Hey gang. I’ve been wanting to work on a Transformers the Movie supplemental disk for quite a while. While the Sony disk they just put out was pretty damn awesome, it was lacking a couple things due to rights or other issues.
Things I would like to include:
-Transformers the Movie promotional trailer restored with the actual audio. This trailer is about 4 minutes long and was used to sell the movie to outside investors. It initially floated around on the internet in a really crappy (160xsomething?) size back in the mid '90s. A big chunk of it is video which did not appear in the actual movie, including old colors for Ultra Magnus and other stuff. The video for this appeared on the recent DVD, but the audio was not present for some reason. It was originally narrated by Vince Dicola with a bunch of music and stuff. Instead there was just a bunch of commentary over it. More on this later.
-Scramble City OAV with Japanese Audio + Subtitles. Maybe even mux the fandub in. The official US DVD has probably the best quality version of the video for this, but it has absolutely no audio. All of the audio is replaced with commentary, and there are no subtitles. I have sourced another version of this with decent subtitles and audio.
-Transformers the Movie Theatrical Trailer, encoded as anamorphic instead of with black bars. This is on the official release, though it’s not anamorphic. Oddly enough most of the audio for this was also used on the promotional trailer, and the audio is actually on this one. This should be cake to do.
-The UK scrolling credits opening to the movie, as well as the ending Vince Dicola narration. Currently have no source for this.
-The Touch Music Video by Stan Bush. Currently have no source for this.
-The Japanese Transformers 2010 Intro, which includes movie footage and other original stuff. I have a good copy of this somewhere, but I don’t know where.
-The 5 Part TV version bumpers with the stop motion Powermaster Optimus Prime and Peter Cullen voiceover. No source currently.
-The interview clips on the DVD website which aren’t on the DVD itself.
-Any trailers that are floating around missing from the DVD set. I’ve also toyed with the idea of recreating the longest ones with the DVD footage.
-The really cool intro to the really bad Japanese PS2 game which has the TFTM prime fight recreated in CG.
So far, I’ve done the most work on the promotional trailer:
http://rapidshare.com/files/42697854/tftm-promotional-trailer01.avi.html
This is my currently unfinished work in restoring it. I’ve had to go in and edit some of the footage at the very end, looping some of it, since the audio was longer than the actual video. The audio is sourced from the best copy of this video I could find; I believe it’s from a Japanese Laserdisk. Pretty much every other copy of this video I’ve seen has Japanese titles added to it. In addition, there is some missing audio at the beginning with the scrolling grey text. Every other copy I’ve found starts at the ‘TRANSFORMERS: THE MOVIE’ part. The missing narration exists on the front of the ‘Theatrical Trailer’ I mention above, however it is backed by some really booming music which doesn’t fit the tone of the trailer. I do not have the technical skill as an audio editor to remove this music, so it is one of the areas where I really need help. In addition, I would like to have someone fluent in Japanese to read over the Japanese titling on the old version of this. If it’s unique, we could add it back in in English via a subtitle track.
The above clip requires the avc/x264 codec, or VLC should chomp right through no matter what…
This is my first ‘project thread’, and I’ve read through the rules and I believe I’m on the right side of everything. I initially wanted to see about fixing the color issues (like Pink Hot Rod) in the 16x9 version of the Sony disk, but I feel that wouldn’t be that different from the released disk. My other thought was to try to do a multilingual disk. Currently I have the movie in English, Cantonese, and Mandarin. I’ve been looking for it in Japanese, but I believe the DVD is out of print. A friend of mine did a complete translation of the Japanese movie though, with the dialogue differences, but, again, this is a little too much like a custom disk.