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"Batman: The Killing Joke" - Fan Editing Tips & Help Wanted

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 (Edited)

I’m thinking of attempting to make a fairly simple fan edit of “Batman: The Killing Joke”

Despite its problems, I’ve long been a fan of Alan Moore’s character defining graphic novel. So I was hesitantly excited when they announced they were making it into a DC Universe Animated Movie.

While there are parts that I feel are well done, the film’s prologue is horrendous and there are also some other very sour notes along the way.

It was noble to try to give Barbara more depth than the simple Disposable Woman character she is in the original story. But they went about it all wrong and only made the sexist narrative problems even worse. And since the first 28 minute section has absolutely no bearing on the rest of the movie, it lifts right out. When the prologue is eliminated, along with three other short snippets, IMHO, the film is greatly improved, even if still flawed.

But looking at what I’ve been able to make so far, my lack of video editing skills is still pretty apparent.

In the interest of not making a long post even longer, I’ll refrain from going into the specifics of what clips I’m cutting for now. I can talk about that later if need be. At this time, I’ll just detail the editing tasks that are giving me trouble.

MakeMKV seems to do a pretty good job of ripping, I don’t think the rips are of lossless quality though and I’d like them to be. But then the quality really drops when I try to do any of the following three things:

  1. Cut the ripped file into pieces with various free file cutters.
  2. Add brief audio fade outs at the very end of two of the clips to help make the cuts stand out less.
  3. Try to rejoin the spliced pieces back together.

I have been able to get a single video file back together with various free editing programs. However the degraded picture quality and less than seamless cuts are still far from being passable.

So, does anyone have advice on ways to:

    a. Make rips of both the DVD and Blu-ray
    b. Create cuts from the original rips that are more precise than by the second.
    c. Create gradual audio fade outs to zero volume over the course of a second or two at the very end of a clip.
    d. Seamlessly rejoin the finished video files into one.

And do all of the above losslessly and with software that’s either free or much less expensive than, say, Adobe After Effects or Final Cut Pro?

Thanks for any help!

The NJVC Custom Bluray Set of Harmy’s Despecialized Editions is available on Mega.

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