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ADigitalMan's Guide to MPEG2/AC3 Editing — Page 2

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It's not all that crazy actually. It reads more daunting than it really is.

But 2.0 in Womble isn't bad either. Especially if you export to WAV format and then compress to DD with a really good encoder. Or even leave as WAV.
I am fluent in over six million forms of procrastination.
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When I did the Star Wars Trilogy I used Womble with PCM audio. I used the 2 audio track spaces and did crossfades between them every time I had to correct for missing frames in the PAL film.

My next project is going to be a full and seriously ambitious fan edit. The original film I'm working with has a lot of orchestrals that span scene changes. If I re-edit things aren't going to mesh. Crossfades seem like they'll be a necessity. I don't want to do it if I can't keep the audio in 5.1, but to use Vegas sounds like days (weeks?) more work than the quick on the fly freedom that Womble gives. It's a shame Womble can't recode 5.1 like it does everything else...

Or does it. I just saw that they have Mpeg Video Wizard DVD that supports AC3. Anyone have a chance to play with it? Is it full 5.1 or just 2.0?

Dr. M

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Once you're familiar with Vegas's audio capabilities, it shouldn't add more than a couple days work soup to nuts. The secret is to have it work for you while you do other things. The editing part is time-consuming, but ripping with Hypercube and rendering work in full time ... maybe x2 depending on your processor. When you do those steps, do it overnight or while you're watching a movie or playing with your kids or whatever. Don't discount it as an option though. It's surprisingly easy to learn and lets you do some amazing crossfades.
I am fluent in over six million forms of procrastination.
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"Wow, editing 5.1 audio is crazy complicated with Sony Vegas. It's tempting to do straight cuts and hope it doesn't sound to bad"

What's so difficult about it? You have five tracks laid out, and edit accordingly - in fact, you can group them all together so that fades are done on all tracks simultaneously (and it's easy to ungroup a particular track for a particular fade, and then regroup.) In fact, it's not a bad idea to edit with the 2.0 track first (to figure out how the video will go), and then go back and align the 5.1 soundtrack to the 2.0. You can line them up visually by looking at the waveforms.

<span class=“Italics”>MeBeJedi: Sadly, I believe the prequels are beyond repair.
<span class=“Bold”>JediRandy: They’re certainly beyond any repair you’re capable of making.</span></span>

<span class=“Italics”>MeBeJedi: You aren’t one of us.
<span class=“Bold”>Go-Mer-Tonic: I can’t say I find that very disappointing.</span></span>

<span class=“Italics”>JediRandy: I won’t suck as much as a fan edit.</span>

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MBJ is right ... use the 2.0 from Womble as a guide for your 5.1 layout.
I am fluent in over six million forms of procrastination.
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Well with something like Womble you can edit the audio and video at the same time. So a cut in the vid is a cut in the audio.

It sounds like with Vegas you need to have the video edited, but then you'll have to find the audio pieces, do your edits to match the video that's already had the work done, and make sure the audio syncs correctly as you go.
Basically at least twice as much work since you have to do your edit twice.

Dr. M

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Don't use Vegas for the video if you're using Womble. Just use Vegas as a multitrack audio tool. Demux the streams before going to Womble and use them separately, and export them separately when you're done. Then just use the 2.0 audio as a guide for how to layout the 5.1 mix, being sure to mute the 2.0 mix before you render.
I am fluent in over six million forms of procrastination.
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"So a cut in the vid is a cut in the audio."

This is true with Vegas also. Again, you need to group the audio and video, so that changes are applied to both simultaneously.

<span class=“Italics”>MeBeJedi: Sadly, I believe the prequels are beyond repair.
<span class=“Bold”>JediRandy: They’re certainly beyond any repair you’re capable of making.</span></span>

<span class=“Italics”>MeBeJedi: You aren’t one of us.
<span class=“Bold”>Go-Mer-Tonic: I can’t say I find that very disappointing.</span></span>

<span class=“Italics”>JediRandy: I won’t suck as much as a fan edit.</span>

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This is my first post here at the forums. I've been reading for a couple of weeks and have enjoyed them greatly. My first attempt will be Ep. III with an eye to working on I and II. I also have a notion that all 6 movies could be edited into 3 Godfather II style movies. My wife thinks I'm a nut. I have some questions regarding the handling of sound, especially when editing extensively.

My only exposure to fan edits is via the Phantom Editor, who edits extensively. And, I am currently dl'ing Digital Man's Ep's III & IV - looking forward to watching them! - which should give me an idea of the extent his revisions.

I have read ADigitalMan's excellent guide to editing and have "completed" a chop cut of Ep III with a stereo track attached. The visuals are pretty good, but the sound, as you can imagine, is rough. In editing the film, I've revised many of the scenes extensively, changing the order of shot occurence, etc. This, of course, has played havoc with the music.

I've ripped the soundtrack to 6 wavs and am currently editing the center/dialogue track in Sony Vegas and will then use that as a guide for the other tracks. I'm not sure if I'll go all the way and create a 5.1, though.

My question is how do you handle the break up of the music. Do you rip the cds and reconstruct the sound from scratch or is there something I'm not thinking of. I'm compiling a library of sfx wavs in case I do have to do it all from scratch but I'd rather not if I don't have to.

Again, this is great place you guys have here! Thanks!



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The mixed elements are indeed hard to separate. Typically I group the six channel wavs so that an edit to one will make an edit to all, then temporarily break that grouping if I need to make a tweak to the center channel. Occasionally I've needed to flow in a bit of music from the soundtrack here and there, but mostly I've been able to mix the sound by crossfading the DVD's L&R channels while leaving a gap or a patch from another area in the C channel.

I can readily think of two examples where I had to find a snippet of music from the CD soundtrack:

Killing Jake Lloyd's "Yippieeeee" when he was freed, and shortening Vaders "Noooooooooooooo." I'm sure there are others but those two stick out in my mind.
I am fluent in over six million forms of procrastination.
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<edit> I take back what I just said. Nm.

Dr. M

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I once considered editing an NTSC DVD for a fan-edit. I never did end up doing it because there are so many different problems caused by NTSC's framerates, interlacing, etc. That's why I appreciate all the DVD's you guys make even more - because I just couldn't handle fiddling with the many variables of an NTSC project. When I considered creating an Extended Edition of Serenity (using the PAL DVD) for example, the deleted/extended scenes were very poor NTSC->PAL transfers. Even in my beloved PAL DVDs there are sometimes things like that which remind me of the many reasons why I hate NTSC in general.

I'm not trying to derail the thread, just making a comment.

To contact me outside the forum, for trades and such my email address is my OT.com username @gmail.com

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Ok, this is making me nuts now. It should be simple and basic and I can't get it to work.
I ripped the audio and video with DVDdecrypter.

I scanned for errors even though I never do (none found by the way). Moved the clips into Womble. That's where it goes funny.
The video is 23.976 with pulldown flags of 29.97 (as is common).
Womble shows the runtime bloated (almost an hour longer) and of course the audio and video don't sync.

So I used dgpulldown and used custom 23.976 -> 23.976. The output file shows as 23.976 at 23.976.
In Womble the runtime is now correct and it ends at the same place as the audio.
Except when playing the preview, the audio and video are out of sync even though the visually the two parts are right.
Any ideas here?

Edit: I found the problem. The video has to be extracted as Raw not Demuxed. That's interesting.

Dr. M

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I would guess that the demuxed video still has the pulldown flags, which you don't want. The raw stream might presumably remove those flags.

<span class=“Italics”>MeBeJedi: Sadly, I believe the prequels are beyond repair.
<span class=“Bold”>JediRandy: They’re certainly beyond any repair you’re capable of making.</span></span>

<span class=“Italics”>MeBeJedi: You aren’t one of us.
<span class=“Bold”>Go-Mer-Tonic: I can’t say I find that very disappointing.</span></span>

<span class=“Italics”>JediRandy: I won’t suck as much as a fan edit.</span>

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In this case it was the Matrix trilogy. The first movie needed to be extracted raw, the second and third had to be demuxed and then be rerun through dgpulldown and set for 23.976 to 29.97 (since Womble likes 30fps video).

Dr. M

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Okay, so I followed all the steps in the guide, I've now reached step 4, where in I bring the video and audio into womble. Problem is, when I bring the video into Womble it won't display. It just looks like static. It displays fine if I drag it into the "input" display window, but dragging the file to the video timeline has it displayed in the "output" window, which just shows me garbage. Am I doin something wrong here? I'm editing Revenge of the Sith, just so you know what vid files I'm working with.

**Edit**

Weird. Closing and re-opening the program seems to have fixed the problem. I wonder why it did that.

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That is a common fix for many computer maladies. Don't question it - it just works.

<span class=“Italics”>MeBeJedi: Sadly, I believe the prequels are beyond repair.
<span class=“Bold”>JediRandy: They’re certainly beyond any repair you’re capable of making.</span></span>

<span class=“Italics”>MeBeJedi: You aren’t one of us.
<span class=“Bold”>Go-Mer-Tonic: I can’t say I find that very disappointing.</span></span>

<span class=“Italics”>JediRandy: I won’t suck as much as a fan edit.</span>

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Hey MBJ, I've been meaning to ask how your uber restoration project is coming, it's been ages since I've heard what's happening.

I've finally just started my editing project today. This weekend I upgraded my computer, and now after years and years of talking about it, I'm finally doing it. Initially I had intended to use Adobe Premier but it seems that, unbeknownst to me, Premier is actually no good for editing of this variety. A little stunned to be quite honet. Thus far the edit is looking pretty sweet. I'm finished the first vob file of ROTS, moving on to the second. My intention is to eventually create my own personal versions of the whole saga to my liking. My main philosphy is the OT came first, and therefore over-rides the prequels in terms of canon and philosphy. Therefore, I;m cutting things like buzzdroids and the like because they just don't fit. If buzz droids existed in the prequels, then we should have certainly seen the aliance or the empire making use of them. Battledroids are going to be mostly silent, because battledroids should never have been endowed with personality. They're killing machines, they shouldn't say shit like "uh oh" or run away or get scared, that's just stupid. My main goal though is preservation. That is, preservation of the OT and it's big moments. So, no revelation of Anakin becoming Vader in ROTS. I've started with ROTS because right now it's the one I've been watching the most and the one I have the most ideas about how to cut. Man it's exciting to finally be doing it. I can't wait to see how my first rough edit turns out.

one thing I wish I could do with womble is "scrub" the audio, like you can in macromedia flash. It's hard to make an edit sometimes when it's not dependant on the visual but on the sound, I want to be able to scrub the play line across the audio track until I hear said sound, and thus pinpoint exactly where to place the cut? Any programs out there good for that?


Eventually I do want to get into doing things like playing with the multi-channel soundtracks and doing effects and such on the video, like speeding up or slowing down fram rates, wipes, adjusting saber colours, stuff like that. Are the programs listed in Digital Man's "how to" good for that, or are there more advanced programs I should be looking for? I've got a dual layer burner, and my hope is to produce edits of quality as close to on par with the original dvd release as possible.

Tips, Tricks, reccomendations? anyone?

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One word: Vegas.

It's your one stop shopping mall for everything you're hoping to do. It's not cheap, but it's about 1/3 the price of Premiere I think.
I am fluent in over six million forms of procrastination.
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Vegas may be nice, but see if you can try a demo first. Some people cannot install/run it on their PC's because of technical issues.

Dr. M

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I have Vegas, but the problem I run into there is that Vegas doesn't recognize the .M2V or .AC3 file extensions that DVD Decrypter gave me for my video files and audio file. Do I have to further convert the video files for use on Vegas? Is there some kind of plug-in? Any help would be appreciated.

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.M2V will need to be converted to AVI with AVISynth or some such tool. To do a whole film will take up an enormous amount of disk space. Just as a heads up.

.AC3 will need to be converted to separate WAV files using HypercubeTranscoder or some such utility for each channel per the guide.

Hope this helps.
I am fluent in over six million forms of procrastination.
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Thanks ADM, appreciate the help

I hereby predict that my edit, much like Poochie, will be greater than 10 superbowls! I don't want to over sell it though

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Sweet Zombie Jesus you weren't kidding about disk space. I had 130 gigs free, and sith took it all and still needs more room! that's just crazy man! Boggles the mind how not even 9 gigs of video can expand to fill more than 130 gigs

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Makes ya really appreciate MPEG-2's compression. Can't wait to see MPEG-4 in action.
I am fluent in over six million forms of procrastination.