- Time
- Post link
Charlie Chaplin’s film The Kid was originally released in 1921, at 68 minutes long. I think it runs at 20fps - more on that later.
In 1971, he pulled a George Lucas and re-released a new version, suppressing the old one. It is 52 minutes long, has several deleted scenes, and I assume is sped up to 24fps.
In 1999, there was a restoration of eight Chaplin films from this period, including this one. The DVDs were released by Image. They went out of print VERY soon. The Kid and three others were replaced by tampered-with editions on DVD, and the rest remain out of print in any form. Fortunately, I own all of these DVDs.
Now The Kid is being released on Blu-Ray, but only its 52 minute 1971 version. I’d like to edit it back to its original form, but in HD quality. Criterion said it’s cut from a 1921 print, so I’m hoping the takes will be identical to the 1999 restoration. The deleted scenes and title cards are also on the disc as bonus features, so I might have all the raw materials I need on the BD itself, and can just use the DVD as a reference.
First question, is it possible to change video frame rate without doing a full re-encode? I am assuming that the Blu-Ray will be 24fps full progressive, and also assuming that 20fps is the correct speed. Extracting the video from the disc is not a problem. But if it’s possible, I’d like to avoid re-encoding it, because this will reduce the video quality.
Second, let’s say I create a high quality 20fps video file. What’s the best way of getting this onto a Blu-Ray disc? I’m sure 20fps isn’t a standard supported BD frame rate, and a spec page I’m looking at seems to agree. I could triple every frame and make it 60fps. The main list of BD resolutions lists 1080i60 and 720p60; which would be better? There’s also 1080p60 listed in a table called “BD-ROM AV Primary Video Stream (HEVC)”, which I don’t really understand.
Third, what’s a good, preferably free video editing tool? I’m expecting that I will need to change the overall frame rate, and to splice in deleted scenes here and there. It should be very simple stuff compared to Harmy’s despecialization efforts.
Fourth, and this might need some knowledge of the movie itself, is there any hope of salvaging the music from the BD? Criterion is restoring the 1971 music as a lossless mono PCM, which should be a fair bit better than the Dolby Digital 1.0 on my DVD, but it’s not going to sync properly as is. In fact, I’m very confused about how they synced the music to the 1999 DVD in the first place. The original 1921 movie had no music; the DVD would have to somehow make the 1971 music fit on the longer, slower, 1921 cut, and I don’t know how they did this, or if it’s anything I can replicate.
I’ll probably have more questions when I actually start this project. But for now, when the BD arrives, my plan is to extract the video, slow it down to 20fps, and then splice in deleted scenes.
