Editing part 2 has nearly broken me for the day - this is the most difficult edit I've ever attempted, by far. I've already exhausted every trick in my book and have come up with a million more that aren't in any book ...
The problem ... the biggest problem of many ... is that certain important scenes ... the witch scene mainly ... appear on the Princess and the Cobbler DVD, but only in pan & scan.
So, I was crazy enough to try to convert them into widescreen.
I should emphasize that ... TRY TO CONVERT THEM INTO WIDESCREEN.
If the shot is fairly static, which it never is, I create a background for it. If the shot is moving, and the same footage is in the workprint or elsewhere, I paste the two together somehow. I've been using a lot of Chromakey tricks to try to make it all kind of meld ... I've "colorized" a couple of simple black and white shots ... it's been completely insane.
For certain shots I've had to go frame by frame and color correct it to match ... or go shot by shot and move the background to match ... or move the shot to match ...
The shot pulling away from Zigzag into One Eye's camp/orgy was hell, and I never quite got it ... the reason being that the shot in Princess and the Cobbler is actually different than the shot in the workprint - it's the same animation, but it was reshot, using different lighting effects (so it flashes and flickers bright and dark differently than the workprint) and includes some extra elements (ravens, bats) and different backgrounds and things. The differences are so subtle, but just enough to completely ruin any chance of merging the two. I did so anyway, color correcting frame by frame. I did the best I could.
The shot that really introduces the witch, I had a lot of fun with, I spent ages on it. I created an entirely new background, put some of the workprint footage over it using Chromakey, and put the DVD footage in the middle - it looks wonderful.
I've reinstated footage and lines that didn't appear in the workprint ... stuff that never appeared in any version of the film ... it's very much a different and new and complex and entertaining edit.
But it's been a hundred times as hard as editing part 1.
Also, the sound is baaad, and I'm fixing it.
Pretty much done with the witch now. On to the final battle ... the war machine .....