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Could Square Re-Dub the "Final Fantasy" Movie? 228

Posted by Cliff from the that's-a-lotta-movie-to-rerender dept.
Vegan Pagan asks: "A big part of the FF movie's appeal is how seamless it is, particularly the lip-synching. However, this movie has been synched only to English, and a traditional, audio-only, dub into other languages would ruin it. It seems that to entertain and sell to all audiences equally, Square must re-animate all of the characters' faces, and perhaps the rest of their bodies as well. But since they have already spent so much on this movie, can they afford to?" More thoughts on the question below, but I have to say...while some of you may have Episode 2 on the brain, this movie is something that I've been waiting on for a long time. I hope it's as good as it looks from the trailers.

I imagine, if Square has the money, time and desire, that they could also render a version in Japanese. I would guess that the dubbing is done using some manner of capturing the mouth movements on the voice actors faces, and then appling that data to the movement of their models. However, the issues of how they dub I think are secondary to the cost necessary in re-rendering those areas of the film for the other version. Would Square do something like this? It would be really cool if they did.
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How Will "Final Fantasy" Be Dubbed? More

How Will "Final Fantasy" Be Dubbed?

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  • Re:Square will never make another movie!? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Actually, if i recall, that Square press release stated that they would never independently finance another film. That is, if someone puts up the dough, they'll put their SGI's to work. In this case, Square paid all the expenses and Sony serves just as a distributor.

  • Not for quite a few years (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    First off, they don't render the scenes and then make the audio fit the animation. Instead they record all the dialog and fit the animation to that. This is because it is immensely more difficult to get all the timing right on the dialog than it is to have hundreds of animators sync up to a track they already have. There have been efforts to make mouths move automatically to the sound, but these are imprecise, and you still need an animator to sync up all the other actions. (facial movement, hand, body language, etc). So basically you're looking at redoing a good chunk of the movie from scratch (at least 75%) if you try to sync it to a new soundtrack. I can see it as a posibility 5-10 years from now though, if animation tools get lots better and rendering times go up quite a bit, and there's a huge demand for non-dubbed movies (still have to have lots of voice talent).

  • ahem (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    ahem, I'm from the netherlands, 99% of english TV/Movies we get here is subtitled and we love it that way, if they redub something to dutch it is crap cause of the lousy translations and because the voices never seem done right. And I don't know a fellow countrymen who doesn't speak another language. mostly english but if thats not the case german or french.

  • Why not subtitles? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Pretty much no one dubs movies in Japan -- if you go there, at the theaters, every imported Hollywood movie is SUBTITLED. Why break the trend here?

  • Re:nope (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Er...I blush to say it, but the folks I work for [lipsinc.com] for have language independent automatic lip synching software that should be up to the job. We've tried it with Japanese, Mandarin--no worries.

    I mean, it's not a blatant plug if you asked me, right?

  • Crouching Tiger dub/subtitles. (Score:4)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday May 31, 2001 @05:09PM (#185449)
    I live in Hong Kong. I've seen the dub and the subtitles. The dub version is actually not bad. It's fine to watch. I actually enjoyed watching the English dub+English subtitles. You could tell that the first was done by an American who spoke Mandarin but the second by a Chinese person who spoke English. I guess my point is that *normally* I prefer subtitles, but there are some dubs out there that are worth watching. Also, it seems clear that the interpreter will be influence by his/her culture and that the person selected to do the translation will be picked based upon what the translation is for. In other words, if you want the dub to sound reasonable to an American you'll pick an American who speaks that language to do the interpretation. It will sound more grammatically correct, but will be missing some of the cultural nuances that the American did not understand. On the other hand, if you do the dub and have a native speaker of that language do it it may sound much less grammatically correct, but have enough information to understand (or guess at) some of those cultural nuances. In summary: One method has more information. The other method has less information, but more "order."
  • According to the interview Mike Myers was doing with Rosie O'Donnel on her fascist political platform-based talkshow, Mike Myers re-dubbed all of his lines for Shrek. After seeing a first showing of the movie, he felt that his character lacked a certain fairy tale quality. He asked Steven Spielberg to redub his lines with the scottish accent that you hear in the film today. They had to go through the entire film and adjust to the new dialogue, which added a few extra months of production and a couple extra $million to boot. While technology may be advanced, it is not as advanced as you think. If Square were to do a dub of this magnitude, it would tack a few months of production on to the already overdue project, not to mention a couple $million extra. The film is already overbudget by about twice its original budget; Square could not possibly recoup the money from doing a separate dub.

    Dyslexic.

  • Are you sure that page isn't referring to the OVAs? (Armitage III was originally created as four episodes. Those are available in Japanese and English. Later they were edited into a single movie. The movie is only available in English.)
    -----------
  • The worldwide film industry (and consumers) are already used to having English/American movies subtitled or dubbed and then released in foreign markets.

    I doubt the movie would do as well if Square did the opposite: make a Japanese movie and then release it in the US.
  • I believe this is the technology used on "Late Night with Conan O'Brien's" President Bush/Clinton bits.
  • I've read that Pixar basically created two versions of Toy Story 1 & 2, and a Bug's Life; one meant for wide screen and one meant for 4:3 aspect ratios. Pretty much, the only change between the two was that in shots in widescreen which would have cut out key actors in the edges when pan&scanning to 4:3, they simply moved them into shot more, and thus avoiding any short of p&s. This only happened on a limited number of scenes, so they didn't have to completely regenerate the entire movie.

  • at issue;
    the actual original actors are usually FAR more talented at vocal performance, than cheezy cheap ass foreign language actors used to "satisfy the euro and asian markets" - or vice versa; to break into the US market.

    It's a bullet point on a brochure. The foreign language implementations are often just not as well-funded as the originals.

    This is why the American Translation of Akira sucked eggs. The voice actors made me feel like I was watching a bad Scooby Doo or Flinstones episode.

    When I watch the Japanese version with subtitles, I can read the script to get the meaning, but the japanese voices, which I do not understand, contain the original directed emotional content. The movie had MUCH more impact that way.

    I believe that this problem could potentially be solved by better investment in the dubbing process, casting. Or, possibly, getting the ORIGINAL actors to say their lines in the foreign speech. (because maybe there's an American John Lithgow, but maybe a Japanese voice actor cannot be found that can match the way John Lithgow portrayed a given character) - in any case, even if you do it that way, it won't be the same, because no two performances from a given actor are going to be identical, especially when you throw a foreign language into the deal, because some phrases and jokes don't translate well, or the actor may not understand what's being said as well as a native speaker, so inflection and intonation won't be the same. But even that should be worked around as well.

    My point is, just doing a cheapo dub just to get the asian or euro dollars is dishonest. It asks the foreign audience to pay the same 8 bucks for a product that simply doesn't work the way it would for an English-speaking audience, it's not of the same quality, and therefore, is NOT WORTH THE SAME TICKET PRICE.

    If the studios want to charge the same amount of $ for tickets, they should put much more effort into the translation - and it cuts both ways, for foreign films going to the US.

    Another example; Run Lola Run, (Lola Rennt), I rented the DVD, and I watched the first few minutes in English. Holy shit what a peice of crap! I then watched it in German with English Subtitles (luckily, I DO understand a little Deutsch) and the experience was MUCH better.

    My message to foreign studios: If you want a better piece of the American film market, do a better job in the dubbing, and you'll totally kick Hollywood's ass.

    Here's an exammple of how it was done right: Princess Mononoke. While it didn't to all that fabulous in the US market, it wasn't marketed as mainstream, it was an "art-film". And while the translation wasn't perfect, it was very well done. Let's have more of that, 'k?
  • But rendering is the cost of re-doing it.
    If my boss told me we were re-rendering a video instead of dubing it, I would tell him not on my render farm.
    A lot of production time and money goes into the rendering side of the production.
    The amount of extra money a specific version for a language would produce would not be why anyone would do it.
    If somebody was crazy enough to do this, it would be for arts sake.

  • They did it for toy story 2, if my memory is correct. I thought they were crazy, but they had a monster render farm.

    I don't know if we are doing it either.
    The nice thing about rendering for NTSC vs. Theatre is it is smaller. So, rendering for video lets you preview what it will look like for the big screen.
    But, our last sillysong, which was 16:9, was renered once, except for one shot where the cameraa did a pull/slide move. We rendered the 4:3 version with just the pull.

  • There was a programme on BBC2 the other day about Japanese culture, and they covered this. It said there was a certain "cool" factor about the Final Fantasy films being in English and subtitled.

  • Er, "film" singular, of course :)

  • Re:Subtitles preferred (Score:3)

    by GeorgeH ( 5469 ) on Friday June 01, 2001 @04:46AM (#185460) Homepage Journal
    I'm thinking back to my last trip to Mexico and watching "Los Simpsons" in Spanish for the first time.

    Does Bumblebee Man speak English?
    --
  • What about changing the dialog to fit the animation? It might not make as much sense, but with a little creativity and effort some humorous alternate versions could be made and it would still look cool...
  • Localization in CG movies. Just like when I choose a different language/locale on my X login screen and everything comes up in a different language, it would be great if they could program the movies to do it all fairly automatically.

    Of course I understand that that would be horribly, horribly difficult. But it is a fun idea at least...
  • agreed, sub-titles in the theatre or on a wide-screen seem to be less of a problem that on my hmoe tube. I guess I need to splurge for a larger wide screen TV :)
  • may Ted Turner ROT in hell.
  • I'd like a new 50" HDTV but can't swing the cost, so I'll jst deal with blurry Crap. I agree with your estimation of TV resolution but it is amazing how I never noticed it until I saw an HDTV :)
  • may be the exception there :) It WAS a good movie, Star Wars was a movie 1st I think, Indiana
    Jones was the same way and I'll not EVEN touch MichaelAngelo and company :)
  • ...that did NOT SUCK ???? I hope this one doesn't but I'll catch it on DVD.

  • Can you point to any trends, or figures, other then your own personal preferences to indicate why what you are saying might be true?

    Given that

    1. Computing power doubles every 18 years
    2. Clips of movies like Shrek and Final Fantasy: The Spirit Within could be passed off as real to all but the most careful and scrutinizing observer
    3. You don't have to get the animation perfect, merely 'damned good'
    4. Every CG movie released tops the previous release by leaps and bounds
    It is logical to assume that in five or ten years' time
    1. Computers will be fast enough to render more complex movies than FF:SW in realtime
    2. Animation, modeling, and effect techniques will soon evolve to produce extremely accurate portrayals of the actual universe

    I hope they never do get rid of live-acted movies, and I hope speech synthesis never evolves to the point where it too can replace the real thing. At the same time, however, Final Fantasy: Spirits Within would likely have been cost-prohibitive, or at least looked crappier, if they had used live-action instead of CG rendering.

    Just my two bits

    --Dan
  • I've gone to Europe a couple of times and noticed that instead of voice dubs they do this:subtilting the movie, but who would want to look at the bottom of a screen the whole movie?

    Me. Most other Australian foriegn-film buffs. Overdubs are generally regarded as something that gets done for illiterate Americans . . . :) Overdubs can interrupt the sound effects, get in the road of anyone who *can* understand the original dialogue, tend to paraphrase far more than subtitles (check the difference between the overdub and the "literal translation" of Pricess Mononoke), and the lack of lip-synching is incredibly annoying.

    Go you big red fire engine!

  • Opera Australia has a similar gadget, and they call the result 'surtitles'. I believe most big opera companies have something similar.

    While it's essential if you want the audience to have some understanding of what's going on, it can be a bit of a PITA occasionally because you spend too much time concentrating on the titles rather than the action (such as action is in most operas).

    Strangely enough, they also use the surtitle machine when operas are sung in English. I suppose it's because some people with partial hearing loss have trouble catching the diction of the singers sometimes.

    Go you big red fire engine!

  • Whilst the trailer for FF had some truly fantastic animation, I thought the voice acting and script was a tad on the dodgy side (although the whole `fire in the hole' thing was nicely reminicent of CS).

    So I'd rather watch a Japanese dub with subtitles, lipsync or no-lipsync: I can justify any script weaknesses as too-literal translation and I'll have no clue as to the quality of the voice acting so I'll just assume it's good :)
  • One of the interesting things about movie-making is that you want people to see your work as high-quality, not that it actually be "right". Back at PDI we were doing a commercial for a Japanese snack food company, and we were asked to sync it to an English soundtrack. This was quite confusing to us; as the animation would only ever be shown on Japanese TV, in Japanese.

    The clients reiterated that it should be sync-ed to English. When we pointed out that this wouldn't the Japanese dialogue, they said "Of course, all high-quality animation has lip-sync that doesn't match the audio". At least in the mind of these clients, high-quality animation meant Disney animation, and they specifically wanted the lip-sync not to work 'correctly'.

    There are many other instances of this; for instance doing animation at 24 fps instead of 60 fps and adding film grain to pristine animation.

    thad

  • The movie could have been done in both languages at the same time. Actors for both language parts could have done their voices long ago - and the animation to match their voices could have been done twofold. I assume this was not done because reall this is making nearly a movie and a half at once. I dont know if I would put it past square to go to those lengths to make it successful however. I assume they have developed decent technologies to make mouth animations easier (maya has so many cool controls that could make it simple) that maybe it was done at the same time - and when they are rendered - differing frames are simply rendered twice. So synched voices in both languages are a definate possibility.

    BTW I prefer subtitles, as do, I'm guessing, most of the rest of the population. Theres so much missing many times when it is dubbed.
  • The dialog will be munged and the closest sounding words will be used to synch with the lip movement but that doesn't matter anyway.

    If "Jesus of Montreal" taught you anything (they were dubbing porno movies from English to French,) as long as the word sound believable, the lip synch doesn't matter that much.

    The actors being digital doesn't make any difference. It might as well be Marylin Monroe (or Marylin Chambers) on the screen. You don't get a re-shoot. Just say the words in te right voice and it'll do.

    Just don't get Hoss Cartwright's part spoken by a fouteen year old girl and you'll be okay.

  • Re:test (Score:3)

    by Requiem ( 12551 ) on Thursday May 31, 2001 @02:01PM (#185475) Journal
    If they do decide to redo the voice overs, it'll be an interesting test of the advantages of CGA.

    You know, I'm into retrocomputing as much as the next guy. I like to play the odd game of Chessmaster 2000 on my old 8086, but really, do you think that CGA's the best specification to use? It wasn't all that sharp.

    ;)

  • It is true that CGI is less good and more expensive than most human actors - today. The first steam locomotives weren't as fast, pretty, or graceful as horses, either. That's the nature of emerging technologies. Even today, locomotives cost more than horses to the degree that any one individual uses them. With automation comes leverage. When you mechanize, making 10 of something does not cost 10 times as much as making the first one, and more people have access to the resource.

    The time will come (in 2 years? five? ten?) when photorealistic CGI animation will look just as good as actors. Not that the public's apetite for actors will ever go away - just as movies and television didn't kill off the stage, CGI won't kill off acting. The superstars will still make $6 million per film. However, CGI will inevitably both take a chunk out of the middle of the market, and grow the market by making it possible (or just cheaper) to show things that live actors can't (ordinarily) do.

    Whether an individual CGI costs more or less create than an actor (I'd guess it'll stabilize in the middle) is irrelevant, because the CGI will be able to go places the actor can't. Even to the point of something trivially simple like appearing in many feature films in one year. Even before taking into account the new things it makes possible, even for traditional roles the investment will be amortized over many more uses.
  • You won't have to imagine when the DVD comes out. I've heard they're doing an English dub for the rental market and inclusion on the disc. There was another computer-animated show with lipsynch that was redubbed for Japan, by the way. Mainframe's Transformers: Beast Wars [bwtf.com] had excellent lipsynch, but they didn't bother rerendering or anything when they redubbed for Japan. They just dubbed. (And for that matter, they even changed the gender of one of the characters, because female toys don't sell well in Japan!)
    --
  • First off--most Western-made animated movies are not "dubbed" into their original language in the same sense that foreign films are (with actors trying to match voice to foreign lip movements).

    Western-produced animated movies usually have the voices recorded first, long before any of the animation is ever done. (Disney's Atlantis, for instance, features a character voiced by the late Jim Varney, who died a whole year before the film's release date.) This gives the animators a baseline to work from, and also lets them sync lip movements in the animation precisely to the pre-recorded voices. How much trouble they take to get it exact depends on the budget of the animation; Disney movies obviously feature much better lipsync than Saturday morning cartoons.

    (However, in most anime, the animation is done first, with a few mouth openings and closings done when a character would be talking, and they don't worry as much about lipsync. So most anime is "dubbed" into its original language.)

    Unlike anime or regular animated films, lipsync in computer-animated films can be exact and precise enough that you could literally read the characters' lips, just as you might a live actor. Mainframe's Beast Wars and Reboot and others featured this sort of lipsync, done by feeding the pre-recorded audio tracks through a phonic recognition program that provides the mapping for the lip movements, if I recall correctly. (You might call it lipreading in reverse--"reading voice"--since it is getting the lip movements from the words, instead of the other way around.) One of the Mainframe folks once posted in the Transformers newsgroups that they were looking into ways to use that technology to aid the deaf, in fact.

    If a TV series could afford to do that, do you really think that Square's 9-digit-budget blockbuster movie, touted as being the most hyperrealistic computer animation ever won't bother?
    --

  • I've gone to Europe a couple of times and noticed that instead of voice dubs they do this:subtilting the movie, but who would want to look at the bottom of a screen the whole movie?
    Oh, I dunno, the people who made Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon a megablockbuster? The animé fans who insist on subtitling on their videos and DVDs (enough so to start a letter-writing campaign that forced Disney to change their minds and include the original audio and subtitles on their Princess Mononoke DVD)? The Hong Kong action movie fans sick of hearing Jackie Chan in an Australian accent?
    You could have voice translators, but then, that'd ruin the movie's sound and make the experience less entertaining.
    Actually, some parts of Europe (Italy, in particular, if I remember right) do have major native-language dubbing set-ups. Some of the voice-actors, in fact, are big stars in their own right and get major salaries, and if they go on strike, they're not just replaced. (For that matter, when Arnold Schwarzenegger movies are redubbed for the German language markets, Arnold has to be done by a different actor. Even though he speaks native German, the Germans don't like his accent!)
    --
  • Examples of the Japanese infatuation with English can be found at engrish.com [engrish.com]. Be certain you're not drinking anything that could go down the wrong pipe, and that those within earshot are not bothered by hysterical laughter, before reading.
    --
  • Hate to burst your bubble, but it's not likely Jar-Jar is going to die. He exemplifies the same Campbellian archetype as Luke Skywalker from the first movie--the fool on a journey. When you think about that, it becomes likely that he will survive and mature through all three movies, and might even help facilitate delivering the young Luke Skywalker to his aunt and uncle on Tatooine.
    --
  • Oddly enough, the folks at Tritin Films [planetquake.com]--makers of some of the best-known Quake machinima on 'net--are going to fully-rendered animation for their new Quake: The Movie [planetquake.com] title--importing the models from the game into 3D Studio Max, "biping" them to add skeletons for more articulated movement, and creating a whole movie with them. And the trailer looks awesome.
    --

  • The obvious solution is to render the whole movie in real-time, right in the projector! "Just-In-Time Rendering". JITR. Hey, that's catchy, maybe I should patent it...


    Chelloveck
  • Exactly! The dubbing is what made all the Godzilla movies the comic successes that they were.

    --

  • Square will never make another movie!? (Score:4)

    by InstantCool ( 19982 ) on Thursday May 31, 2001 @02:02PM (#185491) Homepage
    I read an article awhile back that said Square apologized to it's investors more than doubling their $70million dollar budget. Square also went on to say that they would never make another film.

    Although I haven't seen the movie yet, I really hate to have them say they'll never make another film before seeing the fruits of their labor. Hopefully legions of fans will show them the light.
    --

  • Square + On The Fly Rendering (Score:4)

    by tenchiken ( 22661 ) on Thursday May 31, 2001 @02:01PM (#185492)
    One of Square's new favorite tricks w/ the PS2 is to utilize a bit of the overkill proccessing power of the PS/2 and change the facial system depending on the vocals. Hence Bouncer and FF10 both have this feature. As to the re-rendering, nope. It is not unusual for these types of movies to get released in English and only in english. AIC, most recently, only release Armitage III movie in English.
  • I understand the reasons that most people love the subtitled movies, but as a dyslexic I can tell you I don't really like watching a movie four or five times until I can remember the subtitles at a glance so I cna then watch the movie and follow along with what is going on. So for me give me dub any day of the week, just make sub an option so if I want to I can see just what they were saying in a particular scene. As to the lip-sync issue, I could really canre less after watching Jackie Chan movies and other poorly dubed movies for years I don't really notice it.

    thank you I will now return to my regularly scheduled lurking ...

  • ...since the answer to this Ask Slashdot is a simple "They'll dub/sub, because they're not going to re-render the whole thing"...

    As a fan of the Final Fantasy games, I'm extremely unimpressed with the bits I've seen and heard of the movie (rumors, finalfantasy.com trailers, etc.).

    Final Fantasy is a franchise that has an almost unmatched recognition among console RPGamers. In a nutshell: color-coded mages, ninjas that can throw almost anything (9999 knife/spoon any one?), bare-handed martial artists that do more damage than the best-armed swordsmen, chocobos, moogles, Cid and his airship, espers, the concept of "pure/holy" spells (e.g. FFIV Pearl) and the "holy, yet evil" enemies that can't be damaged by them, etc. None of the games has ever taken place on Earth. These are what separate the FF series from every other Japanese console RPG. Which of these criteria does the movie match? Even the anime OAV series was in the true FF spirit, and that wasn't even produced by Sakaguchi Hironobu, while this movie is!

    It looks to me like the movie is being treated as a showcase for what's possible in video-realistic CG with current technology, rather than an opportunity to expand the Final Fantasy mythos, or even just expose it to more people through the theater. It's as if it's being made by FF8 fans -- it's realistic and serious, but not fun. This is a shame, as the FF series has always (excepting FF8) featured great character design and in-game/cover art, not the photorealistically mundane designs in the movie trailers.

    Bottom line, this movie is not traditional Final Fantasy. If it were released under a different name, die-hard FF fans would probably enjoy it more.

    BTW, does it strike any one as odd that this page [finalfantasy.com], linked from index.html (when viewed frameless), exists on the official site? Read that page with a frameless browser like Lynx...there's a link to some odd hentai FF site -- talk about fan service.

    < tofuhead >
    --

  • Exactly! That's why Studio Ghibli consented to the redubbing of Mononoke Hime (Princess Mononoke), even though their distribution contract with Disney prohibits the omission or editing of a single cel of the film. The quote was something like "... all animation is dubbed, even into its source language."

    -grendel drago
  • I don't know if a significant percentage of /.'ers have gone, but the New York City Opera has 'supertitles'. While the action is going on in badass, oldschool Italian or German, *BAM*! High above the stage (eye level for the cheap seats), Star Wars-blue titles translate the story. It was surprisingly not-distracting.

    And besides, Final Fantasy will always remind me of opera houses. They'd better have opera... and chocobos... and Bahamut... and elemental crystals... and summoning sequences... and a mechanic named Cid... yeah.

    -grendel drago
  • Pre-rendered movies are on their way out...

    Machinima [machinima.com], projected real-time via a backroom server (using datafiles d/l'd or streamed from the net) onto the screen by an HDTV projection system, will take their place - it is even possible that such movies might take over the roles conventional movies fill.

    Square has shown the level of realism a computer generated movie can take on - but what happens when you can generate it real-time, rather than pre-rendered?

    Sure, you still need the voice actors - but with speech synthesis rapidly becoming very realistic - I can imagine a time when voice acting will go away for these type movies, and that dubbing will be a thing of the past - voice synthesis would just use another data file, after all.

    Would voice acting transition to "phoeneme" (sp?) acting?

    It isn't here now (outside of amateur efforts), but when it hits - it will be like the transition from silent films to talkies...

    Worldcom [worldcom.com] - Generation Duh!
  • Think about it - what would the movie studios like more than anything?

    Um - how about talent they control - and that they don't have to pay?

    Certainly, the tech isn't there today - I don't have any trends (actually, even Machinima hasn't caught on greatly) - I am envisioning something happening many years into the future - I am thinking around 25-50 years away, not next year, or five years from now.

    The whole thing about it being real time is that it could be manipulated in real time for the market - instead of sending out a ton of reels, you send out data files, and the data would say how to move the mouth and such, voices, sound, etc - for whatever language you need for the market - no dubbing, reprinting, anything needed - just select the language and go.

    Worldcom [worldcom.com] - Generation Duh!
  • Huh?

    Movie studios don't send out projectors right now - what makes you think they would for this kind of thing? Each theater would simply have a high end digital projector and massive (by todays standards, if it could be done) computer in the projection room (heck, maybe by the time this comes about there won't be such things as projectors, the screen might simply be a large OLED display).

    As far as identifying with "stars" - I see your point. The sad part is so many people believe the stars are the people they play - when in reality the "stars" aren't much different from you or me, and many times are nothing like the characters they play... Pathetic, really...

    Worldcom [worldcom.com] - Generation Duh!
  • I am not talking today, or even 10 years out. I think the convergence will happen farther out - 25 to 50 years. I hope I am wrong. I realize the massive amount of power that it would take to do even a semi-realistic movie in real time isn't there yet. But one thing is driving the movie studios toward it:

    Right now they have to pay big bucks for the "stars", and they don't have any real control over them.

    Studios would rather pocket that money, or use it for the film - imagine a film that grosses 100 mil - would a studio rather pay 25 mil to make it today with live actors, or pay only 5 mil for a machinima type film that looks just as good, and pocket the rest as profit?

    No, it isn't possible today, and it will be a long time coming - but someday it will happen. We can already do very realistic films using computer animation non-realtime. It is only a matter of time before we can do them real-time. 15 years ago I would have laughed at you had you said in 15 years we would be able to play games that look as good or better than the graphics of "The Last Starfighter" or "Tron" - on home computers no less. Yet today, here we are!

    As far as voice generation - where have you been? I had a voice synthesizer on my TRS-80 CoCo back in 1985, with a voice recognizable, even though it was machine-like, in real time.

    The Kurzweil Reading Machine has a better voice, and it has been around for 20 years or so. The Sound Blaster use to have voice synth software that wasn't that bad. The best I have heard from today has been Festival [freshmeat.net] - which is quite natural sounding (but still not perfect).

    When you say the voices for a movie takes 2 days - you mean for an animated film - for an actual movie, it takes as long as it takes to get each scene right, meaning numerous takes and cuts for each scene. With a machinima type film, you would just lay the words down from the script, and only have to worry about how the actor agents are moving the 3D models, etc - this could make for films that look as good as todays, to only take a few months for production, rather than many months or years for most mega-buck films...

    Worldcom [worldcom.com] - Generation Duh!

  • YHBT, People (Score:5)

    by MustardMan ( 52102 ) on Thursday May 31, 2001 @05:59PM (#185512)
    You Have Been Trolled, people, the real CommanderTaco, the owner of slashdot, has user ID #1. An imposter account is inherantly mistrustworthy, and should certainly not be moderated up as informative when a known imposter claims to have information from an unnamed, unsubstantiated source

  • Re:Square + On The Fly Rendering (Score:4)

    by Microlith ( 54737 ) on Thursday May 31, 2001 @02:15PM (#185513)
    That's because the Armitage III movie only exists in english (released by Pioneer, btw). It was given to Pioneer, edited into a compilation movie, and was reimported and shown in theaters in Japan (with Japanese subtitles!)

    The 4 OAVs that originally comprised Armitage exist in both sub/dub format, and are going to be released later as an Armitage "Perfect Collection" by Pioneer (most likely).

  • Pretty much all of the film is rendered using the output straight from MTOR, not in layers. PRMan is really good with memory, so the gigabytes of gzipped geometry per frame don't cause a problem. The problem is the shaders, which form the inner loop of the REYES rendering architecture, which are written in an interpreted language. Rendering in layers would mean that you couldn't exploit occlusion culling and thus would have to do too much shading, which would blow your render time.

    Having said that, it is possible that some shots were done in layers for compositing of 2D special effects. Shots without 2D special effects, however, were almost certainly done in one go.

  • Comment removed (Score:5)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Thursday May 31, 2001 @02:38PM (#185516)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Japanese people are very accustomed to watching Hollywood movies in English with subtitles. (They have a much higher literacy rate, for one.)

    Another factor to prevent re-dubbing in Japanese is the "coolness factor" of English in Japan. Japanese people bend over backwards to use English, often with hilarious results. For example the Playstation game Parrappa the Rapper, though mostly aimed at the Japanese market, in the Japanese version features English songs with Japanese subtitles. Japanese pop songs are often peppered with English phrases, sometimes with wildly different pronunciations and meanings than we are used to, so a Japanese movie in English isn't much of a stretch. Think about the recent Disney decision to put Japanese into the US Princess Mononoke release, but the other direction, ten times stronger.

  • "Rumored?" I think they only did this for A Bug's Life as opposed to TS and TS2, but the DVD Collector's Edition [go.com] of A Bug's Life itself even includes a "behind-the-scenes" feature about this process:

    A Look At How The Film Was Recomposed From Its Original Widescreen Presentation To A Full-Frame Presentation For Home Video Release

  • nope (Score:4)

    by CommanderTaco ( 85921 ) on Thursday May 31, 2001 @01:50PM (#185527)
    asked a friend who works at square about this once... they're not going to rerender all the speech scenes, too cost prohibitive.
  • What kind of a geek are you? You should be working harder at your editing job. Oh, wait, you have a geek friend who works at square. It's ok then.

  • Its an equal trade off (Score:4)

    by hooded1 ( 89250 ) on Thursday May 31, 2001 @01:53PM (#185530) Homepage
    They will get a crappy dubbed version of FF to counter all the crappy dubbed versions of Jackie Chan movies that we get.
  • We have had the best dubbing in the world at time and basicly 90% of all movies comming to local market are still dubbed. I suppose that profesional dubbing would not force the original company to nothing. All the work and expense is usually on the reseller and production companies.

    How it works? I remember that one of the techniques, they were using was to insert or remove some frames from the movie so the picture actually fits the voice better. Also, we have the luck of having one of the most bendable languages out there with zillions of synonyms, I am not sure how easy it would be for Japanese or other languages.

  • Tell George Lucas (Score:5)

    by Dr_Cheeks ( 110261 ) on Thursday May 31, 2001 @02:17PM (#185540) Homepage Journal
    While they're at it, can we get Jar-Jar altered so he's not the most annoying thing ever (even worse than Jake Lloyd)? Or better yet, DELETED!
  • from a marketing perspective; when you buy the DVD, wouldn't you want everything? ...if they rerender the mouths for each dubbed language, that would take too much space on the DVD. Only the zoned Japanese version would have the Japanese lip-synch. that doesn't seem to make sense from a marketing point of view, since they'd have to spend gobs of $$ in order to do that and most customers wouldn't even see it.


    Think of what the Barney-generation will be like! Blame parental over-protection.
  • Name a video game that successfully translated to the screen.

    I would say that Final Fantasy's situation is different. Usually when a video game is adapted to the big screen, it's due to the characters and situations that people have grown used to in the game. When Super Mario Brothers was adapted for a movie form, it was because of the characters of the plumbers fighting Koopa, characters people were used to. There have been a number of Final Fantasy games, but they've generally followed a different path, that each game is seperate from the other, that each is in its own world. Sure, there are a few common elements, like chocobos (and Cid), but each game, from a plot and character standpoint, is crafted with the idea that none of the other games existed -- they are fully standalone.

    From what I've seen of the movie, it will do the same -- it exists completely independant from the video game franchise. In this respect, it is not a "video game translated to the screen," it is standalone, sharing only the name. People aren't going to go to this with the idea of the movie being like the game, they would go to go because it looks interesting, and the CGI is excellent.

  • Re:it's about the facial animation (Score:3)

    by malducin ( 114457 ) on Thursday May 31, 2001 @03:57PM (#185544) Homepage

    I think there are a lot of misconceptions about what would be entailed. It's not just a matter or re-rendereing but on redoing the facial animation. And that is done by hand, no mocap, no magical software, nada. It's just a bunch of very talented character animators doing all the facial and scondary animation and lip synching. It would be akin to say, redubbing Mulan to chinese, in essence you would need to redraw all the film again. The same with CG, even with all sorts of blenshapes, morph targets, and animation controls, in the end it's up to the animator to use these controls to move and make every tiny facial pose. They might even have to pull vertices by hand. No matter how sophiticated software is now or in the near future, it will be still an automated process that will probably make characters appear stiff. That's why you need the animators, to bring the models to life. There is stuff like the tradionat animation principles, like squash and stretch, slow in and out, etc. (look for the documents of the old wise men of Disney or the animation notes from John Lasseter) that only animators would be able to impart. That's why you need animation supervisors, dailies, etc. Make sure the film has a consistent vision and animation style. They would have to redo most of the film, at least all face closeups. It simply is not feasable.

    Anyone interested in checking out the the principles of animation, here are some links:

    12 Principles of Animation [cg-char.com]

    Couldn't find Lasster's paper but here is the reference:
    Lasseter, John, "Principles of Traditional Animation Applied to 3D Computer Animation," SIGGRAPH '87, Computer Graphics, Vol. 21, No. 4, pp. 35-44, July, 1987.

    Principles of Traditional Animation Applied to 3D Computer Animation [tayloru.edu]
    Tricks to Animating Characters with a Computer [tayloru.edu]
    Animation Notes from Ollie Johnston [tayloru.edu]
  • Anybody who cared would watch it subtitled anyway. Dubbing is an atrocity, a crime against nature, not to mention filmmaker's intent.
  • And what if I decided that your post was stilted, and needed work, so I 'dubbed' it, and passed it off as yours?
  • Alright Asmov, lets not get ahead of ourselves. The xbox and gamecube look great, and the next generation might be aproaching realism at times, but there is no way that movies will be generated in realtime until the second generation after the gamecube. Until then, there will be no competition to pre-rendered movies, there is just too much that goes into them. Movies right now aren't even using stuff like radiosity because its just too processor intensive. Caustics, extremely heavy anti-aliasing, high quality volumetrics, that stuff takes time, and a butt load of power. Games make leaps and bounds and will continue, but realtime movies are way out of anyone's league, the largest, fastest super computer in the world couldn't even manage it, not by a long shot.

    As for voice generation, its not being done yet at all let along realtime. There is no reason for it eighther, the voices for a movie takes like 2 days, why would anyone spend a fortune on R&D to cut out such an easy element of production. They won't. Not that your the first to think of it, but there's a reason its not being dealt with very much.
  • If you generated a film, even in realtime, even if it looks absolutely real, its still animated, and voice acting takes very little time.

    Of course I have played with voice synth, but nothing as ever even come close to sounding real, and I don't see the progress being made in realism. I think that it will be possible eventually to render realism in realtime, it is the evolution of things after all. An voices will probably be synthesized and sound real too by mimicking human voice anatomy, but why?

    In 10-15 years things will be very different and I think that what you are talking about could happen, but it won't happen to movies. 25-50 years the internet will be a thousand times more important than it even is today, and if all you want is a movie, downloading and playing it should be a piece of cake. As for interactive movies, where you watch it with goggles, maybe in a theatre, maybe in your own house and you can rotate the angle, but not affect the animation, and sound is generated depeding on the events you voted or otherwise influenced to happen, we'll see. Realtime movies will come, but a paradim shift will come with it. Imagine a mystery movie where all the pieces are there, you just have to be looking at the right thing. Imagine a movie about someone's life where you influence, what happens, the possibilities are endless as they always have been.
  • My friend works for a large film company that has made many Toy and Bug oriented CG films. Since we are both actors, films like FF could really hurt our potential careers. We were talking about "Cyberthespians" backstage a couple of weeks ago, because we'd seen the trailer, and I was very impressed with it. I thought that it was the first step towards phasing out flesh and bone actors. I mean, Jar Jar was straight out of hell, but, if you take away the character, and just focus on the animation, it was prety impressive.

    Anyway, here is something she Emailed me about our discussion, which /.-ers may find interesting:

    Although this may be a leap forward in CG humans, it still has far, far to go. Textures, of skin, of cloth are still not quite right. Skin shaders are also evasive. Even the newest, most cutting edge CG skin still has a rubbery look. I've heard the next step is to create "oil maps" of skin to map out parts of a texture map that will have much higher specularity - that shiny look.

    Then there's the movement. I've heard FF's characters look really stilted and jerky. Although they used motion capture for body motion, it still is not fluid. Facial expressions were animated by hand.

    I talked to a guy yesterday who is working on CG hair for a CG head for a real body. I asked him why not just put a wig on the actor and CG the face? A lot cheaper than creating a hair map and rendering out thousands of CG hairs (that look rubbery.) His answer is what I call "the boys with the toys." There's a few men in the world who have the money to RnD computerized anything to no PARTICULAR end, just because they can. Of course, if you can apply it to a multi-million dollar movie and get a return on your investment, that's OK too.

    I often hear CG artists joke that a CG actor will never strike. But they all know that one CG actor takes YEARS and millions of dollars to create. It's neither cheaper nor better. It's just another way to play a video game.

  • In Germany they dub every single movie. Alf screams "komm mal, kittie kittie kittie"[1] and Fred Flintstone screams "Vylma!". Or Bugs Bunny: "wass ist los, Doc?"

    In Holland we only dub children's cartoons, because these children can't read undertitles. But even Cartoon Network is mostly English here. Some of the Dexter, Powerpuff girls etc. cartoons have been dubbed, but these versions are only displayed early in the morning when children watch.

    The network operators are very hesitant when it comes to dubbing these cartoons, and for a good reason. It just ain't popular here.

    I recently tried to view "Back to the Future" on a German channel. "Sie mussen Zurueck nach dem Zukunft!". Yeah, right! I turned it off immediately.

    As the FF movie will not be for children, I hope they do not plan to dub it here. Otherwise I'll take the English version anyway, and I guess a lot of folks will do the same.

    [1] I am not even trying to spell my German correct. Apologies for that ;-)


    It's... It's...
  • This DVD has the interesting feature of having two sets of English subtitiles -- there are the regular subtitles that reflect what the actors say, and there is another set of subtitles that gives the original literal Japanese->English translation. You can watch the movie in dubbed English with the literal English subtitles to see just how much they differ.

    It's been a few months, but I seem to recall that the two translations were pretty close. There were, however, several instances of a character saying something in English that was completely different from the literal translation. But many were more subtle, such as the "forest spirit" becoming the "deer god."

    On the other hand, what guarantee is there that the subtitles are any good? One of my Chinese-speaking friends has commented that sometimes even the subtitles on Chinese movies aren't very accurate.
  • It's more than just the size of the TV -- the problem is that your TV is painfully low resolution, the color bleeds all over the place, the damned thing flickers noticably 30 times a second, and in general everything on television looks like shit.

    Reading subtitles on current televisions sucks. With most movies, it's fairly tolerable, and it's usually preferrable to a dub, but it still sucks.

    On the other hand, I don't even notice subtitles in the theatre -- when people ask me after "were there subtitles?", I usually can't remember.

    Hopefully, improvements in television resolution will significantly improve subtitles in movies.
  • Imagine how stupid Crouching Tiger would have been had it been dubbed

    it was dubbed, and it sucked! i saw the dubbed version on a friend's computer after i had seen the subtitled version on the big screen. subtitles are so much better-- gomers who complain about having to read instead of watch need to learn how to read faster, that's all. dubbed translations always try to fit the words to the character's mouths, which is pointless anyway but leads to some really bad translations.

    i don't know if any of you remember the old dubbed version of akira, where masaru (the little blue kid in a bubble) says "this chapter's finished" instead of "to the east of here". what the hell? what, i say, what the hell?

    to try to get back on topic, i think the japanese people deserve a true japanese language version, but if that can't happen, don't bother dubbing it...

    www.grizzo.com [grizzo.com]
    it's 100% grizzo
  • Rerendering alone would make it too expensive to dub it into other languages. its not as easy as converting the lip-syncing movements to another language. Body movements would have to be re-animated since they would have to sync with the speech. Remember that in translating to some languages, a short english sentence could take seconds to speak out.
  • People in japan do not speak Cantonese. They already have to deal with crapply dubbed Jackie Chan movies.

    Honestly, the idiocy of some people never ceases to amaze me.

    Rate me [picture-rate.com] on picture-rate.com
  • Real time rendered video is never going to be as detailed as pre-rendered (not physically possible). And, lets be honest, most Machinima looks like ass. I don't really see any point in having a movie real-time rendered at all. I mean, a movie by definition non-interactive. How does being real time improve that?

    Can you point to any trends, or figures, other then your own personal preferences to indicate why what you are saying might be true?

    Rate me [picture-rate.com] on picture-rate.com
  • real time localization with voice synth... I don't know a lot of acting is in expressions of human emotion. Something I don't think a computer could do (in real time) vey well at all.

    So while autolocalization might be nice, It's probably something better done by hiring local actors, and re-rendering the mouths and faces.

    Rate me [picture-rate.com] on picture-rate.com

  • Why not in Japanese? (Score:3)

    by mnassri ( 149467 ) <shroud2k@@@yahoo...com> on Thursday May 31, 2001 @01:56PM (#185578)
    Here's a question....Why isn't it in Japanese also? You'd think it would go over great in a technology-driven society, even ignoring the fact that Square is Japanese. Did they make a conscious decision not to do it in Japanese. It seems like English & Japanese would appeal to the largest amount of people who would be likely to want to see it.
  • I'm from Montreal, we see a lot of voice dubs for american movies in french. I really hate watching dubbed movies. Thank god, I'm billingual.

    Subtitled movies are not that much of a problem. Everytime I watch a movie with subtitles after 10 minutes I forget the subtitles are there, it feels like I know the language after a while. Don't forget that when you're reading the subtitles you are still seeing the movie screen. Our field of view is bigger than you think.
  • Dubbing is an atrocity, a crime against nature, not to mention filmmaker's intent

    First off, subtitling changes a film as well -- so it's not exactly the filmmaker's intent. So does viewing it on a TV screen, or watching a bad 4th-generation VHS copy, because that's all you can get.

    But more importantly, why does it matter what the filmmaker's intent was? What matters is how you enjoy it, and what you get out of it. If a dub corrected some stilted dialogue, or errors made in the original filming, it could be an improvement. Besides, at times it's easier to listen to a dub, rather than read subtitles, especially for some people. (Don't tell me you've never got confused in a sub when multiple people are talking at once.)

    I'm personally of the opinion that subs are generally better, but there's no reason to be elitist just because of that. Dubs have their place too, and they're not necessarily evil.

  • So you and everyone else on /. hated Mortal Combat? Or would that movie only rate "OK"?

  • Deux Ex (Score:3)

    by FortKnox ( 169099 ) on Thursday May 31, 2001 @02:12PM (#185590) Homepage Journal
    Deus Ex used a technology that maps voice patterns to lip movement. Sure it isn't perfect, but its closer than lip syncing. This may be a most cost effective way for square to proceed...
  • This may sound ignorant, but can't they code a plugin for their modler to take plain-text dialog and animate the mouth? Then they could just re-type the scenes and re-render. Even with 3DS max, a broadcast and game quality plugin JeteReyes [reyes-infografica.com] let's you accomplish this task to a reasonable degree of realism (while being free as in beer for R3). Any thoughts?
  • This is all just from memory, but I think the original idea was that they were going to do it Japanese first and then translate & dub it into English later.

    But then they kind of realized that this was going to be a Hollywood-style blockbuster thing, so they decided to do it the other way around -- English first, then Japanese.

    I could be wrong, but I seem to remeber reading this on more than a few FF fansites.

    J

  • Sure they could afford it! (Score:3)

    by zombieking ( 177383 ) on Thursday May 31, 2001 @02:07PM (#185597)
    ...But since they have already spent so much on this movie, can they afford to?

    Sure they could! But they would have to spend alot of time at the Chocobo Casino to raise the money...

    -----
  • I think the main advantage to continued progress with CGI movies would be the simplification of special effects-heavy movies. Imagine if "The Matrix" could have been shot without all the elaborate bullet-time setups or training wires to help actors jump twenty feet and run up walls. Experienced martial artists could be motion-captured, saving months of training the actors.

    I don't doubt it takes millions of dollars to create a CGI actor, but that's only with present-day technology. In ten years I'm sure I'll be able to do it on my home computer, and popular CGI "actors" and "actresses" will be re-used for movie after movie, bought and sold and licensed between companies with only their voice needing to change.

  • While I'm sure the FF movie will be spectacular, I would have much preferred it if they had ported FF9 to the PC instead.
    I love the FF series and find it highly annoying that in order to continue playing them I will have to buy a PS2 (which I normally would feel no need to do).
  • I prefer subtitles. I'd rather lose a little in attention span than ruin a movie with poor dubbing.

    Actually, I like subtitles. I like reading though.

    Geek dating! [bunnyhop.com]
  • Speaking of...I think we should have a /. competition to bet on the exact second (in terms of movie runtime) at which Jar Jar is killed in Ep2. He's gotta die sometime...he's just gotta...
  • V. Pagan said:
    the issues of how they dub I think are secondary to the cost necessary in re-rendering those areas of the film for the other version.
    I would disagree. The technology used to do the dubbing and rendering has a direct and significant impact on the cost of the process (obviously). The more pertinent question (to which I do not have the answer) is, given the comments of the previous poster, when will the technology become available to make it cost effective to do multi-language versioning for such animation? and Who is closest to developing such technology?

    --CTH

  • Re:Subtitles preferred (Score:3)

    by thefritob ( 234484 ) on Thursday May 31, 2001 @02:15PM (#185624) Homepage
    It wasn't as off as hearing him say "Yippie Kiyaaa Melon-Farmer!" In the network (no naughty words) version.
  • Well, getting used to it is much of the problem as well. Here in Sweden for example, where every foreign (read Bamerican) film or TV show is subtitled, you never hear anyone complain about it, or horror of horrors that they'd perfer dubbing. Plenty of snide stories about watching John Wayne in german abound though.

    There's really only one segment of the market that's dubbed, and that's children's material, aka Disney flicks. However, even though we have the best actors available and occasionally manage to surpass the original (even Disney themselves admit to the characters Timon and Pumba in ''The lion king'' being better i.e. funnier in Swedish) you'll see those in their original english with subtitles later in the evening at theatres in the major cities.

    The benefits are several of course, it really motivates the children to start reading, if the want to understand what's on after the small childrens segment on TV they'd better be able to read. It's not the only reason our litteracy rates are among the highest in the world, but it is IMHO an important one.

    It also teaches english (the American variant unfortunately, but it's better than nothing). Which plays no small part in putting our proficiency in the english language on par with the dutch. And an added benefit is that you can watch TV in bed w/o disturbing your (sleepy) spouse, just turn the sound real low, or off altogether.

    The reason it's done is of course one of economy, it's a tenth of the cost compared with dubbing. But belive me, if you had had any exposure to it, you wouldn't know it was there. I don't anymore, I've been surprised more than once when a show was cut off after a few minutes with the announcement that they were working on getting the subtitling machine working again.

    P.S. I'm of course discussing real subtitles here, not the awful closed captioning you have in the states, that really is distracting, and I'm not sure anyone could ever truly get used to it. Not that it doesn't help the hearing impared, it's a tremendous aid I would imagine, but it's not for general use in it's current form, I'd say.

  • It's really more of a risk assesment. It's not easy for a poor importing company to produce a decent dub. It's much easier for them to do a subtitling job.

    Also, a dub changes the voices of all the actors. Often the dubbing voice sounds nothing like the origional... and it looks very strange when a 20 yr old has a 40 yr old voice. Plus you loose the characters origional personality when you do a new voice.

  • I've gone to Europe a couple of times and noticed that instead of voice dubs they do this:subtilting the movie, but who would want to look at the bottom of a screen the whole movie? You could have voice translators, but then, that'd ruin the movie's sound and make the experience less entertaining.
    Square might have made the best looking amination ever, but, apparently, they also made the least unwatchable but non-English speaking peoples of the world.
    Voice dubs might have to be forced, because redoing the movie will be much too expensive to do and is not worth it. Redoing the movie in Urkanian for a profit of 12 thousand bucks is not worth a multi-million dollar project, Square will have to bite the bullet and do voice dubs.
  • In Germany, where I live, almost every foreign movie that makes it to the major screens is dubbed, and there's only some of the more art-oriented smaller cinemas that would show the subtitled originals at all. This is mostly due to consumer interest of course, people are afraid they'd miss the story (even in films like The Mummy Returns ;) ), but anyway, much to my disapproval, as I prefer to see a film in its original form, too. Although the dubbing studios here do work precisely and the results are most often sufficiently professionally done, some details like layered connotations and overtones are hard to translate, especially if you have to structure the lines in order to be lip-sync-able.

    Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon for example was shown here dubbed in German only, and I had to get it #elsewhere# to see it like it's been originally conceived. Quite simple, actually: if I go watch a film starring Sean Connery, I want to hear Connery's voice, not some german daily soap star's.

    As for Final Fantasy, I've seen the trailer in both german and english versions, and the dubbed version was just horrendous, but not because of sync-ing issues, it was the translation that made it sound like a New Age B-movie: There is a lifeform in here! for example ended up as Hier drin ist eine Lebensform!, which may be a simpleton's literal translation, but not at all the same concept. I get this terrible feeling they'd ruin the film by showing it in its localized form only. What use is recruiting all that major voice talent for the english version anyway if they drop it on the first occasion? My 2 cents.

  • Re:Subtitles preferred (Score:3)

    by ryants ( 310088 ) on Thursday May 31, 2001 @02:32PM (#185649)
    Yeah, but look, an animated movie is always dubbed--that's just how animation is

    That's an excellent point, one I certainly didn't consider.

    Now that you mention animation, I'm thinking back to my last trip to Mexico and watching "Los Simpsons" in Spanish for the first time. They dub over the animations and guess what... it does work (mostly). (And yes, I do speak Spanish).

    Now, the lip synch in FF is probably just a *little* better than the Simpsons, so as the lip synch in the original language gets better and better, dubs in other languages are going to be more and more off. Judging by the trailers, the lip synch in FF is pretty damn close to perfect, so the dubbing is really going to suffer.

    As for re-rendering, it probably isn't feasible. There's a little more to lip synching than just re-rendering, methinks.

    Ryan T. Sammartino

  • Subtitles preferred (Score:5)

    by ryants ( 310088 ) on Thursday May 31, 2001 @01:57PM (#185650)
    I don't know about non-English speaking people, but when I watch a foreign movie (ie. not in English), I so much prefer subtitles over dubbing.

    Imagine how stupid Crouching Tiger would have been had it been dubbed. This is a two way street: watching English movies on the French channel (here in Canada) that have been dubbed is just silly. Something about Bruce Willis saying "merde" that's just a bit off...

    Ryan T. Sammartino

  • This same thought had occured to me a while back, I just assumed Square would do a special Japanese dub if only out of pride. Granted that the Japanese market is half the size of the US, and most people who are interested will probably see it regardless of which language it's in, but it just seems a slap in the face to the Japanese consumers to only do it in English. There is just as much brand loyalty in Japan as there is in the US and Square's fan base would have kept them afloat even if they never exported a game.

    Of course, they would've done it by now if it was easy to do. The movie is modeled on the real actors, so the visuals and the voices aren't completely seperated. But still, it seems like there are enough tricks one could do with a little facial morphing and creative dubbing. And from the looks of the previews, the most expensive scenes to render don't seem to have a lot of focus on mouth movements.

    Square continues to impress me with the exceptional quality of their games, but there is more they could do. While releasing Final Fantasy's in the states 6 months after their release in Japan is impressive, I still don't see why they can't do both versions simultaneously. In this modern world we live in, any company that can develop for multiple languages at the same time will certainly be several steps beyond their competitors.

  • My company has been looking at the possibility of re-mastering our series [dustrunners.com] for each of our audiences (Japanese, French, German etc.), but what we found is that even though it costs a little bit to record the voices, and it costs a little more to re-animate and render the layers with the lips moving, the flow of the episode gets disrupted by foreign languages.

    If you've ever seen Macross II, you'll know what I mean. There are scenes where the mouths keep moving and the English voices have long since finished their lines. And to try and teach a director how to re-edit their work dependent on a language they don't understand is a real challenge.

    It seems kind of silly, but the artistic vision is the element most hurt by that kind of thing.

    Not to say that we're not trying to get around it...

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