CatBus said:
I've got a question about those commentaries. I understand what you did with the Laserdisc commentary, but what did you do to the other commentaries to get them to sync? Wouldn't they all at the very least have chopped off bits here and there due to the SE sections? Just wondering... seems kinda miraculous. And if it really is seamless, I'm wondering if the same method could be used to get an audio descriptive track for ESB and ROTJ.
It is fairly seamless at least for the 2004 DVD and 2011 BD commentaries. The 2004 web commentary I got from Adywan's AVHCD, which was 24fps, so I had some trouble synchronizing it, even though I slowed it down what should have been the appropriate amount - but most of the time, you can't really hear the movie's audio in that one, so it's not too much of a problem that it's slightly out of sync. The other two should be in pretty perfect sync, because I attached them to the BD video in Premiere and then I used the video rather than the audio for sync reference. I did have to cut some stuff out but 99% of the time, it's just someone talking about Special Edition stuff that's not there anyway, as is the case with the Jabba scene. Sometimes I had to use the short periods where no one was commenting to move some section out of sync to allow for some SE changes to be cut out without loosing the commentary running over them. So all in all, I'd say the commentaries are in sync 95% of the time (and when they're not, it usually isn't really an issue) and 98% of the material is there (and the missing material is about the SE). There's still lots of SE refferences, so sometimes it's kind of funny to watch the film with those commentaries but it usually kind of works, because they say stuff like "this shot was redone with CGI in 97," simply reminding you that you're actually watching the good version :-)
As to whether the SE commentary for the blind could be edited the same way, I'd say it could but it would require some more skilled audio editor than me to keep it in perfect sync, plus of course it would be the 97SE mix with some of the different sound effects.