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Post #502370

Author
Doctor M
Parent topic
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince Extended and Enhanced by Doctor M (Released)
Link to post in topic
https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/502370/action/topic#502370
Date created
26-May-2011, 5:18 PM

A quick update.

I sat through the whole film, made a few tweaks (including the tower scene edit-in point which had a hiccup).

One segment was giving me fits... and in the course of tracking down the problem found it to be a bug in Womble... yup.  (And it's one I've noticed before but didn't have the tech knowledge to understand until now.)

So now I can either:

1) Work around the bug (just re-edit the one problem section).  On proper DD decoders that respect dialog normalization, the audio will probably sound correct, but with a technically questionable stream (variable dialog normalization).

Playback on systems that don't handle D. Norm correctly (and some software players) the audio edits may have volume fluctuations.

2) Brute force fix the problem.  Re-edit all audio segments setting a constant volume across the film, and then using VOBDNorm to reset the entire film's normalization to -27 where it should be.

3) Curl up into a ball and cry.

4) Burn a disc of all my pieces and send it to someone who has more ambition than I do to finish this project.

5) Buy a bigger hard drive, push all the files into a folder somewhere and forget about them for a year (or until I forget how much work will really be required to finish this project).

Yeah... so.... um, yeah.

Edit:  Failed at #1, finished #3, and sort of doing #2.

Actually what I'm doing is using VOBDNorm, stripping the normalization from the movie's audio track so all pieces will be -31db.  (This is a lossless process.)

With all pieces now identical, even the re-encoded edit points will have the same characteristics.

I just need to rebalance any deleted scene audio that is too soft now compared to the rest of the film (probably all of them).

Then after I reauthor I'll use VOBDNorm again to reset the normalization to -27db where it belongs.

This SHOULD fix any weirdness and provide a consistent experience for all conditions.

Edit 2: Interesting discovery: VOBDNorm is meant to only work on VOB files which can be a pain doing each consective VOB.  Turns out it works on muxed mpeg files too.

Really, that is a great discovery.