hairy_hen

That's the plan.  I checked through some of Jedi yesterday and found that for the most part, like Empire, the bass levels from the SE are pretty good already.  But there are definitely some that are excessive and need to be reduced in order to sound like they belong there.  I aim to have this done soon--it's just a matter of being able to listen to it at full blast and figuring out how to set the levels, then making another test file and listening again.  Trial and error combined with creative judgement.

The Empire and Jedi LFE tracks come from the 2004 dvd's, but that's okay because they are pretty much identical to the 1997 versions, and at 448k instead of 384.  For Star Wars, about 65% is from the '97 mix and about 30% from the '04, with the remaining 5% an amplification of the existing bass in the '93 stereo.

Dolby's documentation explicitly states that dialnorm does not in any way alter the dynamic range of the program material.  It only reduces the entire volume of the audio by the amount specified.  For whatever reason, many ac3 encodes including the GOUT are reduced by 4 db, which seems to be a default setting, without regard to the actual levels of the mix being encoded.  This can fool the ear into thinking it has been dynamically compressed when compared to a non-reduced version, such as the laserdisc pcm in this case.  This may also be one reason why people think DTS to be superior to Dolby, because they automatically assume the version that is louder by default to be better, when in fact level-matching the two is necessary to make an accurate comparison.

Dynamic range compression profiles can also be part of an ac3 encode, but they rely on accurate dialnorm settings to work properly.

This thread has become boring.  Stubborn optimism vs. informed pessimism, repeat until nobody cares.  lol

Personally I think this Matthew Wood guy must be completely tone deaf, but maybe his hearing and sense of good taste will miraculously return.  Who knows?!

The compositing in the SE is generally superior, and for most of those it wouldn't really be worth changing them back just to introduce low res shots with matte lines and so forth.  I do think the placement in the original shots tends to be better, but it would be difficult to even notice the differences except in a straight comparison like this.  I like the look of the Millennium Falcon's engine glow in the original better also, but I don't know how you would go about reinstating that without changing the rest of the shot.

Colour correction--mainly eliminating the general blue cast, and dialing down oversaturated reds on Tatooine--is the most important thing.  But the '93 transfer doesn't exactly have stellar colour itself, either, so I'm not sure what it's really 'supposed' to look like.  Given the kinds of differences apparent between the GOUT and the SW Technicolor print, the film's true look is most likely something in between the extremes of each rendition.

Has anyone ever arrived at a satisfactory answer for why the old copies of Jedi have blue stars?  It's very bizarre looking.

lol, that's pretty much my point, the dialnorm can trick you into thinking something sounds less good than it ought to, when really the only thing going on is that the comparison isn't staged on fair terms.  It's not always easy to tell the exact reason for something sounding a certain way.

So adywan's ESB recreation is completely gout-synched?  Awesome.  I haven't had a chance to see his version yet (sacrilege, I know!), but I'll have to do that soon.  If this mix will fit to it that would make it even better for me.  He mainly used the SE 5.1, which sounds quite good for the most part and has the advantage of discrete channels, but I don't like the way they mixed the surrounds (flashy and too loud).

I never made a 2.0 ac3, just the flac, but it would be easy enough to encode one at the bitrate of your choice.  ;)

The fact that the '93 pcm for Star Wars came right from the 70mm printmaster is the reason it sounds so good.  If only they hadn't added the extra junk on top of it!  I really dislike the shattering glass sounds as well--replacing those with the 35mm version was the first edit I ever made on this project.  The loss of dynamics during that section is noticeable, but a worthwhile tradeoff.  I partially compensated by raising the blasting volume by 2 db; any more and it would have been too obvious I'd fiddled with it.

I'm sure they still have the 70mm mix in the archives, since they claim to have kept everything.  I think they should have used it as the primary audio source when making the special edition, because its power and sound quality are superior to the '97 mix (which is still pretty good for the most part).  But why use an existing version when you can change it and make it "better"?

I don't remember anything about the LFE portion of the '97 mix in the theatre, or whether the place I saw it was even using 5.1 at the time.  On the laserdisc ac3, I find the Star Destroyer flyby to be remarkably subdued in that respect--not even close to the accounts of awe-inspiring rumble in the 70mm version.  Because of that, I made a large increase to the bass volume in that scene for the 5.1, so it would live up to what it should be.  The Empire and Jedi SE's were never lacking in bass in that way--no idea why it should have been so low.

Dunedain said:

Did you encode these at 448k from the uncompressed master .wav file? :)

Satanika upmixed the stereo file I sent him (flac, for ease in uploading) using the Foobar2000 plugin ATSurround, into a multichannel wav and added in the custom LFE channel, then encoded the result to 5.1 AC3 at 448 kbps.  So in short, yes.  ;)

It sounds fantastic.

Edit: the download links are at the bottom of the previous page, in case anybody missed them.

Yeah, all of my mixes were made primarily from the 1993 laserdisc PCM tracks, so they have the full dynamic range and power of those versions.  Add the custom LFE channel derived from the special editions on top of that and you've got a seriously awesome sounding mix for each film.  ;)

I don't know for sure that the Empire GOUT came from a vhs master source, but its restricted dynamics compared to the laserdisc make it a likely possibility.  Combined with the non-defeatable 4 db reduction in total volume that comes from the Dialnorm parameter in the AC3 stream, the result sounds very anemic, much less powerful than it should.

I don't think the other two films are dynamically compressed as Empire is, but they do still have the Dialnorm reduction, which again makes them sound weaker than the laserdiscs at any given volume setting.  Raising the gain by 4 db to compensate when playing the GOUT will narrow the discrepancy, making any difference solely the result of lossy compression encoding.  Obviously Empire still won't equal the original, but the difference won't seem as drastic.  Regardless, the laserdisc versions are certainly preferable since no adjustments need to be made to achieve the best sound.

I've checked over the file from Satanika and everything sounds just the way it should, so I'm pleased to announce that my rendition of Empire in 5.1 is now available for general use.  To my ear this is the best-sounding audio version of the film out there--it has a very good balance without anything standing out as flashy or out of place, with strong dynamics and powerful bass when appropriate.  Its overall quality is most likely very similar to what the 70mm mix would have sounded like, though it does not claim to represent that version in its specific details.  The AC3 file is split into a two part rar archive.

Part one: http://www.sendspace.com/file/9lphp7

Part two: http://www.sendspace.com/file/vwz779

Anyone wishing to use my audio for their own projects is welcome to do so, provided the video is properly synched to the NTSC version of the GOUT.  I'd be very interested in hearing feedback and impressions of this mix from anyone who obtains it.

I'm not done with RotJ yet, but hopefully it won't be long before I'm finished with it.  Bear in mind that it isn't a theatrical mix, more of a hybrid, but it sounds excellent and you are welcome to use it.  I just finished a 5.1 for ESB also, in case that is of interest for any of your projects.

I challenge anyone, even the most aurally uneducated of folks, to listen to the opening scene of the film back to back with the dvd mix and any other version, and not be able to tell that it is completely screwed up.  This is easily done with the GOUT dvd release, since both the 2004 and 1993 mixes are available together in one case.  Switch between them a few times and you'll hear how the '04 is muffled and distorted while the '93 is crystal clear.  If you pay even a little bit of attention you'll be able to tell that several laser blast sounds in the '04 are out of synch, background noises frequently overpower everything else, and the general rhythm and flow of the sound design is severely compromised.  And that's just the opening scene!

If you can't hear that while making a direct comparison between a correct version and a hideously garbled one, then you should get your ears checked.  ;)

Flipped music in the surrounds was definitely not a problem in the 1997 mix, because the rear channels only contained music in certain key scenes, such as the opening flyby, the sunset, and the Falcon approaching the Death Star.  The rest of the time they contained sound effects only, and the music came solely from the front.  The music error in the 2004 mix can only be heard with a 5.1 system--downmixing to stereo masks the problem--but with the right setup it is very easily noticed and highly distracting, particularly with high notes from the violins, which occur frequently.  Hearing them emerge simultaneously from the front left and the back right is disorienting and just plain wrong.

I haven't seen the Holiday Special.  I'd never even heard of it until a few years ago, mainly because I wasn't yet alive at the time it was made.  With all the negative descriptions I've never been brave or motivated enough to actually go to the trouble of finding it somewhere.

My girlfriend describes it as cheesy, but not as bad as most people say.

Weird Al's music video for 'White and Nerdy' shows him making a shady deal for a copy of the Holiday Special on vhs.  lol

Cool.  :)

Will it have the same frame count as the GOUT, so that determined users can add their own preferred mixes?

Fang Zei said:

Speaking of Empire and Jedi, there's something I've been wondering. Were the original six-track versions 5.1, or were they 4.2 like Star Wars? There's a featurette on the Apocalypse Now complete dossier about how it was the first movie to be mixed/played in 5.1 when it opened in '79. Did every other six-track release from then on do the same thing?

According to the lists on in70mm, all the Star Wars films used the 4.2 format with twin LFE's and mono surround.  Apparently stereo surround channels were quite uncommon before 1989, and didn't always correspond with use of the dynamic increase provided by Dolby SR.

http://in70mm.com/library/process/dolby/index.htm

These newer 70mm magnetic mixes could be described as 5.2, because for the sake of backwards compatibility they still used twin LFE's as did the older variant.  The stereo surrounds were mixed into the LFE channels, relying on crossovers in the signal chain to separate the bass frequencies from the rear effects.  A mono rear channel was also included for theatres that didn't have stereo surround capability.

(Note that present day DTS cinema format also encodes the bass into the surround channels to eliminate the extra bandwidth a separate LFE would require, but the home video DTS codec does not do this.)

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade is listed as using both Dolby SR dynamics and stereo surrounds.  I wonder if the 5.1 mix on the dvd is the same as the 70mm or if it was redone.  I'm pretty sure Raiders of the Lost Ark was remixed, due to occasional stereo surround use, but I couldn't say whether it was done from scratch or came from modifying the existing 70mm version.  Some have commented negatively on the dvd mix compared to the 35mm stereo, which might indicate its having been redone, but I'm not familiar enough with either to speak of it with any authority.

I don't really know much about the specifics of Dolby Stereo optical in particular, but two-channel audio generally works reasonably well downmixed to mono.  It isn't optimal, of course, because the levels may not come out right, and most especially because the matrixed rear channel effects will phase cancel out and will not be heard at all.  So things like the blockade runner coming from the back before appearing on screen in the first film would be missing on a stereo mix played in mono, as would various other ship flybys, the chasm voice echo, and numerous background sounds.  There are quite a lot more rear effects than you might imagine without hearing them on a surround setup, though not as numerous or immersive as present day mixes tend to be.

When they say Dolby Stereo is designed to be mono-compatible, does that mean that it has a way of ensuring that the surround effects will still be heard?  I'm not sure how such a thing would work.  Based on that alone I can see why they wanted to make a separate mono mix, and also to take into account the Academy EQ curve for mono setups without noise reduction.  I guess by the time they made Empire and Jedi they assumed most theatres had upgraded to stereo and didn't bother making another separate version?

I hadn't planned on it, since it's a hybrid not representing an official mix, and most of it is the same as the '93 version, so it seemed best to release it as 5.1 only.  But I'll be glad to make the links for the stereo file available to anyone who wants it.

Satanika reports that he has obtained the files I sent him and that the ESB 5.1 should be ready soon.  So, yay.  :)  Once I have it I'll test it out to make sure everything is as it should be and then it will be available.  I'm quite pleased with the way this turned out, although I wish I'd been able to finish it faster.

I'm also going to do some tweaking to the LFE channel of RotJ to achieve a better balance, but this will amount to minor changes only.

I send him my stereo files which he then upmixes into five channels, then adds in the LFE channel to get the 5.1 format.  The reason I can't do that myself is that my computer's WINE setup only supports stereo output, even though the sound card itself is capable of surround.

Satanika is currently on vacation, and will be helping me out with the remaining 5.1 when he gets back.  So those should be ready in a about a week or so.  As far as I know that's the only thing d_j is still waiting on, right?  So these projects are very close to being ready for release now.  

The grappling hook thing is ridiculous.  All you have to do to confirm that it is Apocryphal of the worst kind is listen to the music cue for this scene.  The way it is composed fits the film perfectly--there is no break or edit anywhere that would indicate it had been trimmed to fit a shortened version of the scene.  There are other places in the film where the music is edited to accommodate picture changes, and listening to them as compared to the score alone the cuts can be spotted easily enough, but the chasm scene never needed to be subjected to this.

Given that the stereo and 70mm mixes are said to have been completed with little time to spare, I find it highly unlikely that there would have been time to rescore it.  I can only surmise that 'memories' of this come from reading the novelisation and confusing the two.  It is telling that people also 'remember' seeing fighters crash into the Death Star shield in Return of the Jedi, which only occurs in the novelisation also.

And the 70mm version never had 'close the blast doors'.  This was only dubbed in for the mono version, made after the first two mixes were already playing in theatres.  Aside from much greater dynamics and the addition of powerful bass, the only differences in content between the 70mm and the stereo mix are some explosive sounds added to the battle at the end.  Personally I prefer 'close the blast doors' to be absent, because it makes the stormtroopers appear to be incompetent buffoons, not to mention it is dubbed in a voice entirely different than the one that says to open the doors a few seconds later, which I find jarringly discordant.

For what it's worth, my dad says he never saw any garbage boxes when the film played in theatres originally.  Given the lovely and deep contrast evident on the Technicolor print, I'm inclined to believe that even if they were visible, they would be very hard to spot.  The home video transfers were often very washed out, making them stand out a lot more than they should when projected properly.

Not exactly 70mm because we can't know what audio differences were present, but my versions capture the general feel of what they would have been like, if not the specifics.  The RotJ mix I refer to above is the one present on dark_jedi's previous encodes.  Sorry for causing confusion about different versions; it comes from the fact that successfully recreating a theatrical mix will automatically garner more interest on this board than something that is a fan-made hybrid, which is what my other mixes are.

Anyway--I just started a new job, and so haven't yet been able to send the ESB files to Satanika as I had planned, but I will be doing that as soon as I can.

RotJ was done fairly quickly last year, and I didn't spend as much time perfecting it as I have for these more recent versions.  Hardly any adjustment was made to the LFE beyond synchronising it to the original film edit.  For the most part it sounds fine, but I recently realised that there are some places where the bass does again get too loud.  So I am considering going back to correct them, though it wouldn't be anything particularly drastic.

In news more interesting than the pointing out of tiny audio errors (lol), I've completed work on the new 5.1 for ESB.  Just waiting to hear back about doing the upmix.

There ended up being four changes to the main channel sound of the '93 mix; two of which were repairing glitches, the other two being creative choices.  The first is the insertion of the snowspeeder crash sound from the '80 stereo, and the other uses the more complete and unedited music cue for Boba Fett's departure as heard in the '97 mix.

I was considering including all of the relevant SE music edits, but in the end this was the only one that made a positive difference.  The original edit of this cue is cringe-worthy, very clumsily done and distracting, and I think the scene is improved by using the music as composed.  But the Imperial march transitions seemed too loud for nothing happening onscreen, and the others aren't really significant enough to bother with.  That's my opinion, anyway, plus I'm accustomed to the way they sound, and the fewer changes overall the better, generally speaking.

The LFE channel has been optimised to blend with the 1993 mix, similarly to what was done for Star Wars.  Being the SE, there were several bass effects way louder than they should have been, but many were at a strong level that fell short of being overwhelming, so I didn't have to do that much.  A couple times I added bass where there wasn't any or brought up the existing volume to be more noticeable.  All the SE's sometimes have this weird thing where bass doesn't come in until about 1/4 second after the main channel sound effect it accompanies, but in some instances I find that a more direct synch gives better results.

I should point out again that this is not an exact 70mm mix for Empire--without an actual recording to base it on, no version could reliably be named as such.  However, the overall feel of it should for the most part be very similar, with strong dynamic range and powerful bass, and a general sense of 'rightness'.  Hopefully it will be available soon.

There was definitely some significant re-editing of the score for the special edition.  Notice the transitions after the cave scene and the X-wing rising from the swamp, which use the music as composed rather than cutting in the concert Imperial march.  Boba Fett's departure from Bespin, allowing the music to continue to the end of the scene rather than being clumsily chopped up to end abruptly as the ship takes off.  The Millennium Falcon flying away after the Avenger goes to lightspeed, extending the cue by using the previously unheard beginning section, changing the music synch to accommodate the addition of new fx.  The Falcon's arrival at Bespin using more of that cue, again because of new fx.  The brief high strings edited into the old mix as the Empire bombs the asteroid field are missing, as is the gong crash when Luke enters the carbon freeze chamber.

I agree that an isolated score shouldn't have dialogue or other sound mixed in when there is no music.  Sometimes I enjoy the sort of 'silent film' vibe you get from the music only.  Anyway, this sounds like a really interesting project.  :)

Steve Sansweet has his head so far up George Lucas' ass he could probably see Rick McCallum's feet.

LOL

Yeah I don't think anybody's as far up there as Rick McCallum, but there are others who come close.  *cackles*