It's A Mad Mad Mad Mad World (1963) 1991 Cut in HD

[Dek Rollins]

Something I should mention is that there is a small glitch in the laserdisc capture, involving a cut to a few black frames, with the audio being a bit messed up during those black frames. What I found strange about this glitch is that when the next shot resumes a split second later, it had skipped some shots of theatrical footage (not an extended bit). I don't have my old VHS copy on me right now to check how the scene should play out, so I checked both comparisons of the film on movie-censorship, and neither of the pages mention that footage being cut out of the "Special Edition" version. I have decided to include that footage with downmixed Blu-ray audio patching it in. I can only assume that this footage should be there, and the glitch just jumped over it. When I look at the shot immediately after the glitch, even the first half of that shot is missing on the capture, and I seem to remember the whole thing being there. So if someone cares enough to verify, be my guest, but I think it's supposed to be left in.

Specifically the segment that's missing is during the car chase toward the end, where Hawthorne says "This could only happen in America" and Finch responds, "You wanna start that again?" with 'again' being cut off by the start of the glitch. The missing footage is two shots of the cars driving, including a shot from inside Culpeper's car looking at the road ahead. The film cuts back in on the wider shot showing all three cars catching some air going over a hill in the road. Since the first few seconds of this shot are also missing, you only see the two cabs coming over the hill, as Culpeper's car has already passed it and is just still bouncing.

[Dek Rollins]

Just to update, this is done, it's just not released yet. Looking for a way to upload it because my cheapo free MEGA account is 60% filled with my Terminator project, which I don't really want to take down because I don't think anybody has put it up anywhere else yet. Hopefully this'll be up soon, so keep an eye out.

[PDB]

Use a dummy email account and create a separate, different mega account. I do that all the time for projects.

Looking forward to seeing the end results Dek

[X5gb]

Another is fex but upload will be removed after a week.

[Dek Rollins]

This is uploading now, so I'll say what I haven't gotten around to saying about the project now. I was a little disappointed by the audio, because I didn't realize until I had already edited a significant portion of the film that the LD capture audio is dual mono, whereas the database says it has matrixed stereo sound. So if anyone can capture new audio from the LD, that would be really cool.

Also, some of the cuts to extended footage is bridged by cutting to a zoomed in frame of the extended take, and cutting back to wide when the action moves. I think this happened three times if I remember correctly. I recreated the zoomed shots, framing them at my own discretion since the wider aspect ratio made the closer framing strange when trying to recreate it perfectly as it is in the LD image. Overall I think I was very faithful to the intent of each zoomed shot, with only minor differences to the placement of figures in frame to keep any visible points of interest within the frame and not sticking halfway out of frame.

Another way they bridged the gap to the lower quality footage was to cut to a one shot or two shot of the actors during a cut in a wide shot, or in one instance on the plane, cut to an exterior of the plane, and then cut back. If I remember correctly there were four instances of this method being used. Out of the four, two of these shots were not in either the extra DVD footage or somewhere in the Blu-ray. These had to be included directly from the LD capture, which I still do not have the skills to properly frame rate convert. I used my reference to include the shots, which was the LD capture, decombed, running at the full 30fps. Of course this was rendered at 23.976, which would have resulted in some sort of frame blending, though these shots are short and the low resolution drop is more jarring to me than the strange frame rate. The two shots are an inserted shot of Ethel Merman when Russel is pleading with his wife to come with him and Hawthorne in the car after getting the keys back, and the other is the aforementioned exterior of the plane, placed between shots of Micky Rooney checking on the unconscious pilot in the back. But there is one more bit of LD that had to be used, because the shot of Sid Caesar's plane gaining a slow takeoff starts a few seconds earlier and is longer. I couldn't find the extended beginning of this shot in the DVD, so it's stuck in from LD.

Again, if anyone else has access to this LD and can make high quality captures of the stereo audio and video converted to progressive 23.976fps, I would definitely make an updated v2, but this is the best I can do with the LD source I have available to me.

I should also mention that I've included the police radio calls during the intermission, since both the LD and VHS had a side change there anyway and it should really be there. I have shortened the amount of silence that sits between each of the calls, because this is obviously for a home viewing environment, though there is still a distinctive silence between them. I just made the intermission last seven minutes instead of ten. If anyone thinks it would be better left at the full length that it's presented in on the BD, let me know, that kind of feed back lets me know if my decisions were the right ones.

The last thing I'm going to say in this very long post is that I color corrected several of the extended bits, usually using DrDre's wonderful color matching tool, and also just doing some balance changes. Overall I find that my corrections make the various wonky color moments do to faded footage at least slightly less jarring, though one or two of the shots I corrected ended up with hot skin tones unfortunately.

It should be uploaded tomorrow, see you guys then.

[X5gb]

Not the best at framerate conversion between 30fps and 23.976fps but wouldn't the simple Ripbot's de-interlace and decimate options be able to do it correctly.

I'm sure someone more in the know will pipe in and say there is a better way to do it.

[Dek Rollins]

I tried handbrake, which worked on the DVD footage. When the LD comes out of handbrake, frame rate is all choppy. Not sure what causes it.

[Dek Rollins]

This is now up.

[X5gb]

I'm sure the decimate option in Ripbot would get rid of the choppiness, does handbrake also have that option and have you tried it, haven't looked at handbrake for a few years so can't remember.

[Dek Rollins]

I just used decomb and detelecine in handbrake. As I said, it works on DVDs, it just didn't on the LD capture. I'll check out Ripbot and see if it fixes the issue.