Originally posted by: Darth Editous
ADM, did you have to do any resyncing (by eye/ear) during your edit? Or did you just make sure you took out the same amount of audio as video when you made a cut?

A little of both. What I did first was make straight cuts in the audio where the video was made. Then, I would slide the audio cut point to something a little more palettable. Weird thing about Womble, it treats everything as 29.97, even if it's 23.976, repeating the 6th frame for you when you work with it. The end export would lose frames occasionally that I don't think were dropped frames, but were simply where cuts were made on a "repeated" frame. That's my guess anyway.

So, I generated a reference copy of the mix and noted how many frames it was off from the final video. I loaded this reference copy into vegas and squeezed it the appropriate amount of frames to match where it should have fallen with the video.

I then went back to the source AC3 files and used Hypercube Transcoder to rip the streams to individual mono wavs, then loaded those wav's into vegas, grouped them by source, and set up the surround panning to match where it should be.

I then started the painstaking process in Vegas (I only use the Audio part of it) of listening to the squeezed stereo reference mix and the original WAV files at the same time. Whenever a cut was detected in the reference copy, I rebuilt the cut in the surround mix, crossfading the audio so it would sound seamless. Often, I'd try different envelope shapes to find just the right fade shape for the particular cut. On Ep I and II this was a total nightmare because there were so many little cuts here and there.

Eventually I got through it all. I then removed the stereo reference WAV and generated the resulting 5.1 AC3. I muxed it, watched it, and every time something was noticed (in video, audio, or subtitles), I would return to the source, tweak, re-export, re-mux, burn, re-watch. I probably did a dozen rounds of fine-tuning in this manner on each movie.

Sometimes the sync appeared a little off so I'd tweak something there visually. "There it is R4, our missing planet, Kamino" sticks out in my mind as a line that was out of sync. It's actually a bad ADR job, as it's still out of sync, even thought part of the line now matches Ewan's lips.

Anyway, the goal was to eventually get through the movie without finding anything. Every time I thought I was there, I'd find another little something misbehaving. Clearly I even missed one that's prompted this "recall" I'm doing on Ep I.

I once had a boss that called this kind of meticulous, anal-retentive attention to detail "the endless pursuit of needless perfection."

My wife calls it "spending too much time on the damn computer doing Star Wars bulls#!t."

I don't sleep much. B-{