schorman13

Update:
First, I’m sorry that I’ve not posted the final versions yet! I live in Miami, and while we didn’t get Hurricane Dorian, I did have to spend a bit of that Labor Day weekend preparing my house in the event that we did.

In addition to that, the extra languages quickly ballooned to the point that I’m working on upwards of 15 foreign language subtitle tracks per film, which is 90 tracks. Fixing OCR errors in one’s native language is tedious enough, let alone 90, in languages I don’t actually speak.

I spent last weekend transcribing the crawl text for the various languages and throughout this week, I’ve finalized the different tracks for encoding to BD Sup. At this point I have all assets encoded for the PT, and should be able to finalize the OT this evening. I’ll spend Saturday muxing and QC’ing the different files in hopes of posting by Sunday.

I’ll then be able to start encoding the low-bitrate video tracks for upload later in the week.

At this point, the only thing I’d like to include, but haven’t been able to find would be Polish and Japanese audio and subtitles from the DVD releases. I might be able to include those in later releases, if I ever track down legitimate dvd rips.

nightstalkerpoet said:

Wowow is based on the bluray mix rather than the DVD mix.

My one curiosity - will you be including a “fixed” dvd mix. If I remember correctly, the surround channels were swapped during portions of the 2004 audio master.

I’m not planning to include any Blu Ray based audio tracks, and I’m not planning to create or include a fixed 5.1 mix. That’s not really the point of this release. You’ll notice that I’m not color correcting either. I think of that as one of the unique aspects of this particular version of ANH.

It might be easiest to just render that out using AviSynth. I can do it for you if you want.

This weeks update:

All audio is finished and the only thing left is to finish subtitles. Here’s the subtitle list for my release:

Forced Subtitles (Where necessary):
English
Spanish (Castillian)
Spanish (Latino)
French (Quebecois) [PT only]
French
Portuguese (Brazilian)
German
Italian

Full Subtitles:
English
English SDH
Spanish (Castillian)
Spanish (Latino)
French
Portuguese (Brazilian)
German
Italian
Dutch

At this point all subtitling has been ripped from DVD sources, error-corrected, and synced, but since my release will only have an English crawl, I’m going to transcribe the various foreign language crawls and include them in the subtitles. I’ve got the Dutch and Portuguese tracks already done. So that’s the only thing holding up the release at the moment.

Hopefully, I’ll be able to finish that over the coming weekend and share by Monday.

Ok, right now I’m working on audio.

I’ve tracked down the 5.1 Castillian Spanish and the 5.1 Italian mixes, but still need to speed correct and sync to the NTSC versions.

If anyone has access to the Polish 5.1 or Japanese 5.1 mixes, I would also like to include those.

sent you a pm d_j.

Ok, I’ve finished my high bit-rate encodes, and they are indeed soft subbed. I’m working on the 5.1 French audio from @MalàStrana and have also received Brazilian Portuguese tracks that I need to sync as well.

I’m going to get going on the lower bitrate encode, which I’ll hard sub.

Thanks! Yes, I’m looking for the PAL releases, with the 5.1 French or Spanish mixes. The US releases use Dolby 2.0 Surround for the French and Spanish tracks.

Just wanted to ask one more time if anyone had access to any other 2001-2005 alternate language dubs from the original DVD releases.

I have the German 5.1 mixes already, and I’d be most interested in the Spanish and French 5.1 mixes. I’m also aware that 5.1 mixes exist in Italian and Japanese.

Thanks for any contribution you can make!

Update:

I finished encoding today, but after some QC’ing, I’m seeing some pretty bad ringing artifacts along the top and bottom edges of the picture, next to the letterboxing. I’m doing some more testing with the Cinema Craft encoder now, and I think I found a solution. Unfortunately, I’m going to need to re-encode all six films.

nightstalkerpoet said:

I’d go:
1080p x264 adding --vbv-maxrate 18000 --vbv-bufsize 15000 --keyint 48 to your command line

Include the 5.1 track and the commentary track, with your hard subs burnt in.

This should give you a fairly high quality general purpose release.

I’m using Cinema Craft HDE this time for the main version. I’m sure I could use x264 for a lower bitrate version.

MikeWW said:

That scene is fine IMO?
Side note, it’s like the only scene that looks better on the BD version due to the close up moving shots of them sitting having lots of artifacting on the grass in Schorman’s version.

I wonder if some kind of fusion of the two could be done. Keep the higher bitrate of the BD, but somehow give it the color grading of the HDTV version.

And this is just fantasizing really, but could, through some kind of partial transparency effect, the extra digital noise and detail of the HDTV be overlaid on the hypothetical color corrected BD footage?

Unfortunately, you can’t really combine the Blu Ray and HDTV versions of Attack of the Clones perfectly. The Blu Ray has just been tweaked too much. You can get a sort of mediocre result using this code in avisynth:

BluRay.Merge(BluRay.MergeChroma(HDTV.Merge(BluRay.Invert()))).Tweak(sat=2,bright=1.5,coring=false)

Everyone may find links at the starwarstrilogy forums.

What would you suggest for that sort of release? Just burned-in subs and 5.1 English audio? What about the commentary, or Stereo mixes?

SnooPac said:

schorman13 said:

I would recommend looking at the scene with Anakin and Padme in the field on Naboo.

…said no one ever.

😃

Lol, True enough. I will never quite get over the trauma of this particular film being the one that I needed to go through frame-by-frame.

Yes, no change was made in sync for any of the video tracks. Just the audio for ESB, TPM, and ROTS.

Of course, the subtitle scenes will be different, I would recommend looking at the scene with Anakin and Padme in the field on Naboo. There are lots of patches throughout that scene. The German HDTV had a lot of problems with any scenes with bright greens or bright reds, as well as with sudden flashes of white light, so basically all of AOTC. There are lots of patches throughout that scene.

I don’t want to over sell this update. The main work I’ve done is to upgrade the secondary source and minimized patches from the Blu Ray to nearly zero. Although I did use them in SW and Jedi to remove the subs. Besides the ALTA/Opening Crawls, there are no full scenes that were ever completely from the lower quality source. I could have done it that way, but it was always too easy to spot. Mostly we’re talking about 3-5 frame patches throughout to cover encoding glitches, or less frequently stream errors, which might be around 10-15 frames at a time, depending.

AOTC and Jedi have by far the most patching, because of how much red and green they have. It may not be completely visible when watching in motion, but there are just hundreds of 3-5 frame segments, where blocking artifacts that will cover significant parts of the screen. But, again, we’re talking about less than 15,000 frames for AOTC, in total that have been upgraded. That’s only like 7% of the film.

Anyway the other main upgrade will be the improved audio sync.

Yeah, no problem! I meant to say before, that I’d like to upgrade the Spanish and French audio to 5.1. If anyone happens to have rips from the French and Spanish PAL DVDs, I could speed correct and include those. Unfortunately they are only in stereo on the NTSC discs.

I wanted to announce that I’ve nearly completed upgraded versions of my HDTV preservations. All that is left to do at this point is to run final encodes of the video tracks. Here is a brief summary of the issues/improvents that it will provide.

Original Project:
Video:
My original impetus for this project came from the fact that the best available HDTV rips of the six films came from a German broadcast, which had a very high bitrate, but used the German crawl, and German subtitles, an more importantly, suffered from numerous broken frames, encoding issues, and glitches for lack of a better description. AOTC and ROTJ are especially bad in this regard.

My original for the project has been to make versions of the films that are frame accurate to the English versions of the films, in 1080p, in the best possible quality. This required an alternate rip of the films from an English broadcast, for the purpose of replacing the German crawl/ALTA, any burned-in German subtitles, and for patching over any damaged frames from the German broadcast versions.

Unfortunately, the best I could do at the time of the original project, was to use rips from SKYTV UK, which had been cropped and re-encoded from the original captures. These were of noticeably worse quality compared with the German versions, but since I wanted to avoid using the blu rays, they were the best I could do. Notably, it wasn’t possible to use the Blu Rays at all for TPM or AOTC, due to TPM being an entirely new transfer and AOTC using a significantly different color grade. I did use the Blu Rays as an element in creating the Crawls for episodes 2-6, as the English HDTV versions were noticeably worse in quality than the rest of the films.

Audio:
I basically just used the 5.1 and stereo mixes of the films as-is from their DVD releases. Notably, the NTSC release of AOTC did not include a stereo mix, so I used the track from the Australian PAL DVD, speed corrected from 25fps to 23.976fps, for that mix. I also included the DVD commentary track and the Spanish and French dubs.

I don’t know how aware people are of this, but the original NTSC DVDs of the OT and PT films have a few sync issues when compared with the HDTV broadcasts, and the corresponding Blu Ray versions. Namely, ROTS is missing what should be frame #112670, ESB is missing frames #59815 and #123004, and TPM is missing #82926 and #150518. In my original versions, I just left those frames in the video, and this meant that the audio did not perfectly sync for those three films. You may notice or you might not, but I have come to be pretty sensitive to that kind of thing, and definitely notice it now.

Subtitles:
I originally included a custom English track as well as a Spanish track in idx/sub format.

Updates for v2:

Video:

I was finally able to track down the original SKY TV UK rips. These still have a lower bitrate than the German Premier versions, but are a much much closer match quality-wise. The level of detail is nearly identical and the colors match exactly, which was not true in the original version of this project. I have replaced all the original edits with these rips as a source. I am also able to use these as direct sources for the English crawls, and no-longer use the Blu Rays to enhance.

I have also used some compositing to eliminate the burned in subtitles for the four films that had them. Mostly this was accomplished by masking the German and English subs and then overlaying the two films. This did require a third source for any subs that had overlap between the german and english subtitle masks. Obviously this required third source for the film, which for SW and Jedi was the Blu Ray, as the masters for those films are largely identical to the DVD/HDTV versions. For TPM and AOTC, the Blu Rays are too different for the compositing to work. I was able to use the original DVDs upscaled with Super Resolution as the source for this. This was a much bigger factor for TPM, as most of the subs in AOTC didn’t overlap at all. It’s actually not noticeable at all and looks pretty much perfect.

Audio:
I have updated the audio tracks for each of the films that had sync issues. This was done losslessly, meaning without needing to re-encode the ac3 tracks, by splitting the AC3 tracks in the correct location, then encoding small patches that use the PAL DVDs as a source, and finally inserting those patches into the original ac3 stream. This fixes represent somewhere between 30 and 90 milliseconds of audio per film, but it’s very difficult to get this to work and make the patches fit seamlessly into the stream. I won’t go into the details, due to complexity, but it is seamless, and should fix all audio sync issues.

I will also include the correct 5.1 German dubs, as these were specifically requested last time.

Subtitles:
I will include a few additional tracks here, and will be using typical PGS/SUP format rathere than IDX/SUB. I’m going to include subs for the DVD commentary, which are sourced from the Blu Rays, as well as the correct English SDH tracks ripped from the DVDs.

Feedback:

My main question going forward is to gauge preferences for the alien subtitles before I encode. I can make these subtitle tracks, meaning I can just leave the video clean and have it be soft-subbed. For what it’s worth, that is how the DVD versions were originally. I can also hard sub and have them encoded on the video. Remember that the English HDTV versions of AOTC actually have the theatrical subs. This is not true for SW, Jedi, or TPM.

The main benefit of hard subbing is that the TPM and AOTC actually use subtitles that fade-in and fade-out. This is not really possible to do using PGC/SUP subtitles (I mean, you can sorta do it, but it pretty much won’t work). If I hard sub, the TPM subs will look a little more authentic on playback. The other benefit is that it saves from having to include an additional subtitle track, which you’ll have to remember to turn on any time you play the movie.

The drawback is mainly that, though they look nearly perfect, they’re not technically authentic, in the cases of TPM, SW, and Jedi. I also kind of prefer to soft sub, as it leaves these versions more open to being used for other purposes.

I’m also curious if there would be anything else that anyone would like to include, within reason. I could theoretically include German and French subs if it’s desired.

Anyway, thanks for any feedback you may have. Once I decide on how to proceed with the subtitles, I should be able to share these within the week.
😃

Bitperfect audio for this is included in my LD Audio Archive. It’s on myspleen.

I have a Blackmagic Decklink Mini Recorder PCIe card that I’m not using. I’ll sell the to you for a steal. Just let me know if you’re interested.

Jesta’ said:

ChainsawAsh said:

Theatrical version of ROTS exists. It’s just the HDTV with the missing wipe restored. Schorman did it.

I also think there are differences in the crawl timing. Not to mention that the Blu Ray is a higher quality source than the HDTV rip.

There’s no difference in the crawl timing between the Workprint bootleg, the DVD, the HDTV versions, the Blu Ray, the Streaming versions, or the Theatrical DTS CD audio for that matter. They are frame-for-frame identical. I’m not sure where you’re getting that idea.

For what it’s worth, the Blu Ray has more DNR than the HDTV master has.

5.1 and stereo versions are already available. PM sent.

Swift S. Lawliet said:

4K83 sync in DTS-HD Master Audio 1.0.

It’s posted already on the star wars trilogy boards on the audio thread for 4K83. DTS-HD MA and 192kbps AC3 are posted.

There are audio changes as well. I remember two in particular. I’m still waiting for the DataSat digital CD’s for TFA to show up somewhere.

bttfbrasilfan said:

schorman13 said:

Leoj said:

Does anybody knows what font is used on the GOUT DVD R1?

My best guess is “Franklin Gothic Condensed Book” or “Franklin Gothic Compressed Book”.  Leaning more toward Condensed.

http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/urw/franklin-gothic/

It looks like “Open Sans”. The oficial Star Wars Complete Saga BD uses this same font for the subtitles, but hi-res. I think it’s the same font, although I can’t be 100% sure.

https://fonts.google.com/specimen/Open+Sans

It’s close, but the s looks totally different on the DVD version.

That’s probably exactly what they used for the BDs, though.

a_o said:

for some reason the movies anywhere version doesn’t sync with much of the soundtrack cd or ‘for your consideration’ mp3s in pluraleyes. i suppose one could do it manually. the score-only file i found is just 96k aac.

That’s the unencrypted version you can rip from the movies anywhere website. It’s also available through iTunes and through the movies anywhere Roku app with a higher bit rate of, iirc, 160k. The trouble is that it’s encrypted, so one would need to capture the decoded output, much akin to capturing laserdisc PCM audio. In addition to that, it’s also available in 5.1 through iTunes, which, again, can be captured/ripped in the same manner as LD ac3 using an AppleTV.