n00b

Deleted and Reposted in other Thread.

@ Harmy

I don't know how busy you are with your studies or your work on ROTJ v2.0 but is there a chance for TESB v2.1 without the additional frame and credits typos, only if you have a timeframe while waiting for new 35mm sources? Of course, it's not that important and depends on the amount of effort.

Blade Runner - Final Cut (followed by the Director's Cut). I think it may depend on which version you've seen first and what kind of movies you're into in general. As I prefer Japanese movies, I like neither the over-explanation nor the artificial atmosphere of voice-over narration. Plus, the happiest ending of my 10 favourite movies is from A Clockwork Orange and the fact that Blade Runner's happy end is just stock footage from Shining doesn't make it any better.

Apocalypse Now - Theatrical Cut. Redux has so many unnecessary added scenes of lower quality than the rest movie that Kurtz' Compound just seems like another unimportant stage of the never-ending journey. And I hate the exotic 2:1 aspect ratio.

Alien - Theatrical Cut. I also hate the cocoon scene because it's overly complicated for the first movie and doesn't make any sense without a queen (and even less after the activation of the self-destruct).

Aliens - Haven't seen the Director's Cut yet.

Terminator 2 - Haven't seen the Director's Cut yet.

Harmy said:

Oh, no! "Minor" corrections like those in Blade Runner FC would be absolutely unacceptable for an OOT release - it would destroy the historical integrity of the movies and while it would be the same cut, it wouldn't be the same original version - I've said it a million times before but I guess I'll have to say it again - if you say some fixes could be made, then it is up for debate, what's still acceptable and what is not and you'll get a million different people with million different opinions - some would draw the line at matte-lines, some at blue R2 and others at expanded Cloud City windows, whereas, if you say the original version warts and all, there's nothing to debate - the goal is to restore the movie as close as possible to the way it looked on opening day.

I understand your point and have to agree but as I said, minor corrections are unacceptable for the Despecialized Edition as they would make it a mixture of official versions. Shaw's eyebrows are a different thing though but there's still hope that the manual stabilization pays off. If not, I also think that they should be omitted unless there's a 35mm source.

Of course, I also favor the historical integrity of an unaltered theatrical version but a slighty polished release by Disney would still be ten times better than any official release right now.

Oh, and talking about Blade Runner, some of the new composites in the Final Cut actually look worse than the old ones and you don't have to go far into the movie - the 1st shot will do:

[...]

The top is the original, bottom is the FC - now it is not quite as obvious in a still frame as it is in movement, so if you have the set, I recommend popping the discs in and checking it out for yourselves but those circled dark areas, which are nice smooth gradients in the original, become weird shimmering black blobs in the re-composited version and they bear unmistakable signs of bad digital keying - it caught my eye immediately the first time I put the disc in and I was like what the eff!?

Question: Which version do you prefer overall? In my opinion, the Domestic Cut is the awful version while I don't have real preferences between the Director's Cut and the Final Cut. For me, the developement of this movie is the complete opposite of Star Wars.

Nick66 said:

My suspicion is (and this is purely a guess) that if Disney indeed is planning on releasing the OUT in BD, they'll still have minor corrections like the Blue R2 in there, so hopefully for those who want an "improved" OUT, they'll get it one day.

I wouldn't have a problem with that as it would be an official release. Minor corrections are fine if they don't go beyond the extend of Blade Runner: The Final Cut. Until then, it's simply impossible to leave R2 blue because there is no such version.

Behodar said:

Unfortunately these fixes (typos in the credits - quote is from page 77) didn't make it into the released 2.0; it looks like you forgot to re-render them. Something for the 2.1 to-do list :)

OMG, none of those typos was fixed? There were at least 10 >.<

EDIT: The necessary fixes are (in order):

NORMAN CHANGER => NORMAN CHANCER (02:01:56) 

Dialoge Editors => Dialogue Editors  (02:02:39) 

JOHN CAMPELL => JOHN CAMPBELL (02:03:04) 

Asssistant Directors =>Assistant Directors (02:03:07) 

Additional matte Photography => Additional Matte Photography (02:03:33) 

Assistant Acountants => Assistant Accountants (02:03:47) 

Electronics Engineers => Electronic Engineers (02:03:53) 

Supervising Stage Technicians => Supervising Stage Technician (02:03:57) 

Minature Pyrotechnics => Miniature Pyrotechnics (02:03:59) 

comma after applicable laws (02:04:41)

Beyond that, SirJonah has done some minor adjustments (character spacing etc.).

EDIT 2: @ Beber

Thanks!

Harmy said:

That is a known issue - if you want to mux an mkv, you'll need to use a different version of MKV merge or first demux all the tracks in TS Muxer and then re-mux them in MKV merge.

Is there any disadvantage if you do all the work with tsMuxeR?

SirJonah said:

I couldn't either. What I did with both SW 2.5 and this is to drag the playlist file onto tsMuxeR (to preserve the chapters), deselect whatever streams you don't want and choose TS Muxing as the output. Works fine in XBMC.

You mean remuxing works if you use tsMuxeR? That's what I would have done in the first place but I don't have the time right now.

Thanks Harmy!!!

dbG33K said:

And which audio tracks? The AVCHD will be my preferred format, since I can burn it to a DVD9 easily. I just hope the stereo and isolated score are included. The commentaries are super nice too ;)

You can extract them from the MKV-file with MKVExtractGUI and recombine the audio tracks of the m2ts-file by using tsMuxerGUI if they aren't included (though it's very unlikely for the English GOUT stereo track).

What really worries me is that I didn't see 3 of SirJonah's finds. Aren't your eyes hurting? I guess we're all routine-blinded and need more victims.

@ Harmy & SirJonah

"JOHN CAMPBELL" instead of "JOHN CAMBELL" (at 3:11)

EDIT:

"Electronic Engineers" instead of "Electronics Engineers" (at 3:49)

"Supervising Stage Technician" instead of "Supervising Stage Technicians" (at 3:53)

SirJonah said:

I hope I didn't come off as angry in my reply. I'm really not! I welcome your criticism -- in fact, if it wasn't for you, my ampersand mistake would have been left in. So, thank you!

No, of course, you didn't. And I didn't want to be nitpicking or something like that. In fact, I really feel sorry for not being of any further help. Many thanks for your effort on the credits!

The new credits look awesome!

SirJonah said:

This might be a little defensive but I think it's close enough. There are 1,331 words and 10,898 characters in these credits (just checked my initial .rtf file) and not every single job title and name is perfectly adjusted to fit exactly over the ESB GOUT credits -- it would just be too time consuming to custom adjust the kerning like that.

When I was working in Photoshop, I just made sure that everything lined up on the left, middle and right sides and that the vertical alignment was correct. Sometimes a job title or name wouldn't fit exactly over the GOUT. But most of the time it did. Here's what that portion of the credits looks like superimposed over the GOUT credits from my PSD:

Don't worry, I know that any further adjustment would be far too time consuming. I didn't want to criticize your work nor did you make any mistake at this point. It's just because "RALPH McQUARRIE" had always been positioned anomalously and therefore is much more eye-catching than anything else. And that's the only reason why I pointed this out.

Harmy said:

OK, will do :-)

Thanks!

Could the space between "Conceptual Artist" and "RALPH McQUARRIE" be downsized too (the space between "RALPH" and "McQUARRIE" has to be exactly above the space between "LESLIE" and "DILLEY")?

@ Harmy

Looks better, especially the reduced gate weave.

Could it be possible that the ":" in "TM: (C) Lucasfilm Ltd. (LFL) 1980" at the end of the credits looks weird?

@ CatBus

I checked the Hyperspace Collection and the apostrophes seem to look more angled. However, I can't tell if they look curly or even like commas.

@ Harmy, Laserschwert & SirJonah

Looks fantastic! I played it simultaneously with the original one and it feels absolutely right.

Three questions:

1. The starfield seems to be somewhat shaky. Is this an intended effect?

2. Would it be possible to make some of the smaller letters (APPROVED No. 26034 and smaller) slightly sharper as there isn't really an improvement in sharpness over the GOUT upscale? The GOUT upscale also seems to have sharper (R)s (the registered trademark symbol).

3. May I ask what's the difference between your and Laserschwert's approach?

@ Harmy

Thanks! Did you notice the "Respecialized" at the bottom?

Harmy said:

Well, I personally don't even notice the two frame difference, even knowing that it's there but I know some people are more sensitive to it.

Yeah, same with me. In the end, it's a decision between accuracy and simplification.

Harmy said:

How about cutting one frame from the end of one shot and the other from the beginning of the next - that should minimize the damage.

That's what I would recommend anyway but how about the 1 frame idea? But only you (and h_h) can judge if one would still notice that.

@ Harmy

I have to do a 25fps -> 23,976fps conversion (which I did a few years ago) but your German audio track from ROTJ v1.0 seems to have a higher pitch than my version. However, the pitch of Laserschwert's German audio track for SW v2.5 (taken from GOUT) is identical to mine (though his version is more complete, more stable and overall better).

@ hairy_hen, Laserschwert & Harmy

I have to agree that h_h invested most work but it's also his project that is most closely tied to Harmy's release, so the sync can be done before the release while the foreign PAL-synced tracks would have to be synced later by less-experienced peoble (which may cause even more confusion).

A third idea is to cut out only 1 frame of the picture to achieve a compromise for all PAL and NTSC tracks. Would a sync error of 1 frame still be noticeable, considering that the GOUT tracks go in and out of sync all the time?

Harmy said:

If I decided to do that, I would probably release v2.1 as just AVCHD with just the basic mixes found on v1.0, plus the commentaries. This would then be perfectly congruent with v2.1 of SW (an AVCHD only release with much better picture than v1.0 and better colors and on top of that some 35mm shots, where they were most needed and better despecialization all around). This would mean that ESB v2.1 could probably be out sometime next week and it would give me some time to gather all the resources for v2.5's audio and subtitles and make that the ultimate, fully featured release.

What do you guys think?

Sounds good as there wasn't a big difference in picture quality between the AVCHD and the MKV version. What really surprises me is that the credits could be done in such a short time. Would it be possible to release some of the foreign audio tracks that would have been included in the MKV version along with the AVCHD, I mean separately? Though I know how to create synched audio tracks, my results aren't nearly as good as the official ones.

Is there really an occasion where someone needs subtitles and the overlay for rounded corners at the same time? TESB doesn't have any burnt-in subtitles, every existing GOUT-synched language track can be added to the file and everybody speaks English anyway. I heavily oppose the idea of not removing the rounded corners because they are unnatural for HD-formats that already have been cut and, what is most important, because it's an irreversible decision once the project files don't exist anymore. On the other side, saving the rectangular picture is not an irreversible decision. And even if we are arguing about few pixels, they are quiet noticable, especially during the Hoth scenes. I've talked to some people and your extra effort to recreate the rectangular picture is very much appreciated, Harmy.

dbG33K said:

Can I ask what that means? Painting them out invisibly?

 Duplicating the coloured pixels that are next to the rounded corners.

Harmy said:

OK, although it makes me quite unhappy and I still disagree with most of the arguments against the corners, the backlash from so many people invested in this project makes me even unhappier, so I'm gonna get rid of the corners. It will be quite a lot of work though, so I expect it to push the release a bit.

Thanks, you're awesome!!!

I also think C) is the best choice if only some shots are affected.

msycamore said:

It's the opposite. If the rounded corners of the 35mm frames are visible, the frames aren't cropped enough if original theatrical aspect ratio and presentation is the goal.

But those aren't the rounded corners of the 35mm frames. If there's any scene in the workprint that naturally has the rounded corners in the same place (because 35mm frames had to be used) and the missing picture information can't be "restored" by duplication or the use other sources, this clipping mask would make sense.