I've been re-tweaking M3. The quality has been good, but I keep going back and forth over things.
I just clipped one small scene that I had trimmed down and now removed all together for pace.
Something else I had cut before now makes an appearance in hopes of smoothing out other things..
I'm both happy and annoyed with these edits. M2 has proven to be a delight. A movie I was so-so over to start with I now find enjoyable. I didn't think I could improve it as much as I did. The new beginning, ending and tighter pacing really do wonders.
On the down side M3 I figured would turn out better than M2, but it's feeling more like a student film or something because of the way it jerks along.
I don't know whether to make apologies for it or boast how proud I am of it.
That is, I like the order of the parts I put together and some of the action scenes flow a little better, but the plot sort of jerks along at times and requires a leap of faith on the viewer's part.
An example: we now see Bane act menacing/crazy around the doctor but does not stab her. The scene plays well but there's really no explanation from that scene to how he manages to leave Hammer. Or for that matter where the doc is in between then and when she reappears in my new ending.
I like to think he overpowered her or she actually felt sorry for him and let him go. Either one of which feel possible with the recut of that scene. The thing is I need to do what I'm doing to make the film play how I want.
On the small scale there's even some lines of dialog I feel like swapping around, but it produces obvious continuity errors.
An example: The Merovingian would sit, eat all his olives, shake an empty glass and then suddenly finds some more olives in his glass to munch on.
The reason is in that scene I always thought he should give the long rambling speech about wanting the Oracle's eyes, and when he says "Yes? No?" cut in the lines from earlier when Trinity says "No" and Merovingian replies "I didn't think so but it doesn't hurt to ask." Then Trinity follows up that she doesn't have time for this sh#t. It's pretty funny to watch and looks great. It brings out the fact that he's really an ineffectual and silly man. But again, the olive crisis. This films is full of tough choices.
I think I'm going to sacrifice witty tweaks like that and only cause continuity trouble when it's unavoidable. I love the new cut of that scene though. Curse your olive sucking fetish!
Edit: Oh yeah, I've been emailing Womble's tech support back and forth. It looks like the same problem that cause the Xvid idea to go wonky may be the same cause of the lower quality re-encoded clips. The software can't tell the difference between 23.976 with 30 fps pulldown and true 30fps clips. When a re-encode is needed it does 30 fps. It looks bad and makes a hybrid video stream. Invisible to DVD players, death to an avi file.
Hopefully they'll come up with a fix shortly, if not I won't hold my breath (or the release) waiting for them.
Really, avoid MVW for major projects.