I have been slow the past few days due to fact that the second track from the Intrada Special Collection/ Sony Legacy release of the score is longer than used in the film. One part was especially tricky, no matter how I cut the section out to match up the length of what how it goes in the film it just sounded too sharp in the edit. This resulted in me going to a small but unavoidable "evil" of doing a splice to the track and fading out on the part that was causing the issue and fading into the other end where I needed to go, which thankfully made it sound like 99.9% of what was originally heard in the film soundtrack edit.
Now I've noticed a portion of the same time length I took out of the track suddenly is added back in during Laserbeak's report to Megatron. So again it will require me to listen very carefully through all the sound effects and vocals to hear what section of music during that moment is reused and where the insertion occurs. Out of morbid curiosity, I checked youtube for the same music piece from the Botcon '97 release TIL ALL ARE ONE (which there bears the name"2005") and sure enough, it's shorter than what is on the Intrada/Sony Legacy by about 40-45 seconds. I do have a copy of the Botcon ´97, but it is a copy and I know the way it was done means that there's a small amount of loss in the range. If I had the release OR had a way to get my hands on FLAC /WAV files of it, it'd be great. I could still use the Intrada/Sony Legacy release but use the small transition parts from the Botcon '97 whenever necessary to make certain edit points less problematic.
Don't get me wrong, I love the challenge of this! Been a few good years before I've jumped into the deep end of the sound editing pool like this. It also does point out to me that it is clear there were edits that happened as these tracks on the Intrada/Sony Legacy CD are most likely the original composition lengths and that means they have meant to have more during the Autobots preparing to head to Earth and less during Laserbeak's report to Megatron. Interesting indeed!
Well, it's time to get back to it. And wish me luck! More luck than you can possibly imagine...