So, while I'm working on my pain in the arse "new adventures of winnie the pooh" restoration project, I decided that I need something to distract me from the tediousness of seeing that every night. That's where this project comes to play...
I don't know about you guys, but I was severely disappointed with the fact that there is NO OTR on Bluray of this movie and instead we have this DEC and DDC bullsh*t to contend with. Now don't get me wrong, I like the extra footage as just that, "an extra" but the fact that we are stuck with ONLY that sucks IMHO. There are pros and cons to those releases and the fact that I had to get a PAL R2 DVD just to have the theatrical cut pissed me off. I started looking around the net for alternatives and found a "Hybrid cut," which is also not the OTR, but I really did like it, however its only an SD cut... sh*t, sorry guys, I'm side-tracking...
After some extensive research I found that I can have a proper NTSC speed theatrical of the movie if I get the R4 DVD which I ordered for $7 (including shipping) and I just received it today. I am really happy to have a theatrical cut without having to re-encode the audio, after slowing it back down to NTSC speed from the R2 DVD... but, alas, it's still only an SD copy...
So, I searched the internet, and discovered a 1080i copy of the movie ripped from a SKY-HD broadcast of the theatrical version. YAY!!! but, it too, is a PAL transfer, and to boot it ONLY has a 2.0 (despite what the torrent description says) English audio track. I have a copy of the DDC Bluray as well and then it dawned on me that I can reproduce the OTR using, mostly, footage from the Bluray with the scenes that need changing from the 1080i broadcast once I change the framerate from 25fps back to 23.976. Unfortuantely the 1080i broadcast has a bitrate of ~6400kbps whereas the bluray is around 28000kbps so there is some (lots of) grain structure missing from that HDTV copy. However, this is ok if I apply REAL 35mm grain back onto it and judging from my tests so far should be very doable.
Interestingly though, when I changed the fps of the R2 DVD and of the PAL HDTV broadcast and aligned them to the R4 DVD I discovered an interesting discrepancy in the total frame count. What I mean by that is that the R4 DVD is 2 frames longer than the R2 DVD and the HDTV broadcast is 10 frames longer than the R4 DVD. These are very subtle changes, but they are there, therefore none of the copies actually line up perfectly. This is more as a novelty information than anything else but I just wanted to mention it.
Anyway, I am ripping the (unfortunately) lossy 5.1 English AC3 track from the R4 DVD and will be timing the video to that release, as since I'm using a lossy audio source, I don't want to re-encode it and degrade the sound even more. There are too many changes and different audio for me to use the lossless DTS-HDMA track that's on the bluray, hence the decision to use the audio off the R4 DVD.
For the video editing, I am using the R4 DVD (as that will be the audio that it needs to be synced to) as a reference, where all the video will be used from the bluray, except when there are changes, where I will use the HDTV (with a REAL 35mm grain-plate overlayed onto it) edition to fill in those blanks as that's much better than using upscaled DVD footage.
All of this will be re-encoded using AVC at ~30000kbps and then...
well, if I can figure out how to author a BD-25 out of it then I'll go that route, or I will just remux it into an MKV file depending on how hard that sh*t is to figure out. I will also include the English subtitles from the R4 DVD as I won't have to re-sync them.
There are two things I am wondering though, before I finish this project (and it's easy and I should have it complete within the next few days, except for, maybe, the proper BD authoring) and I was hoping you wonderful people could help me.
First, I am aware of the fact that there was a Laserdisc edition, which some claim is the theatrical cut and some say there are minor changes, but would the laserdisc audio be a better fit for this than using the R4 DVD audio?
Second, would there be any interest in this "preservation" once it's complete?