Not to get anyone's hopes up, but post 16 turned out to be prescient.

Option 5 it was.  4 hours straight of remixing and re-encoding most of the audio and I have a build ready to preview.

I was actually getting ready to delete the files to clear some drive space (which IS a larger drive) and I realized how much work was already done.

All the deleted scene video was color corrected to match and edited in.  An English subtitle track was synced.  Chapters already marked.

I'll also probably be rewriting my Stereo to 5.1 guide soon too.

Please don't PM me for details, it's way too soon.

Now my toughest decisions are if I'm going to bother with menus and if this will be DVD5 or 9.  I've sort of stopped burning DVD9's now that I'm considering the leap to Blu-Ray.

Anyway, still alive, and evidently not retired from editing.

I honestly hadn't thought about it.

I've been looking at the Deathly Hallow entries.  The deleted scenes are a bit crap, aren't they.

When they aren't boring or pointless, there are green screens everywhere.

I don't think there's a point to trying to edit them unless someone with After Effects skills wants to finish the fx shots first.

I did a very simple DH Part 1 Extended Edition HERE

Other than the two scenes I added in, and a couple subtitles to help along the passage of time, I don't really think any of the others would make a difference (Ron talking to his dad is a good scene, but kills all pacing).

nightstalkerpoet said:

I did a very simple DH Part 1 Extended Edition HERE

Other than the two scenes I added in, and a couple subtitles to help along the passage of time, I don't really think any of the others would make a difference (Ron talking to his dad is a good scene, but kills all pacing).

Yeah, I keep going back and forth on this.  Some of the scenes make no sense without further info, a lot have green screens, a couple don't fit because they were replaced with a montage.  It's pretty thin for what's useful. 

Considering they needed to stretch a really slow story into 2 movies, I guess that's to be expected.  I'm currently looking into doing this though only to add some high dynamic range gain to it.

It won't be anywhere near what I was showing in my tests.

I'm curious what others think, but on a well calibrated TV there are several scenes that are just black with some blobs moving around.  I don't know if the people that built the DVD were crap at their jobs, if the movie was intended to have bits with effects shots that can't be scene(?) or if they assume everyone has LCD televisions in torch mode that has to be compensated for.

I assume the last is true.  Anybody with a professionally calibrated (or pretty well amateurly calibrated) TV find some scenes to be too dark to even make sense in Deathly Hallows?

I've been having trouble finding a release outlet I'm comfortable with lately.  A lot of places formerly safe or that welcomed edits no longer do.

Also, I held off because I thought there might have been a last minute tweak coming.  I was looking at doing Deathly Hallows and it made me rethink some things.

I don't know about anyone else, but in the DH films, when my TV is set to it's most accurate movie viewing mode, there are scenes that are almost completely black.

While I will be making dynamically brightened versions of the DH films (mostly because I think the director is a hack to make them so dark), I've determined that although HPB is pretty damn dark at times, it never gets as bad as the two DH flicks.

I was worried that if I brightened Deathly Hallows they'd be brighter than HBP which wouldn't be right either.  I think I've found a good balance.

I'm also pretty convinced extending the DH films is a waste of time.  Most of the deleted scenes have unfinished effects, are lacking context to know what is going on, are really boring, or just don't feel necessary in these already unnecessarily strectched films.

There might be 1 or 2 useful scenes to each movie, and that's just not enough to go to the effort.

I'll post some screens of DH later on.  I'm really aiming to see fixed some scenes that are inexplicably near black when there is cool things that should be seen.

If I don't add any deleted scenes to DH, I won't release it though.

I will however post the avisynth script that can be pasted into DVD Rebuilder for a quick easy self-coversion job anyone can do.

This is probably the final settings I'll use on Deathly Hallows.

It's a tough balance.  There's what would be good, and then there's what is consistent with Half Blood Prince (which is my goal).

While HBP was generally dim, only one scene was unreasonably dark.  It also has much better color saturation than Deathly Hallows (which borders on grey scale at times).

I'm convinced that the color/brightness abuse was done to hide cheaper effects and makeup in DH than for artistic merit.

Anyway, here's some snapshots for DH1 and DH2 showing a variety of scene types.

Source : HDRAGC adjusted

FYI, HBP will probably get released, but ATM I'm having slow ISP issues.