I found some errors in the German mono audio:
These errors have been fixed and the German audio is added as a separate file (so it can be muxed in or sideloaded during playback).
Project has been released!
This topic is a collection for my restorations of the German versions of Stanley Kubrick movies.
Stanley Kubrick was very adamant to the effort of having his movies localized for the countries they were released in. He took the effort of personally selecting voice actors, localizing entire credits sequences as well as actually reshooting footage in other languages.
The focus of the project are Kubrick’s auteur movies after “Spartacus”. “Dr. Strangelove” has also been taken out, as I don’t have a source for German localization for it.
List:
I am not saying that I will be able to tackle all of these, and/or in which order this will happen. After all, it’s a question of availability of material.
I am always looking to obtain:
Gave it a test watching yesterday.
Everything is quite fine, but the localized last shot (taken from the VHS) turned out to be quite a falloff in quality.
After so much effort in the opening credits, such a shot would be unworthy. Especially when zoomed further in for the 16:9 version.
So I decided to redo it with retouching and keyframe animation.
Pretty soon, I guess. Since I actually solved the sync error on the 16:9 version. 😃
Some small but still important things still need to be done, like the right set of subtitles, etc.
Had some technical issues with sync on the 16:9 version (because of the darnded VC-1 codec).
Seems to work now. 😃
Would like to participate, as well.
The second “e” in “freundlichE” is missing…
Correct! 😃
Now, pray, what’s wrong in this picture?
I decided that I will be restoring not just the 4:3 fullframe version, but also the 16:9 widescreen (as the BluRay has a higher bitrate).
For the title credits, I had to recomposite the entire sequence once again for the correct aspect ratio.
By the way, I just became aware that the helicopter sequences were filmed by Greg MacGillivray from “MacGillivray Freeman Films”, the company responsible for a whole load of those nifty IMAX documentaries!
Status update: front credits are finished! Rather happy with how it turned out.
I’m intrigued! Could you possibly post the German typewriter footage?
Why, here some examples.
As it is well-known, Kubrick (at least up to and including The Shining) used to do complete localization for credits for his movies. The Shining is no exception in this matter. The entire intro sequence is in German.
I had two sources of German credits. One was the VHS version, the original theatrical sequence was used. Unfortunately, it has a rather bad quality.
Then, the version by TV station ZDF. This has been re-created digitally.
After several attemtps of upscaling VHS footage, I was quite unhappy with the results. Neither the AI approach, nor my AVS filters could produce anything of at least of a decent quality, even after color-correction.
So I decided to take the English footage and rotoscope out the titles that need translation. For that, I broke up the relevant sequences into single frames and edited them one by one.
My first approach was using Photoshop’s Content-Aware Fill feature. That worked quite okay, however, it had noticeable flaws at high-contrast areas. Then it tends to produce artefacts which I deemed unacceptable. They are especially visible in motion (see the random piece of rock at “L” in “STANLEY”). But what’s even worse, are the boundaries between the mountains and the sky. That was quite inacceptable.
After that, I had to refine my workflow. The German TV version has proved quite helpful, as the credits are rolling there at different locations and with a different speed. Therefore, I could combine the two footages (albeit after alignment and color correction) in order to cover up the credits in original footage.
As there were still differences in color, brightness etc., I have combined the two approaches. After that, some retouching by hand frame-by-frame still remains though.
Here a video sample I am quite content with.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9CjRbTVCas
Screenshot:
Sources:
Eurocut BluRay (2007)
Eurocut Web-DL (4:3)
German 4:3 TV airing. The intro sequence and intertitles have been redone digitally, but it does contain the typewriter scene in good quality.
German VHS (mostly for time reference).
After completing the German Version Preservation of Kubrick’s “Barry Lyndon” I decided that this might be a long-term project, to preserve German versions of Stanley Kubrick’s films. And the next in row was the most complex of them, namely “The Shining”.
Now the project is released.
Here are the following things I aimed to achieve.
The German version was the 120-min International version of the movie. The new 4K restoration is, however, the US version (with additional footage dubbed recently and rather badly - sadly, Kubrick was not around anymore to prevent such an outrage). This was the version I was conforming to.
I have been able to obtain a WEB-DL of The Shining in 1080p and 4:3. Although the quality was suboptimal (many compression artefacts) I decided to use it as the main version for the restoration.
Due to those artifacts, I decided to also make a branch of the project, a 16:9 version (with the first BluRay as a source). Therefore, all the needed footage was created in 4K resolution to be scaled down accordingly for each of the versions.
As “Shining”, when originally released, made use of the 1970s WB logo, I cut it in instead of the 80s one. (The source being the HD version of “The Bugs Bunny Roadrunner Movie”).
I attempted various ways of upscaling existing intro credits. From the digitally re-created interlaced German TV ones to an upscale and regrade of the original VHS footage. None of them brought any decent results.
So it was decided to do it frame by frame, removing the German parts in the intro credits (“Produced and Directed by” - “Produktion und Regie”) and cleaning it up. That was possible by programming some clever Photoshop actions and scripts, though led initially to some weird artifacts.
However, it was quite helpful that the digital TV version had a custom-made intro, having different timings and placement of the scrolling text. Therefore, it was in parts possible to “patch” over the credits with blank footage. After that, some very complex retouching and color/levels adjustments were necessary. However, I am quite pleased with the results, and there are only a few artifacts left.
The original intertitles were replaced by German ones, according to the original translations from the VHS. The letter look and spacing were approximated to that of the original German texts.
Now that was probably the 2nd main reason for doing this at all. Originally, Kubrick shot different international versions of the typewriter footage, replacing the words “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” with various proverbs in other languages, which would be more or less fitting. The German saying used was “Was du heute kannst besorgen, das verschiebe nicht auf morgen” (Do not hold off for tomorrow what you can get done today).
The footage was in a decent quality from the German digital TV recording, and was already upscaled and cleaned up by Taddäus Tentakel. My job was just to upscale it some more with some of my AVS scripts.
Also an interesting point: the German typewriter footage actually doesn’t sync up to the English (or German 5.1) audio, only to the original German mono.
The last shot of the movie was replaced by a German-localized version, having a German inscription on the photograph. This was the last thing I did, as I originally planned to used scaled-up VHS footage. However, after having put so much effort into the intro credits, it would just not do the product justice quality-wise. Therefore, the German text was recreated and the pan down re-done. Also, that German insert did not have the dissolve effect the original version had. The missing of the dissolve was also recreated.
The end credits were done using the German VHS footage and the high-res of 4K UHD which was then scaled down for both the 4:3 and 16:9 version. The German credits had some small differences, adding or moving some names from one title to another. Also they had two cards added, crediting the creator of the German versions and the German dubbing speakers.
Also, the original spelling errors were re-created.
The German mono audio was taken from the digital TV version. It had quite a decent quality, too, except in the end credits. This part was replaced by the English mono.
The English mono was taken from the 1st edition of the US version of the 4:3 DVD (it was later replaced by a version without a mono track. Clearly, Leon Vitali seems not to like mono). The audio needed to be conformed to the European version.
Also, the English and German 5.1 Dolby Digital versions are conteined as a bonus.
As stated before, the German mono version actually used different production sound (or foley design) at the typewriter footage, which is conformed to the German version. The German 5.1 and the English track are out of sync in this shots.
The subtitles were adapted to the fact that the intertitles and typewriter footage are in German, so they are translated into English via the subtitles (and are removed from the German subtitles, accordingly).
Chapters were created for the video using the International BluRay chapters. The names of the chapters are taken from the 2001 4:3 DVD (English and German versions).
pinheadraiser
Taddäus Tentakel
SpaceBlackKnight
pipefan413
4:3 version:
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16:9 version
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Released.
More progress on the titles:
Del
Del
The VHS mono audio was in a better quality than expected (though far from hifi). However, there are several serious asynchronization on the track. Also, it has some audio dropouts which are most notable during narration (pieces of audio are just missing).
After some tweaking, I seem to have found the parameters for dynamic compression and equalization in order to fill those things with a fold-down of the German BluRay dub so that the difference in quality is not very notable.
Here is an example.
https://sndup.net/7xt5
The fascinating thing about the credits is, that back then, all those nifty movie job titles, “Gaffer”, “Grip” and so on, actually had German translations.
It’s been lost by approximately the beginning of the 80s (when they stopped translating the entire credits in Germany, and just stuck to the title). Even Kubrick didn’t bother translating the credits for FMJ, if I remember correctly.
More of the end credits.
Just to clarify: they are not reset entirely, but only the parts that need to be translated. Looks rather seamless to me.
I’ll toss out while here, please keep throwing us these images/examples.
I’ll try! Right now I am at a rather tedious task of the end credits.
but on the second one that opening “ST” on Stanley is kind of distracting with the different sizes of the letters.
The funny thing about it: the names are actually from the original English HD footage. They were not touched at all. (with the exception of added umlauts to be conform to the German names / end titles).