ChainsawAsh

Oh yeah, if you have FCP and can do it that way, that's what I'd do.  Much simpler IMO.

It seems like you've been using a mix of huffyuv and Lagarith, is that right?  If so, that's probably your problem.  It shouldn't matter which you choose, it just needs to be one or the other the whole way through.

I dunno man, even if you don't change anything else about them, they still look way too small to me.

I wouldn't use an outline at all.  I'd use a black drop shadow instead, with hard (not soft) edges.  I'd also make them bigger, and slightly higher in the frame.

For reference, I believe this is what they looked like in theaters (for the yellow subs - the red ones will be the same, but, obviously, red):

There's no "definitive" cut.  There's the theatrical cut, the Donner cut, then like 5 different fan edits that combine the two in different ways.  Check out fanedit.org to see what's different about them and decide which one you want.

ibleedspeed said:

5 exported from vegas as lagarith avi 720x480 dar=3:2 par=1.2121

This makes no sense, and is probably your problem.  720x480 will only have a DAR of 3:2 if the pixel aspect ratio is 1.  720x480 with a PAR of 1.2121 is 16:9.  You're confusing the encoder.

Choosing 16:9 every time might have been your issue, honestly.  Not sure though, as I've said before I'm not an expert in Vegas (or DVD Architect, for that matter).

Try rendering to MPEG2 from Vegas as 720x480, but don't choose 16:9 anywhere.  When you bring it into DVD Architect, set it as 16:9 there.

Well, if you're looking at a 720x480 image with square pixels, it's a 3:2 aspect ratio, so I can understand the confusion.  But since digital NTSC video isn't square pixels, 720x480 is 4:3.

Oh, nice!  Thanks, OM - I've definitely never seen that disc anywhere.  I must have missed it while it was still in print.

ibleedspeed said:

3:2 pulldown is only selectable when 23.976 is your framerate.if 29.970 is chosen i can  not use 3:2 pulldown.

Exactly, because that's what 3:2 pulldown is - a method of translating 24 frames per second into 30 without speeding up the film.  To go from 30 back down to 24, you just need to remove the pulldown, or do an inverse telecine if the transfer was at 30fps to begin wtih (like your Volume 2 DVD).

(Note that, as I'm getting sick of typing 23.976 and 29.97 all the damn time, I'm rounding up to 24 and 30, even though neither one of those is entirely accurate.)

Camelot, the new Starz show with Joseph Fiennes and Eva Green.

Very good so far, based on the pilot alone.

He's just asking.  Maybe he saw some Sony discs at the store, and wants to know if it's worth it to wait for the Verbatims in the mail or if the Sony's are good enough.  I know there isn't a single store in my hometown that sells Verbatim DL blanks, I had to get them shipped.

3:2 pulldown is something completely different than what you're trying to use it for.

3:2 pulldown is applied to progressive 23.976 (or 24) frames per second material in order to bring it to interlaced 29.97 frames per second.  The reason it's called 3:2 pulldown is because of the cadence that this results in - frame 1 becomes 2 fields, frame 2 becomes 3 fields, frame 3 becomes 2 fields, frame 4 becomes 3 fields, and so on - 2:3:2:3.  (The term is technically supposed to be 2:3 pulldown, but that and 3:2 are sort of used interchangeably.)

What you need to do is set an anamorphic flag.  I don't know how you'd do this in the programs you're using, though, so someone else is gonna have to help you there.

Also, I'm not 100% sure if you do need to apply the 2:3 pulldown now, or not.  That whole business confuses me, since DVDs display with 2:3 pulldown on 480i/1080i TVs, but they can display without it on 480p/720p/1080p TVs.  So I'm not sure if you can encode without the 2:3 pulldown and let the player do it itself, or if you need to encode with it from the start.

Really?  I have never seen the theatrical cut on DVD anywhere.  And I hate all the CG/animated/whatever comic book stuff they added to the DC.

Theatrical version of The Warriors, anyone?

I've got an HP printer that can print labels on inkjet-printable discs.  I strongly advise against stick-on disc labels.  They can melt while spinning, ruining both the disc and the player.

I don't know if they're bit-perfect, but the 5.1 tracks on Dark_Jedi's 97SE V2 DVDs sound great (based on the test discs he sent out - I assume the final release will be the same).

You could always get the Blu, demux the lossless audio tracks, and remux them with an MKV conversion of the V3 DVD video.

I say that because that's probably what I'll be doing for myself.

I may not have chosen Arial myself (I'd have gone with Franklin Gothic or Helvetica), but I've gotta admit that those subs look pretty damn good.

Don't forget that when the picture is stretched back out to make it 16:9, the subtitle text is going to get shorter/wider, as well.  Just something to keep in mind.

I really like a lot of those ideas.  Unfortunately, most of them are pretty close to impossible to pull off convincingly.

I'm not trying to re-invent the wheel, as it were, with this edit - I'm just trying to make the TV movie feel more like Doctor Who, and resolve as many inconsistencies between it and the rest of the series as I can.  That's the main goal, to me at least.

Must be something to do with playing it from a USB drive.  It's not interpreting the anamorphic flag correctly for some reason.  The advance (burned) discs DJ sent out don't have this problem, so I'm guessing once you burn it to disc it'll be fine.

Monolithium said:

A Simple Plan

No shit, I just watched this for the first time today.  It was fantastic, but got more fucked up than I anticipated.  Should've seen it coming, what with it being Sam Raimi and all.

It's Adywan's edit minus the music, I can confirm this.  I was able to use the sound from the Purist version with the video from the Revisited DVD-9 back when I was working on my own edit (before my hard drive crashed and killed it).

The black & white was to keep an R rating, as cartoony blood in color is clearly more psychologically damaging than cartoony blood in black-and-white.

Also, and this is purely a personal preference, but I hate subtitles in the black letterbox bars.  I prefer them to be at the bottom of the image itself, with a little bit of a drop shadow behind.

Out of curiosity, what font are you using for the subtitles?

I really hope this whole business is an April Fool's prank.  I really, really do...