yairisan

TheBoost said:

Todd Browning’s 1931 “Dracula” is a film that, to put it mildly, is iconic almost by default. As a film, it is perhaps the dullest and most pedestrian of the ‘classic’ movie monsters, Lugosi’s charisma saving many moments that would otherwise have been painfull.

Despite a few moments of sheer brilliance at the beginnig, it exudes mediocrity in many forms, from camera set up, to pacing. It also does not have a score.

My goal would be to make the second half of the film less of a drawing room mystery and more of a horror film on par with the rest of the Universal Canon.

My resources:

"Mexican" Dracula- The Spanish language version of the film has several sequences that are marked improvements. In shots wide enough to get away with it, I may substitute shots of the similar looking Carlos Villarias for Lugosi if the shot is more atmosphereic. I will be replacing the Browning armadillos (mandated by the censors at the time) with the shots of actual rats from the Mexican Dracula. It’s half an hour longer than the English language version.

“Ship at Sea”- Due to the low budget, shots of the ship “Demeter” are recycled from an old silent, and are a different framerate than the rest of the film. It’s cheap and it shows. I will try to find a better series of shots of a ship in a storm.

Score- (I will not consider the atrocius Phillip Glass score). Using the opening credits “Swan Lake” as a starter, I plan to utilize more of “Swan Lake” and probably some cues stolen from other horror films of the era.

"Mark of the Vampire" "Return of the Vampire"- Two Lugosi vampire films. There might be a few moments in each of these of use.

“Abbott and Costello meet Frankenstien” The only other film Lugosi played Dracula in, but he’s 13 years older and noticably larger. I don’t know if there’s anything of use.

This film has LOTS of people talking about awesome things that happened off camera. I’m going to scoure all the classic horror/chiller films of the era for bits an peices to steal. Wolves, foggy streets, rats, etc.

Wow, this post is classic vintage in itself! I’m almost done re-editing/cutting of this cranky old tale in DaVinci Studio. The pacing in the last few acts is like molasses. My re-edit does its best to readdress hokey dialog, smooth out wobbly dollys, and cut out anything that does little or nothing but to drag the narrative down. David Manners (John) has to be the single most loust actor to ever grace the silver screen. The hardest part was editing his appearances wherever possible in a vain attempt to make him look in any way competent. His lines and posturing are just maddening. Even things like Dracula’s biting closeup got the snip, as they just look ridiculous. Completely overrated movie, a third of which is little more than fodder for the cutting room floor. Did my best with the “It’s over, John” scene, but fixing the embarrassing dialogue would have meant cutting the entire thing, as they have nothing but hokey things to say to each other for 3 minutes. Interesting exersise. I can finally lay this utterly crap flick to rest. My eventual edit runs 17 minutes less, LOL.

No cats here. It can only be gremlins!

Cheers!

Thank you, sir! That gave me some confidence to give this a go again. I did everything you mentioned, although I DID uncheck the ‘entries’ and ‘global tags’. I am NOT able to set the aspect ratio—that area is grayed out unless I am missing something that enables changing of the settings in that area.

UPDATE: I was able to do this on a lowly Dell Optiplex 790 (Core i3/4GB) at work, so what gives with my Kaby Lake Gen 8/8GB Dell 9360 is beyond me - EXCEPT, I wonder if the failure was the result of my using an external HDD on that occasion - so data is going back and forth from the motherboard to the external drive (accessing the source file on the HDD and then placing a copy on the same external HDD). In the case of the older Optiplex, everything was done in the box/on the same HDD. These are all computer-rookie-level assumptions. Another thought was that this is better performed on HDD rather than SSD given the large data amounts moving around.

Anyway, thanks, Chainsaw, and some progress for sure. I will have a go at doing this within the 9360 itself, but that will require making space for the destination file (hence my using an external drive in this case).

Sorry, long reply, but it might be of use to someone experiencing similar problems.

Agh, bollocks. Process failed at around 20%. Things were looking good up to that point.

Back to the drawing board.

ChainsawAsh said:

The primary use of tsmuxer is to either demux files (split an MKV/MP4/etc. into its elementary video, audio, and subtitle streams) or mux them into a Blu-Ray or AVCHD folder/ISO or .m2ts file - it can’t output a muxed MKV or MP4 or whatever.

The primary use of mkvtoolnix is to either take elementary streams and mux them into an MKV file, or to take an existing muxed file (MKV/MP4/etc.) and take out/rearrange/add audio or subtitle tracks, outputting an MKV file.

Basically, mkvtoolnix will give you an MKV file at the end that contains exactly the tracks you want, but tsmuxer can’t do that (you could make it give you an m2ts file or an authored Blu-Ray with no menu, though).

Well, so far so good. mkvtoolnix seems to be playing nice with the 4K77 (4K) file, and appears to be rendering a new file with all soundtracks (except my preferred 35mm Dolby A track) ‘nixed’. Looking forward to seeing what it spits out.

Thanks again for providing me with some fun fodder, Chainsaw!

Wow, I need to read that over and absorb the various implications, but thanks so much for taking time out to spell it out for this rookie.

The Force is strong with you Chainsaw.

Cheers!

ChainsawAsh said:

Both of those things are true. But if you want to make a single new file with just one audio track, don’t use tsmuxer - use mkvtoolnix. Same idea, uncheck all the tracks you don’t want, but it’ll spit out a new, muxed MKV file at the end instead of splitting it into individual video and audio files.

Haha, well, I just got tsmuser up and running (thanks again) but looks like mkvtoolnix is probably better for my immediate purposes. I’m a bit confused as to how tsmuxer differs. Is it better suited to extracting video content only?

Sorry to pick your brains, but you obviously have a good handle on this.

ChainsawAsh said:

If LUTs are what you’re primarily interested in working with, I’d recommend first demuxing the video stream out of the MKV file before doing anything else with it. Grab tsmuxer (free), open the file using it, uncheck everything except the video stream (h264 for the 1080p and h265 for the 4K), select “demux” above the destination field, then choose where you want the file to go.

You’ll end up with a video-only stream that some programs might not be able to open, but most things that you can use to apply LUTs should play nicer with that than with a muxed MKV file.

You can also check one of the audio tracks if you want to end up with both the video stream and an audio track as two separate files in the end, which might be useful depending on what you want to do with it in the end.

Thanks so much for these insights, sir. I will follow your suggestions and see what comes up. I assume that rendering a new file with only a single audio track will also guarantee that the chosen track gets played (rather than being stuck with an alternative language that someone might not know how to change), and also make the file smaller and more manageable (although, I guess, the bulk of the file size is 1080 or 4K video data).

Thanks again.

Thanks. Interesting in-depth answer.

I have the actual 4K and 1080 MKV files of both SW and RotJ. These things are gems.

I use WMP in a pretty decently spec’d Dell XPS 13, which plays the 1080 files no problem, and actually manages to play the 4K files although it stutters occasionally!

As for my intentions, I was curious to have a go at editing/adding LUTs (following DrDre’s posts with great interest) to given scenes, and just generally playing around with it, since I’m a big fan of the film, and it might serve as an interesting means of learning the Filmora9 software I have.

Thanks for replying—appreciated.

The 4K77/4K83 ones, actually.

I’ve made several attempts to extract a selected scene from the 4K… video files—namely using Windows’ Media Player ‘Trim’ feature to trim any given downloaded file (which gave me a message saying that I do not have ‘permission’ to do that), simply copying the file (on Media Player’s prompt suggestion before retrying Trim), and (finally before giving up on the idea) importing the file into Fimora9 (in the hope of selecting the scene in there), which resulted in an ‘unsupported file’ message. So, I’m more or less beat, I guess.

I assume from all this that the files are ‘locked’ in some way. Can anyone confirm this? It would help just to know if I’m wasting time trying to do something that’s technically impossible (at least for someone like me with merely average computer skills).

Thanks!