SNOWPIERCER (Le Transperceneige)

[pipefan413]

SNOWPIERCER

a preservation by pipefan413

This is less of a restoration and more of a preservation / resync similar to the one I did for NEAR DARK. The difference is that this time I have lossless audio to play with, meaning I have no qualms about decoding, editing, and re-encoding back to the source format again (DTS-HD Master Audio, 7.1) rather than feeling I had to limit myself to only trims and delays to avoid degradation (as you'd get from re-encoding a lossy format to a lossy format after editing).

As a bonus, I've also gone through all the English subtitles translating from other languages (almost exclusively, Korean) and re-translated them myself, in an attempt to both fill in blanks where lines were not translated at all and also to slightly improve the accuracy of representation of what's being said. These are available in both PGS (Blu-ray Disc compatible) and SRT (simple text-only) format, and can be forced so that your player should play them back by default. (Some hardware that will play PGS off a disc won't do so from an MKV file over USB or whatever, which is mostly what the SRT file is for.)

The idea is, put simply, to take the best existing elements available and combine them. This could be defined as a remux, but I'd argue that somewhat oversimplifies what's involved; I'm not just taking demuxed streams and sticking them together, I'm also very precisely synchronising them down to individual audio sample accuracy rather than just doing simple positive or negative delays, which are limited to cutting at whole audio frames (in this case, each containing 512 samples). In practice, I do not expect anybody to notice the difference (including me) but it makes me happier to know that I've done absolutely everything I could to keep this as spot on as possible... assuming, of course, that the original South Korean release was accurately synchronised in the first place. Still... at 48 kHz, there are 48000 audio samples per second, each lasting for 0.0208333 milliseconds, making that my error margin with this method. If I'd stuck to delays only, I'd have ended up with the audio being about 2.375 milliseconds ahead of the video. Doing it this way means that the audio is precisely the same sync as its original South Korean presentation down to ~1/50 of a millisecond. It also results in a more efficient DTS-HD MA encode, for one reason or another (I believe this has more to do with the original South Korean video bitrate than anything else).

I have direct sources for just about everything at this point. If you have another release with different subtitles that you'd like me to include, let me know; I think I'm only missing Japanese, Chinese and Russian, but they're expensive or awkward to get a hold of where I am so I'm not going to force the issue. I've already spent entirely too much money on this one film, frankly...

I already have the following international Blu-ray Disc releases, all of which have contributed at least something (even if it's just a subtitle track) to this project...

• South Korea
  
• France (BD + DVD)
  
• Italy (2 x BD)
  
• Germany (Steelbook, BD + DVD)
  
• Norway
  
• US (Anchor Bay 2 x BD special edition, now out of print)
  

... and the only one I own that is completely useless to me is the brand new UK release, which has nothing new on it at all. The audio and video are the same as the earlier Australian release, which is in turn a repackaging of the 2-disc US version but with 16-bit instead of 24-bit 5.1 DTS-HD MA audio, and the bonus features on the UK disc are edited down.

I was waiting to check the long-awaited UK Blu-ray Disc before releasing this project, but since it's a bunch of crap in a slipcase, here we are!



CURRENT STATUS:

VIDEO: done

AUDIO: done (redone to avoid any automatic dithering)

CUSTOM* ENGLISH PGS + SRT SUBTITLES: done
CUSTOM** ITALIAN PGS SUBTITLES: done

ENGLISH BD SUBTITLES (partial* and full): done
KOREAN BD SUBTITLES (partial* and full): done
FRENCH BD SUBTITLES: done
GERMAN BD SUBTITLES: done
SPANISH BD SUBTITLES: done
DANISH BD SUBTITLES: done
FINNISH BD SUBTITLES: done
NORWEGIAN BD SUBTITLES: done
SWEDISH BD SUBTITLES: done
ITALIAN BD SUBTITLES: done - do not translate English text at start because Italian BD has Italian text burned in instead**

* This film has dialogue in multiple languages, with the vast majority being English and a substantial portion of the rest being Korean. The partial subtitle tracks (including my custom English ones) are translation only. So, for the Korean, this means translating only non-Korean (mostly English), for English it means translating only non-English (mostly Korean).

** The German and Italian releases actually have German/Italian versions of the text burned into the video and so the Italian one doesn't translate it in the subtitles, hence that translation not being present here (but curiously, the German one does duplicate it in both the video itself and the subtitles). The French and German releases include audio dubs in their respective languages, which have also not been included here, because they would significantly bulk up the file size and honestly the official French and German releases are already fine as they are if you want to watch them dubbed in those languages. They do not suffer from the 1.85:1 to 1.78:1 crop that plagues all of the English language region releases of this film (the Italian one did but they actually fixed and reissued it, unlike any of the English language distributors).


Newly translated subtitle samples:



For comparison purposes, here are some of the changes to the English subtitles translating other languages (almost exclusively Korean)...

US BD: not translated at all... in the film, the translation device fails and says "unknown words found... please try again using correct vocabulary" because it doesn't recognise his name or the slang/swearing
New translation: "And first off, it's not 'Nam', it's Namgoong. Namgoong Minsoo, ask your mother..." (oh dang!)

US BD: "I won't waste it on a prick like you." (he's talking about a cigarette... "won't" is a kinda weird way to phrase this)
New translation: "But... do scum like you even know what cigarettes taste like?" (the actual word is really "dog" or "cur" but that sounds inappropriately posh)

US BD: "And do you know what I saw recently?" (sounds like days or weeks ago, right?)
New translation: "And earlier... do you know what I saw?" (he's actually talking about a few hours ago max, so "recently" is a weird word to use)

There's also a whole section about "the type of snow that's about to melt" that's really clumsy and incoherent (and other sections that are similarly baffling), all of which has now been re-translated as accurately and naturally as possible... and so on and so forth. I'm not going to put everything here since it's a lot and some of it would be pretty spoilery as well.


A NOTE ON FOREIGN LANGUAGE (DUBBED) AUDIO:

I noticed that as soon as I finished work on NEAR DARK, people wanted different audio languages that I hadn't included. This was kinda intentional, partly because I couldn't verify the quality of the dubs (and indeed based on how screwed up the English audio was, it seemed likely there would be issues with the dubs too; at least some of it was definitely PAL pitch shifted, for starters). What I've tried to do with this one is spend a lot of time and cash tracking down as many international releases as possible to provide foreign language subtitles, but do not currently intend to include the audio dubs. I have two main reasons for leaving the audio out. First and foremost, this is not mono or stereo we're talking about here, it's full 7.1 and 5.1 lossless surround mixes, and they're big. Secondly, though, the official Blu-rays that contain dubs are currently not that hard to get hold of if you're in the countries that they're sold in (e.g. France, Germany, Italy...) and I've included very detailed notes on my process with this which means you can very easily demux the audio yourself and then apply either a negative or positive delay in eac3to to sync it with this release (the exact offsets are in the documentation). From my point of view, if you want a copy of this then you should already own the film on Blu-ray anyway!

[pipefan413]

This is now pretty much done apart from that I'd like to include the Italian PGS subtitles and don't have an Italian copy to source from. I'm going to try to grab one tomorrow but I might not manage it (I don't live in Italy and I don't want to spend a fortune on it because the only thing I'd be using it for is Italian subtitles... and I don't speak Italian).

If anybody has the Italian Blu-ray Disc and can help me out here I'd be grateful!

I wanted to share some screenshots and info about the custom translated subtitles I did for this but I figured they'd probably be more at home in the top post of the thread so I've updated it, as well as updating the status of the subtitles off the Norwegian release (they're actually already in sync with my custom trimmed version of the video, mostly through sheer coincidence).

Incidentally, do the mods move "in progress" threads to the "completed" / "released" section, or should I just keep making separate threads there once things are finished?

[spoRv]

You got mail...

US BD: not translated at all... in the film, the translation device fails and says "unknown words found... please try again using correct vocabulary" because it doesn't recognise his name or the slang/swearing
New translation: "It's not 'Nam', it's Namgoong... Namgoong Minsoo, ask your mother." (oh dang!)

At 00:31:35,662, the Italian subs have that line translated, still next line is "Termini sconosciuti." and then "Riprovi con un vocabolario corretto."... so, the problems are in the Italian subtitles, too... if you need help, let me know!

[pipefan413]

You got mail...

US BD: not translated at all... in the film, the translation device fails and says "unknown words found... please try again using correct vocabulary" because it doesn't recognise his name or the slang/swearing
New translation: "It's not 'Nam', it's Namgoong... Namgoong Minsoo, ask your mother." (oh dang!)

At 00:31:35,662, the Italian subs have that line translated, still next line is "Termini sconosciuti." and then "Riprovi con un vocabolario corretto."... so, the problems are in the Italian subtitles, too... if you need help, let me know!

Thanks for the reply!

"Termini sconosciuti. Riprovi con un vocabolario corretto." - that's correct, it's just the electronic translation device in the film failing to understand the character (basically he's Korean and most of the characters speak English so they try to use an electronic device to understand each other but it barely works). The subtitles I found online were SRT rather than PGS and are not sourced so I don't know if they represent what was presented on the official release or not; the line about his name being translated might be someone else doing the translation themselves. I think that's probably the case, partly because the words chosen do not really reflect what is being spoken but could very likely have been translated from subtitles that have appeared online in another language e.g. English. Having said that, the official French subtitles do translate the line (most if not all others don't). So maybe it is like this on disc. Anyway apparently the Italian version is...

Il mio nome non è "Nem", è "Nam".
Namgoung Minsoo, cazzo.

This is basically close enough, I think. Part of the trouble with translating this bit is that he's being derisive about Chris Evans' character's American accent and misunderstanding/mispronunciation of his Korean name; Evans says "Nam" in an American accent which comes out more like "Nehm", which sounds vaguely similar to the word "naemi" in Korean, which means "smell". So the reply is...

그리고 원래 냄이 아니라 남! 남궁, 남 궁 민 수. 니애미...

... which I think is something like, "And firstly, it's not 'smell', it's 'Nam'...  Namgoong Minsoo." (The "니애미" on the end, "niaemi," is basically the equivalent of Biff Tannen saying "Say hi to your mom for me" to Marty McFly in Back to the Future, except it takes a tiny fraction of the time to say so is tough to subtitle.) But if you try to put all that in subtitles it's confusing and/or needs too many words to explain.

I'm still after the official Italian subtitles off disc, will update if I manage to buy an Italian copy reasonably cheaply or if somebody is able to demux the subtitles from it or something! EDIT: I've now bought an Italian copy because I'm an idiot completionist, so as soon as it arrives I'll be demuxing and syncing the PGS tracks from that as well as making a "forced" version to include with all the others.

ANOTHER EDIT: good post day today...



Woah, what?!

Check this out:

Code:

M2TS, 1 video track, 2 audio tracks, 2 subtitle tracks, 2:06:25, 24p
1: Chapters, 16 chapters
2: h264/AVC, 1080p24 (16:9)
3: DTS Master Audio, Italian, 5.1 channels, 24 bits, 48kHz
   (core: DTS, 5.1 channels, 1509kbps, 48kHz)
4: DTS Master Audio, English, 5.1 channels, 24 bits, 48kHz
   (core: DTS, 5.1 channels, 1509kbps, 48kHz)
5: Subtitle (PGS), Italian
6: Subtitle (PGS), Italian
v02 The video framerate is correct, but rather unusual.

[pipefan413]

I think this is pretty much sorted, so I'm going to try to get this finalised today.

Slight adjustment to plan is that I think I've changed my mind and decided not to include the following subtitle options, because they're only useful if you're going to be watching the film with one of the foreign language audio dubs that I'm not including anyway. If you do want to watch it with the dubs and/or these subtitles, then you can get them easily enough off the official Blu-ray Disc releases yourself and use the offsets I've given in the (extremely thorough!) documentation to sync them without having to do all the legwork. Also, there's so much stuff included here (and many of them are subtitle options) that I feel like including these as well just makes it confusing.

Partial French subtitles from FR BD (meant for watching with French audio dub):
  SNOWPIERCER-FR-PGS-112--13514ms-FORCED.sup

Partial Italian subtitles from IT BD (for watching with Italian audio dub):
  SNOWPIERCER-IT-PGS-94--26109ms-FORCED.sup

Partial German subtitles from DE BD (for watching with German audio dub):
  SNOWPIERCER-DE-PGS-93--5714ms-FORCED.sup

I will, however, be including the following...

CUSTOM KOREAN-ENGLISH TRANSLATION (new for this release):
  SNOWPIERCER-EN-SRT-98-pipefan413.srt (also muxed in and set as Default + Forced in main MKV file)
  SNOWPIERCER-EN-SRT-98-FORCED-pipefan413.sup (marked Forced to encourage players to display by default, if used correctly)

ENGLISH-KOREAN TRANSLATION (from KR BD):
  SNOWPIERCER-KO-PGS-944-+375ms.sup

Plus full subtitles (for the deaf and hard of hearing and/or for those who do not understand English and/or Korean) in the following languages...

Code:

SNOWPIERCER-EN-PGS-1320--18644ms.sup*           ENGLISH (US BD)
SNOWPIERCER-KO-PGS-1049-+375ms.sup              한국어 (KR BD)
SNOWPIERCER-FR-PGS-1179--13514ms.sup            FRANÇAIS (FR BD)
SNOWPIERCER-IT-PGS-1225--26109ms-CUSTOM.sup**   ITALIANO (IT BD)
SNOWPIERCER-ES-PGS-1191--18644ms.sup            ESPAÑOL (US BD)
SNOWPIERCER-DE-PGS-1065--5714ms.sup             DEUTSCH (DE BD)
SNOWPIERCER-DA-PGS-937.sup                      DANSK (NO BD)
SNOWPIERCER-FI-PGS-962.sup                      SUOMI (NO BD)
SNOWPIERCER-NO-PGS-936.sup                      NORSK (NO BD)
SNOWPIERCER-SV-PGS-937.sup                      SVENSKA (NO BD)

* If you're watching the film as an English native who doesn't know Korean,
these are probably the ones you'll want, unless it's more important that you get
all the English dialogue transcribed as well (e.g. if you're deaf or hard of
hearing). The SRT version is already muxed into the main MKV video file and
flagged as "forced" to encourage players to display it by default, but if you're
muxing to put this on a disc or into an AVCHD folder to play off a USB drive on
a device that supports graphical subtitles, you'll probably want the forced PGS
version instead because it'll most likely look nicer than the text-only SRT.

** The German and Italian releases replace the English text at the beginning of
the film with German/Italian translations which appear as text burned into the
video stream itself, and the Italian one doesn't translate it in the subtitles,
so I've created a custom Italian subtitle track that incorporates that text
alongside the other subtitles from that release. (Curiously, the German release
actually does duplicate the German text in both the video itself and the
subtitles; I was about to do the same again before I realised I didn't have to!)
The Italian BD was the only one that ran at 24 fps so I first adjusted it to
match the rest by slowing it down slightly to 23.976 fps, then inserted the
additional text.

Here are some screenshots showing what I mean about the Italian subtitles:

[pipefan413]

Well, every time I say I'm finished, I'm not. But it's usually for good reason!

I was done except that I really wanted to include the US commentary track, even though it's occasionally kinda... grating? I dunno, I'm not a big fan of listening to American critics try to sound clever while filling loads of gaps with annoying big tongue clicks and ums and uhs, but there is some insight buried in amongst it as well so I wanted to include it. However, there was no straightforward way to do that because the audio and video lengths of the US BD are significantly longer than the KR and FR BDs used in this project. Also, it's further complicated by the fact that the commentary tracks is very low quality 192 kbps Dolby AC-3, and the film audio playing in the background is mixed in with the actual commentary so there's not really a simple way of removing it in order to do the edits required. I originally did an edit ages ago with me selectively cutting out awkward pauses and mouth noises to truncate the beginning of the commentary so that it caught up with sync as quickly as possible, but the film audio in the background made that awful so I abandoned that approach. What I've done here is *significantly* more complex, but the results are much, much better...

The methodology here was similar to what I did when combining audio for the updated StudioCanal logo with old film audio from DVD for NEAR DARK not too long ago. It basically involved two main processes:

1. Editing the lossy AC-3 without re-encoding by knocking out very very carefully chosen and specified whole audio frames (each being 1536 samples long, or 0.032 seconds). I did this primarily by looking at waveforms in Audacity / RX to view individual samples for accuracy, running a whole bunch of calculations, then editing using eac3to to apply negative and positive delays and MKVToolNix to trim out the exact chunks of AC-3 audio that I wanted to keep. I also inserted a brief 0.512 second pause in between two pieces of speech that were originally separate to make the edit less conspicuous, and I'm pretty happy . I concatinated the separate pieces together to get a final continuous AC-3 audio stream at 192 kbps (stereo) with no re-encoding, except for...
   
   
2. Creating a custom stereo (Dolby Pro Logic II) downmix of the previously synchronised 7.1 DTS-HD Master Audio from the start of the CJ Entertainment logo (similar to the StudioCanal one I did for NEAR DARK) to fill a short 8.096 second gap at the start of my newly synchronised commentary track, after reducing the gain (because the 7.1 is loud as hell) and adding a fade out right before the commentary host starts talking.
   

Not only does this mean that the US commentary is now available with this release (it was only included on the US and AU BDs, it isn't on others such as the brand new UK one from this month)... it also has the rather nice side effect of removing approximately 18 seconds of the host rambling about where we might know them from, which is - in my uncouth opinion - inane and annoying as hell. I don't feel I've removed anything of value here, and if you really really want to hear the bit I've removed, it's still on the US and AU releases anyway (I'm including it here so that you don't have to offend your retinas with the awful cropped 1.78:1 video on those releases).

Here's a transcription of the bit that was edited so that you can see for yourself what I took out...

ORIGINAL (source):
"Hello! This is Scott Weinberg. I am a, uh, film critic [annoying tongue click]
of about fifteen years, uh, from... you might know some of my work from, uh,
Cinematical, aaaaaand Fearnet... uh, currently you can see my stuff at uh,
Geek Nation, and The Horror Show, and a few others. Coming soon... but... uh...
um... lately I've been mainly known as a film critic on Twitter."

EDITED:
"Hello! This is Scott Weinberg. Lately I've been mainly known as a film critic
on Twitter."

-

OVERALL RESULTS

What I'm left with after all of this is, I think, as follows...

VIDEO: frames 325-181393 of the 1080p AVC off the FR BD (trimmed at keyframes, so NOT re-encoded!)

AUDIO: lossless DTS-HD Master Audio encode of very accurately trimmed original 7.1 English/Korean mix from South Korean BD, synchronised to accuracy of 1 audio sample (1/48000th of a second); no actual audio is lost in the trimming because there was more than enough zero-byte complete silence on either end, and the final audio stream now lasts only 88 samples (0.00183 sec) less than the video track

COMMENTARY: edit of US BD commentary in original 192 kbps Dolby AC-3 including custom encode of CJ Entertainment logo music to fill an 8.096 second gap at the start (re-synchronised to accuracy of approx. 10 milliseconds due to only being able to cut at whole AC-3 audio frames, which are 1536 samples long, and trimmed without needing to re-encode anything so that it lasts only 0.00125 sec less than the video)

SUBTITLES: 15 PGS + 1 SRT subtitle tracks in 10 different languages, including a custom English translation (both graphical PGS and text SRT) of Korean and other foreign dialogue by me + custom version of Italian PGS track that adds translation of the English text at the beginning of the film + numerous PGS subtitle tracks in many languages from official BD releases (all very precisely re-synchronised as well, of course)


So now, I think, all that's left for me to do is some editorial on my documentation before I call it done and focus on something else (which should probably be my translation of Hachiko Monogatari, because I keep working on other things due to it being bloody hard work)!

[Kynch]

Fantastic work, my chap.

Which format are you planning on releasing this in?

[pipefan413]

Fantastic work, my chap.

Which format are you planning on releasing this in?

MKV containing...
1. H.264 video
2. DTS-HD Master Audio 7.1
3. Dolby AC-3 commentary
4. Text only (SRT) version of my custom translation subtitles
5. Chapters

+ separate PGS files for all other subtitles (including a graphical PGS version of the above SRT track) in folders, one for full / SDH, one for selective translation of specific dialogue, so you can mux what you want to a folder structure such as AVCHD to improve player compatibility

If you play MKV off USB on my UHD Blu-ray player, for example, it ignores PGS streams and chapters... but mux the exact same streams to AVCHD folder structure and both work perfectly. Obviously it also has no problem playing back with chapters and PGS subtitles if you mux and burn to BD as well. I think making something as particular (and, dare I say, dated) as AVCHD the primary format is probably the wrong call, though, so you can just use the MKV as is unless you want nicer PGS subtitles or one of the non-English tracks.

[pipefan413]

UPDATE: commentary is done. I changed my approach a few times as I tested various ways of doing this.

Here is the structure of the final commentary track:

00:00:00.000 - 00:00:48.352    Re-synchronised 24-bit 7.1 with gain reduced by
                               10 dB, downmixed to 2.0, encoded to 192 kbps AC-3

00:00:48.352 - 02:05:52.992    Re-synchronised 192 kbps AC-3 commentary, edited
                               for sync by removing the first 66.944 seconds

Total: 362,543,616 audio samples
       236,031‬ Dolby AC-3 audio frames

The commentary was not re-encoded at any point (only the 7.1 film audio, which was done from 24-bit lossless DTS-HD Master Audio source rather than anything that was already lossy); the first 2,092 AC-3 audio frames were simply removed from the beginning to achieve the most accurate sync possible without re-encoding (which would have only been ~9.27 ms more accurate, which is an imperceptible discrepancy that would not justify lossy to lossy re-encoding).

[pipefan413]

COMPLETED: https://fanrestore.com/thread-3262.html