I've been snowed in the last couple days and will be making the post office later today or tomorrow (haven't even made it to work). I took the opportunity to scrub through the audio to ensure better synch throughout (subtracted a frame or two of audio here and there). It was odd, a scene in the beginning would be in perfect synch, as would a scene at the end, but a scene in the middle would be out of synch. Then the scene next to it would be in synch, and so on. I suspect the piecemeal structure of all the multiple sources must have thrown my software off. Anyway, I scrubbed the entire film twice (whereas I had only spot-checked it before) and then I took the newly synched wav and used Audition spectral frequency and scrubbed away imperfections such as gaps and pops and abrupt cuts. There was a short gap in the soundtrack on the recreated scene of Han and Leia in Bespin (just before he says "Sit down") I fixed, and Jeremy Bulloch's comment was sharply abrupt, so I smoothed it. I did them one at a time as i heard them and saw them on the spectral frequency display (an undesired pop would show up as a spike that hit the top of the scale, while a desired pop would not). I also went through and individually pitch-shifted the four or five commentaries that were slowed down (usually Carrie and Mark) that sounded awful. I was using pitch bender and I made it through an hour and a half before I noticed it was lengthening the wav, so i had to start over using pitch shifter, which didn't. I didn't do that for voices I wasn't familiar with, just Carrie and Mark since they sounded the worst.

Despite all the trouble, I'm very glad I did it progressive. On my TV, there's none of those interlacing artifacts such as combing or double images. As big a pain in the ass it was, I think I did it right. It's a true NTSC rather than an IFO trick that may not work on everyone's system. There's also no frame skipping or judder from repeated frames.

The only thing I'm not as happy with is that audition does those nice transitions between menus and they look good on my computer, but there's the ever so slightest pause when I watch it on TV. I don't think you want me to delay it while I teach my self DVDLab Pro, so I'll have to live with it.

Anyway, the slight delay here will help not steal any thunder away from Jambe's Jedi release (which I had pledged not to watch until I finished BE). I hope you guys all like it.