Attached -> Sex Friends

Having an English title gives it a certain cache, and I think it's catchy with the younger crowd who like mixing in English words with their speech more and more. 

As far as not translating certain words directly... I think there are certain words that can be translated but that there is always something subtle missing in the translation. For example Speed is monosyllabic, and we automatically think of fast. It's quick to say and it sounds cool. La vitesse is the translation in French, but it doesn't sound as cool. When French people hear it, they don't really think of Fast right away, they see is as a quantifier of movement. Is it slow is it fast? It's clinical sounding and not very marketable. 

It's like Jaws, which is translated in French as The Teeth of the Sea. They could have called it "Les Machoirs" (literally the jaws) but it sounds incredibly stupid. It takes its literal meaning and people might think it's a film about dentistry or something. 

Toutes mes félicitations! 

Teeceezy said:

Found that track on a.b.starwars. I heard somewhere (Save Star Wars?) that the PAL GOUT was struck from the NTSC master, but I am not entirely sure. If that is the case the audio will sync with the NTSC synced audio and I will know if there is a difference.

The NTSC masters  for A New Hope and Empire were converted to PAL. Jedi, however uses a different master for both regions.

I think Jedi is a native PAL master, but I could be wrong. In any case, the reason the PAL version is used in restorations is because of its higher quality. 

I believe he's talking about taking the PAL GOUT German audio tracks and putting them in sync with the NTSC GOUT video. ("BTW to have the German tracks be in sync with Harmy's video track...") He says that Empire and ROTJ are pretty easy to resync but that the German track for the original Star Wars is more difficult and that the dialogue isn't really in sync with the rest of the sound. 

This makes sense considering the sound was remixed for the Definitive/Faces collection and I guess that the sound mixer putting together the new mix for the German release didn't get the dialogue track quite in sync with the other Effects/Music tracks. 

In any case, I don't think he's talking about the English track at all, and thus it would be safe to take the PAL ROTJ English track, slow it down 25fps to 23.98 fps and use it as a reference for the editing of the digital track.

If we're talking about dubbed versions then that is a whole different story! When a film is being dubbed ALL of the foley has to be redone from scratch since they can't use the on location sound due to dialogue. 

There's different ADR in PAL regions? I find that hard to believe. 

Can someone just take the pal rotj sound, slow it down to 23.98 fps and use that as a reference?

Dvdmike: I apologize for using the word 'rant' and rest assured I wasn't criticizing you for your preference as to which version of Raiders you prefer. 

I should have worded myself better, but I was trying to explain that what is on the o-neg is not color corrected. A film will have its colors tweaked in post and those colors are represented on what is called an IP - which stands for intermediate print and is about a generation or two away from the o-neg. They make a negative from the IP and this is how release prints are made. 

Nowadays, bluray transfers are almost always going to the o-neg, but when they do this, they have to completely redo the timing on the film. Some posthouses might look at an IP or theatrical print to get an idea for how a film originally looked (like Harmy's despecialized), or then some might go completely crazy and try to make it look more modern. 

So I was criticizing the fact that you were comparing the timing of a film - in this case Raiders of the lost ark- to it's real life counterparts. Like the fact that you saw the real stained glass windows somewhere or that the nazi flags never had the same hue in real life as on the bluray. This is a flawed arguement because color timists - even in the days of antiquidated optical filters - have been tweaking the colors in order to compensate for subtle changes in lighting between shots or wishing to create a certain mood. 

I'm not here to argue that the bluray or any other transfer is more faithful to the original screening, because I honestly don't know. I just wanted to explain that you can't use a real life prop or location to determine the original colors of a film's theatrical release. 

yoda-sama said:

When I watched the SE of Empire theatrically in '97, the projectionist screwed up at the beginning playing it horribly squished (not sure how multiplex film projectors work, but it was like they didn't put an anamorphic lens on), well through the Star Destroyer flying by and shooting out probe droids.  They stopped it, said they'd fix it, which they did, but didn't start the film over, and then refocused it on the fly while we're trying to watch the movie *shakes fist*...  Anyway, talk about what seemed like one heck of a weird SE change at first, LOL.

So yeah, perhaps they could show it theatrically a little different than how I remember it from '97...

Oh, and why would you even want them to release it theatrically, they'd just show the crap version we're trying to undo on this site...  But in THREE DEEEEE *whooooooooooooaaaaaaa*

Hahaha! This brings back memories of my old projectionist days! Indeed, the projectionist forgot to put in the anamorphic lens. You don't HAVE to stop the film to change lenses, but it might take about 30 seconds to do in which time, the film becomes an unfocused, blurry squished mess. He did the right thing to stop the film. 

Also, the projector was probably a platter system, and I can tell you... It is impossible to rewind a film once it's started. Well, I take that back, it's possible but you would have been waiting 30-45 minutes for him/her to unthread the machine, rewind it all back by hand (you'd be amazed at how long a couple minutes of 35mm is!) and thread the machine again. 

To give you an idea of the complexity of these machines, here's a film that a good friend of mine shot in the projection booth where we worked. https://vimeo.com/63456596

Dvdmike, you keep ranting on the fact that the grading in the film does not look like their equivalents in real life. Filmmakers always tweak their colors to evoke a certain mood. Yes, even before the days of DI color grading, this was being done. Look at Michael manns manhunter or Cameron films. 

Perhaps Raiders is warmer and the foliage is brown and not green but that could have been a creative choice!

Yes the typo is ugly, but this is a restoration, and Harmy went through a lot of work to put back in a lot of the visual mistakes of the film (vader's missing saber effect for example) and I feel that correcting this mistake is a revision of the original French version that is no longer available to people interested. 

What's next? Replacing Han's 'Pauvre cave' with the SE's "ça m'étonne pas"? Well it wasn't there in 77 but the redub is more faithful to the original language. Perhaps I feel that is better and we should change that as well... You see what I mean?

To anyone interested who doesn't speak French, the typo in question is a misspelling of the third person plural future form of 'pouvoir' (to be able to / can). It's supposed to be 'pourront' but it's written on the scroll as 'pourrant' which is the present participle. It's difficult to translate into English but that one letter changes the text from "the stolen plans that will be able to save her people" to "the stolen plans that being able to save her people and restore freedom to the galaxy". The two words also sound the same so an equivalent in English would be mixing up there and their. They both sound the same, but when the mistake is written out, it's really gratting to look at. Especially for an important landmark like star wars. 

OK, I decided to re-do Marvins original translation (j'espère que tu ne m'en veux pas!) and then translate a part of the interview that seemed pertinent

Here's the link: http://www.objectif-cinema.com/spip.php?article4547&artsuite=8

Gazette du doublage: You worked on the first Star Wars films. Retrospectively, what do you think about the first trilogy? Were you a sound engineer or a technical director?

Pierre Davanture: When Michel Gast and I saw Star Wars (1977) to prepare the dubbing into French, we were very impressed and immediately took particular preparations.

Knowing that the film was going to be mixed in Paris in 6 track stereo (for the 70mm release prints) we immediately envisaged the grand auditorium of the SIMO de Boulogne. I got in touch with my friend Jean Neny who wanted to come see the film. Before projecting it, he told me, "if I'm watching this film before it's even mixed, it's for you" but after watching it he recognized right away that I had done the right thing.

We decided that I would do some sound tests for Vader's and C3PO's voice and that I would give him, for the mixing session, edited tracks that were voice-distorted for each character. We only had a harmonizer which was used to distort Roger Carel's voice for C-3PO. We could not use the same machine used in the States for Vader's voice, so I used the harmonizer to bring down François Chaumette's voice an octave. Then, in order to recreate the resonance effect of the mask, I decided - as I've often done - to get closer to reality. We then constructed a box made of laths (about 40x25x30 cm) the inside of which we placed an omni-directional microphone and a small 12cm speaker, mounted on a pivot so that it could be adjusted for better results. Our chief editor, Maurice Martin, prepared the French voice tracks and Jean Nany, at the studio in Boulogne, worked on the mixing session in the presence of Ben Burtt, the production sound engineer.

This little box that I talked to you about was nicknamed the "Vader Box" and an artist even drew Vador's face on it. It stayed in PM Productions' auditorium throughout the years but unfortunately it has disappeared since.

La Gazette du doublage: Did you get the impression in 1977, at the release of the first film, that you had worked on a very special film that would mark its time?

Pierre Davanture : Yes, certainly. But we didn't imagine the infatuation that would continue 30 years on.

La Gazette du doublage: Did you have particular recommendations from Lucasfilm/Fox for the dubbing? Talk to us about your collaboration with Jean Rouat, Jean Neny and Ben Burtt, the sound engineer from Lucasfilm.

Pierre Davanture: No, we didn't have any recommendation from production seeing we couldn't even obtain the name of the machine used for Vader's voice.

As technical director of the SND dubbing services, I organized, in agreement with Michel Gast, the methods used to distort the voices as previously explained. Jean Roua recorded the dialogue. Maurice Martin made sure the voices were in sync and he then sent off the tracks for mixing. I only met Ben Burtt at the mixing session, as directed by Jean Neny.

La Gazette du doublage: Do you remember who the artistic directors and supervisors were for these films?

Pierre Davanture : For Star Wars Fox hired Eric Kahane as artistic director. Michel Gast surely regretted it because he really loved science fiction films and would have loved to have directed the dialog himself.

The following episodes, The Empire Strikes Back (1981) and The Return of the Jedi (1983) were dubbed by PM Productions under the direction of Michel Gast this time. I did the recording and premixing, Maurice Martin did synchronization and the mixing was done in the States.

Heidy Webel supervised those films and I have good memories of her which is not always the case with certain supervisors that I've had to deal with on certain films.

La Gazette du doublage: Did you ever go to Skywalker Ranch for the films' mixing sessions? What was your implication in the States?

Pierre Davanture: No, I never went to the States. Certain films like E.T and every other large Spielberg productions were mixed in the States after a premixing of the French dub tracks in Paris. This was always a source of problems because I think that American engineers were happy just adding the French dialog to the international tracks (music/effects) and to this day, I am persuaded that it is difficult, in a mixing session, to judge the intelligibility of words in a language that we do not understand. When the French version was listened to in Paris, it was rejected and remixed.

Great article, Marvins! Learned a lot about the French dubbing business. The rest of the article was interesting and I'll translate it when I get home tonight.

What missing lines exactly? Just curious!

Well I was only 1 when Jedi came out, so no need to be that jealous! :P

Did you grow up listening to the movies in German or English?

I have no idea how much they were involved in these mixes. I assumed they just sent the stems to dub houses across the world and they would take care of it from there. I just don't know why they would listen to French, Spanish, German, Italian dubbings when it was just a question of sweetening the levels. But if they were that dedicated, cool!

As far as non-dubbed foreign releases, I would say it was the mono mix that was sent out. Just look at puggo's swedish 16mm (can't recall the name) and the various vhs broadcasts from the 80s in Europe : they have the mono mix.

But this is just a guess.

Sorry to hijack the thread, but we're having a discussion on the original sound mixes in the general sw forum, and the question of the international mixes came up and what differing content they have. I figured you guys might know best... Thanks and you may go back to your Gespräch!

Right, gotcha! Well the international versions will be even more different because there would have to be redone foley work for all of the on set sound that wasn't captured, along with the dubs, then they would all be remixed. I really doubt that Burtt surpervised those mixes - I say that because Darth Vader's voice effect in the French dub is really cheap sounding. Almost like the actor is talking through a tube.

In any case, the German people might know best, but I think they are more influenced by the mono mix than the stereo mix in terms of effects and dialogue.

Well the mix is different from the original 77 mix because:

1) There is the inclusion of CPO's tractor beam line

2) Hairy_hen has said in Harmy's thread that "the '77 version has the channels panned inwards by a fair amount (presumably this was to reduce crosstalk in the surround, since upmixing processors were less advanced in those days), while the '85 has the full stereo width"

So in my mind, the 85 is a tweaked and modified 77 stereo mix. So yes, in effect a new one.

The Fool Who Follows said:

Just putting this out there, I'm rebuilding the 1977 Zoetrope® 6 Channel audio, in effect its 5.1 surround. I'm using the 1977 Mono muxed to support all 6 channels and normalized to the 5.1 levels to build each track.

 

I saw the pre messed with version 57 times, I was a sonar tech and know my sound....

So we could just average out what all the transfers have in common?

Don't the Negative1 team have several sources?...

Agreed, much more informative than my post in harmy's thread.

@yoda-sama:

http://originaltrilogy.com/forum/topic.cfm/Star-Wars-1977-70mm-sound-mix-recreation-stereo-and-51-versions-now-available/post/547363/#TopicPost547363

In a nutshell: loudness war.

PS: scroll down to the bottom of the page for a detailed critique by hh.

Guspaz said:

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?