2020-10-07, 09:36 PM
Right! So, the "open matte" capture and resync is done for the French DVD. The most significant edit was a pretty big patch of audio pertaining to 39 frames missing after a cut somewhere around the 47-minute mark on the pan & scan LaserDisc, which luckily were absolutely fine on the widescreen LaserDisc, so I lifted it from there and patched it in (not necessarily exactly 39 frames' worth but rather the most seamless edit point that would both insert the missing audio and not create any kind of audible transition). Apart from that, it was all purely realignments: deleting the side change accurately, applying extensions and crossfades to pad the audio by 1 or 2 frames' worth at a handful of other scene transitions where there were some other frames missing. The resulting audio lines up pretty well with the audio from the French 1.33:1 DVD after PAL 25 fps -> 24000/1001 fps time correction, though not 100% precisely because I was more interested in doing the least destructive resync than getting a 100% match to audio that was ostensibly a 5.1 remix anyway.
I initially was going to leave it there until I checked some scenes and was pretty sure that the sync from the LD source was too early, meaning that sounds were being heard too early compared to what I was seeing on screen, so then I completely overhauled the whole thing to abandon the idea of resyncing based on the video and instead just resynced it mostly to target the French DVD audio (which I no longer think is actually a remix but potentially just a 5.1 version of the original theatrical mix, since it actually syncs up really *really* closely for big chunks of runtime after some adjustment to offsets and the like). I say "mostly" because I found some moments where the French DVD sync was also not quite right, with things like punches sometimes being heard either way too early or way too late, so I opted for a compromise between slavishly following the French DVD audio and "fixing" areas where it wasn't quite right by realigning it in AviSynth by watching the audio waveform alignment to video frames in VirtualDub (which I didn't even know you could do until I found that feature *after* I'd done the first version of the resync). This was extremely handy because it meant I could look at stuff like punches and car crashes in both the target video and the resync/source audio, to make sure that those big waveform spikes were not landing any earlier than the frames on which the punch landed and so on (generally, audio being slightly too late is basically a non-issue, but it being too early is a huge problem because you would never hear something before you see the thing making the sound since light travels way faster than sound, so it makes your brain do somersaults).
Anyway, next move is resyncing to Blu-ray / @The Aluminum Falcon's "35 mm" regrade (which looks all kinds of amazing to me) since that too had audio sourced from the problematic widescreen LaserDisc. I'll basically be taking the hybrid master I made for this DVD resync and reworking it to fit the Blu-ray instead, since I've already done a big chunk of the work and I imagine they'll probably match up reasonably well although they'll obviously be from different sources. I'm annoyed the widescreen LaserDisc audio is mostly crap but it was a godsend being able to sample that big chunk of missing sound that was missing from the 4:3 LaserDisc main source!
I initially was going to leave it there until I checked some scenes and was pretty sure that the sync from the LD source was too early, meaning that sounds were being heard too early compared to what I was seeing on screen, so then I completely overhauled the whole thing to abandon the idea of resyncing based on the video and instead just resynced it mostly to target the French DVD audio (which I no longer think is actually a remix but potentially just a 5.1 version of the original theatrical mix, since it actually syncs up really *really* closely for big chunks of runtime after some adjustment to offsets and the like). I say "mostly" because I found some moments where the French DVD sync was also not quite right, with things like punches sometimes being heard either way too early or way too late, so I opted for a compromise between slavishly following the French DVD audio and "fixing" areas where it wasn't quite right by realigning it in AviSynth by watching the audio waveform alignment to video frames in VirtualDub (which I didn't even know you could do until I found that feature *after* I'd done the first version of the resync). This was extremely handy because it meant I could look at stuff like punches and car crashes in both the target video and the resync/source audio, to make sure that those big waveform spikes were not landing any earlier than the frames on which the punch landed and so on (generally, audio being slightly too late is basically a non-issue, but it being too early is a huge problem because you would never hear something before you see the thing making the sound since light travels way faster than sound, so it makes your brain do somersaults).
Anyway, next move is resyncing to Blu-ray / @The Aluminum Falcon's "35 mm" regrade (which looks all kinds of amazing to me) since that too had audio sourced from the problematic widescreen LaserDisc. I'll basically be taking the hybrid master I made for this DVD resync and reworking it to fit the Blu-ray instead, since I've already done a big chunk of the work and I imagine they'll probably match up reasonably well although they'll obviously be from different sources. I'm annoyed the widescreen LaserDisc audio is mostly crap but it was a godsend being able to sample that big chunk of missing sound that was missing from the 4:3 LaserDisc main source!
