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davextreme

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Join date
5-Dec-2011
Last activity
23-Jun-2023
Posts
89

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Post
#632997
Topic
Harmy's STAR WARS Despecialized Edition HD - V2.7 - MKV (Released)
Time

Puggo - Jar Jar's Yoda said:

davextreme said:

Just to play devil's advocate slightly, I think the whole thing would not be an issue if the SE had been done tastefully from the start. If all it had been was cleaning up some continuity errors and doing some touch ups I doubt anyone would have gotten worked up.

You may be right, but to not preserve and make available the originals would still be wrong, regardless of whether or not a lot of people notice.

But allow me to play a different devil's advocate... I think that one of the reasons that so many people are concerned, is rooted in the fact that the changes were made 20 years later.  Had the changes been made 2 or 3 years later (say, in 1979), they would have been viewed by most as creative tweaks.  The fact that they were made 20 years later is what is so unprecedented and what also makes the changes so glaringly out of place.

It is hard to imagine any change made 20 years after-the-fact that could possibly be appropriate or relevant.  1997 is a very different time and place in moviedom than 1977.  To wit, if George had made tweaks in 1979, they would likely have been very different tweaks than the ones he made in 1997... even if the technology of the late 1990s were available to him.  This is evidenced by the change to Han's character with respect to him shooting first -- acceptable in 1977, not acceptable in 1997.  This is why it is so dangerous to change movies: in so doing you lose your window to the past.

I don't disagree with any of this and this thread derailment has probably gone on long enough. Clearly there's no scenario where the original shouldn't have also been restored properly and released, even in a world with a less outrageous SE. The problem was never that George shouldn't be allowed to mess with the movie, just his attempts to suppress the original.

Post
#632901
Topic
Harmy's STAR WARS Despecialized Edition HD - V2.7 - MKV (Released)
Time

Puggo - Jar Jar's Yoda said:

The main issue has nothing to do with the quality of the changes.  History is what it is, and trying to change history is wrong - even evil.  Supressing any cultural artifact that had as big of a societal and technological impact as Star Wars did, is wrong regardless of how it is done.  It should be available 100% intact, warts and all.  Any less is to vandalize an important piece of our heritage.

Just to play devil's advocate slightly, I think the whole thing would not be an issue if the SE had been done tastefully from the start. If all it had been was cleaning up some continuity errors and doing some touch ups I doubt anyone would have gotten worked up. I guess I'm saying there's a parallel Earth out there where the SE is just a well-regarded Director's Cut that sits next to Blade Runner: The Final Cut, the Donner Superman, extended LotR, etc. (And obviously we'd still want the original preserved, too, as in the Blade Runner boxed set that has several versions.)

Post
#631436
Topic
Future of Home Video
Time

My uncle is a fairly high-up physicist at NASA. Years ago he was asked to come to a meeting with some of their directors to discuss what to do about their aging archive of data on tape. They knew the tape would start to corrode and wanted his opinion on what format would have a longer life. His response was the we know if they inscribe it on papyrus and lock it in a pyramid in a desert, it'll last thousands of years. "Everything else is just conjecture."

Post
#631396
Topic
Future of Home Video
Time

Two points:

One, digital files are much, much easier to use for kids and for parents of small kids. There's no disc to have to find or get lost, and you'll watch the same thing over and over and over so the convenience really adds up.

 

Two, though I can't substantiate this, I don't think the high school and college kids are spending much on movies (or music) anymore. Where I accumulated tons of DVDs after I got out of college, 20-somethings now are using Netflix mostly and aren't buying physical media much at all. This was once a huge market for entertainment companies that's drying up over time.

Post
#627420
Topic
Harmy's STAR WARS Despecialized Edition HD - V2.7 - MKV (Released)
Time

CatBus said:

I've got young kids, so while I prefer to watch everything subbed (and I'm even one of those snooty ones who also prefers the literal subs on the Japanese discs), I'll be watching with dubs exclusively for many, many years and they may grow on me. 

Briefly off-topic: I was surprised with how my 3-year-old daughter took to the Japanese on Kiki's Delivery Service. We watch it in either English or Japanese and I think since she knows what's happening she just goes with the flow. Plus kids are used to stuff going over their heads all the time so I think she just doesn't mind it. But we watch English probably 80% of the time.

Harmy, thank you for all your work on this. Alexandria, VA, USA here.

Post
#572460
Topic
2006 GOUT DVD Chapter Titles (Released)
Time

I’ve made three text files that can be imported into Subler to give your GOUT or GOUT-timed files the proper chapter titles. VLC, Quicktime, iTunes, and other video players will then show the titles (“In the Garage”, “Lars Family Dinner”, “Binary Sunset”) instead of just “Chapter 9”, “Chapter 10”, “Chapter 11”, etc.

You can download the files from Google Docs here.

These are in the Chapter Text Format described in Subler’s docs. To use them, open your movie in Subler. Click on the Chapter Track, then pick Import and File from the File Menu. Browse to the chapter text file and save your video. It should go very quickly.

Post
#572056
Topic
Project Threepio (Star Wars OOT subtitles)
Time

I really do appreciate you doing this project! Subtitles are very important to me since my dad is hard of hearing. I always try to include an srt file whenever I rip a DVD for use on Apple TV, iPad, etc. just in case I end up watching it with my dad. Very few online video sources (Netflix, iTunes, etc.) had any captions at all a few years ago. They're getting better but it surprises me there isn't legislation requiring it. I think this sort of project is great for people making edits since it means they don't have to do much work to get the captions in there.

Post
#572026
Topic
Project Threepio (Star Wars OOT subtitles)
Time

re: the SRT files, I tried making new versions of the Despecialized Edition in Handbrake and added your SRT files. I used the Apple TV 2 preset and when I played the resulting movie the Apple TV didn't like the typographically correct apostrophes. It just omitted them ("wasnt", "didnt"). I tried again doing a find/replace and putting in the real character but they just showed up like improperly-encoded characters.

Post
#569678
Topic
My STAR WARS Thesis; I need help!
Time

Here's a 1977 Rolling Stone interview with Lucas.

I think it's incredibly important to look at how much Star Wars draws upon older pulp sci-fi, westerns, swashbuckling adventures, and war movies, which Lucas openly admits to in that interview. Lots of Star Wars isn't new, it just did old stuff in a very new way. Kids who grew up being forced to watch boring Westerns by their dads suddenly got an exciting one with bad guys in black helmets instead of hats. Kids who loved Errol Flynn adventure movies but found them old-fashioned got laser sword fights. I think its audience in the late 70s was craving all the good parts of many genres that had fallen out of popularity (I don't have a source but I'm sure you can find charts of box office numbers in 1975 and 1976 and show that these sorts of movies were out fashion).

Post
#569291
Topic
Harmy's STAR WARS Despecialized Edition HD - V2.7 - MKV (Released)
Time

 

I spent a little bit of time trying to line up the chapter titles from the GOUT DVD to the 25 chapters in the Despecialized Editions. I put the results here:

http://goo.gl/nwAJk

There are tabs at the bottom (a little hard to see w/ Google's color scheme) for each film.

The GOUT DVDs have 50 chapters each while the DeEd files have 25-27, so not every chapter break lines up completely and some sort of wind up in the middle of a scene but it's better than "Chapter 1", "Chapter 2."

 

Post
#565206
Topic
Harmy's STAR WARS Despecialized Edition HD - V2.7 - MKV (Released)
Time

(Longtime lurker here. Love your work, Harmy.)

If you're taking requests, I'd love a set of the front cover art that's 666 by 1000 pixels for importing into iTunes (like a movie poster). Blu-Ray boxes are more square and the lettering doesn't fit at the aspect ratio iTunes likes. iTunes will take any shape art but it's neat to have everything looking uniform.

If anyone's curious, I've used Handbrake to convert the files using the Apple TV preset but with the resolution increased to 720p. The movies look great on the iPad and iPhone 4, too. You can import all of the soundtracks or just pick the first one depending on how small you want the files to be. I also downloaded .srt subtitle files and added those using Handbrake.