The Librarian Quest For The Spear Extended Cut HD Project with bad sources (Finished)

[Doctor M]

So, I was planning my first HD preservation.  After much trial and error I picked some editing software that works well for me.

The movie: The Librarian: Quest for the Spear.  Briefly: The U.S. DVD has an extended cut running 12 minutes longer, there is no U.S. blu-ray and the international discs are the original TV runtime.

I snagged the extended cut from TubiTV.  It's low bitrate @ 2.4GB.  I was going to edit it with a Blu-ray source, inserting the missing pieces and swapping at least one wrong shot compared to the U.S. DVD.  I also planned to sync it to the DVD audio since Tubi does stereo AAC and the BD is only 640kbps 5.1, hardly worth editing the audio tracks and re-encoding.

That's when something interesting happened.  I started playing around with AnyStream.  The free version can do Amazon Prime (which I don't have), but it can, as a result, rip freevee... which has the extended cut of the movie weighing in at 10.3GB with 640kbps 5.1 DD+.  Hardly worth editing at all now.

Except: The freevee 5.1 audio has (at the very least) the center and right audio channels swapped.  I haven't aggressively tested the rear or LFE channels to see in they're in the right place.

My first thought was just to, again, sync the DVD audio.  Except freevee's version is 24fps, not 23.976 like my other three sources.  So I guess not only do I have to resync the track, I need to adjust the frame rate... which means the same needs to be done for the subtitles, and yeah, now I'm hating this.

The stereo track on freevee seems okay, but that doesn't help.  I don't know if a lower bitrate 5.1 track would be in better shape or not.

I guess I could swap the audio channels, but AFAIK, there is no way to do that without decoding to 6 WAV files, re-arranging and re-encoding... to 5.1 PCM? FLAC?

Anyone have any good suggestions, because I hate all the answers.

[stwd4nder2]

If you don't plan on using the web-dl audio at all just change the framerate to 23.976 with mkvtoolnix.

And there's nothing wrong with decoding ac3 to PCM to sync it (just make sure to remove any dialnorm). TBH you could probably convert it back to ac3 @ 640kb/s without any noticeable loss, but unless you're tight on space or aiming to be BD compatible FLAC should be good enough and completely lossless.

[Doctor M]

Yeah... good idea about just slowing down the video and using the DVD audio.
I was considering using EAC3TO to rearrange the channels and re-encode... to something.
First, out of curiosity I checked both tracks in Sound Forge and discovered the LFE channel is also swapped with one of the rears.
Since I can't even be sure of the L/R and SL/SR proper side at this point, I just can't be bothered to spend any more time trying to fix it.

[Doctor M]

I'll admit, I'm never completely sure about my interpretation of spectrum analysis, but this looks a lot to me like the E-AC3 track is just louder than the DD track with little else. Opinions? (The channels are still out of order, but I don't think that should make a difference to the graph.)

[SpaceBlackKnight]

I'd avoid massive headaches with retiming and resyncing, since it seems the WEB audio is a lot better than the DVD trackk. I'd just reswap any incorrect channels in Audacity and output as DD 640kps 5.1 or LPCM (FLAC won't work with all players and isn't BD compliant).

[Doctor M]

So I decided to examine and swap channels today. Lots of weirdness.
Using EAC3TO to decode to the DVD and Amazon download to 5.1 WAV files resulted in 23 minute files. Okay, whatever.

Decoding to 5 individual WAV files showed that the 'LFE' track, which is actually one of the rear channels, is at half volume of the other rear channel, and when played rumbles like a LFE channel.

I don't think there is such a thing as a low frequency flag. Am I correct to assume there is something even more screwy going on there?

[Doctor M]

This is stupidly more complicated than it should be.

So I have 4 sources at the moment: the extended cut DVD, extended cut Web-dl's from Amazon and Tubi, and a non-U.S. original broadcast length Blu-ray.

First, I was just going to sync the U.S. DVD audio to the Tubi video so it had 5.1 sound and be done with it.

Because of the lower bitrate, and some oddly cropped/zoomed shots that needed to be replaced, I was going to use the BD and cut in the extended bits as needed and use the DVD's audio so I didn't need to re-encode.

Then I got my hands on the Amazon stream which is more than 4x the bitrate and doesn't seem to have the zoomed shots. It does have badly corrupted audio that, as mentioned above, can't be fixed.

Next try was to sync the DVD audio to the Amazon video, but the video is 24 fps, not 23.976... so that needs slowing down to sync... right? No, wrong.

It turns out the Amazon stream has a delay of -1.049 seconds from the DVD for the full length without slow down, and the frames don't sync.

How is that possible?  It's not true 24 fps. It's 23.976 CONVERTED to 24 by adding one duplicate frame every 1001 frames (that was fun to find).

So I COULD sync the DVD audio and be done, but I'd know that there are pointless duplicate frames.  Do I re-encode decimating the video?  Heck, I'm not even sure what avisynth filter can drop every 1001st duplicate frame.

Gah.  Sorry, I just hate when simple projects are complicated.

Edit: I noticed today that my copy of the third film didn't have subtitles. Checking Freevee I saw there were two listings for that movie.
Long story short, Amazon has new transfers of these films. The new transfers have less cropping on all four sides, and darker scenes are lighter with less crushed black detail. Also, the old version is true 24fps, the new version is 23.976 with a duplicate frame every 1001 to achieve 24 frames.

Edit Again: Project is finished!(?) Video is 1080p and sourced from Amazon Prime/FreeVee. DD 5.1 Audio and chapters (with titles) synced from the U.S. extended DVD. Subtitles are ripped, synced and corrected from TubiTV since they are text based, don't need OCR, and are identical to Amazon's subs but easier to fix with fewer syntax errors.

Should I delete every 1001st duplicate frame? I can't say I see a stutter and since it means re-encoding the video, it's probably not ideal. When I watch this, I'll decide for certain.