OMGWTFVDNG

Jul. 12th, 2006 01:21 pm
gwyn: (vids)
[personal profile] gwyn
As I mentioned a while ago, [livejournal.com profile] justacat has been digitally remastering some of the old Media Cannibals Professionals vids and working with me to get some of them on DVD. It's been kind of fun, revisiting all of this -- some of the vids were made before I even hooked up with the MCs, and others were among the first vids I ever participated in, so it's a long stroll down memory lane for me.

But it is also a weird Twilight Zone ep of its own. Justacat sent me a copy of Tender Comrade the other night, and man, talk about a psycho change of vid. By the time we'd sorted out what was going on, I was, like, OMGWTF VIDDING! For those of you who've never seen Tender Comrade, it's a Pros vid to an a capella song by Billy Bragg. He uses these incredibly long pauses between lyric lines, which, when Sandy was laying down the music track, she apparently hit pause repeatedly on the casette deck to cut out extra lines and edit the song down, and edit the pauses to a more manageable bite of silence.

Well, poor Justacat has a very interesting copy of TC. She worked so, so hard to time the pauses right when she was editing the song, and to cut all the clips to match exactly, which was a total bitch because the edit points came in the middle of silent pauses -- no audio graphs to show you were a beat is. I happily downloaded the file and thought, whoa, this is odd, everything's coming in way too early -- about 3 seconds too early. So I sent her an email detailing my ideas of where she should push things forward, what the late stuff is, etc., and she wrote back to me, totally confused, and detailed line by line where each edit point came in on her copy.

For some reason, this vid -- apparently not the other Pros vids on the tape such as 500 Miles -- is about 3 seconds off in timing. I told her how it looks on my original copy, and I know Sandy cut each of those to start on a lyric line (she would never start in such a lengthy pause!), and am sending her my copy of the MC tape 2, but... I am utterly baffled. I can't even imagine how this vid alone got so off in timing, even if it is a copy of a copy. It's just totally bizarre.

The worst part is that I wonder now how many psycho copies are out there where the song is 3 seconds off the original. The clips that Justacat has in there are perfect matches for the audio, it's just the timing that's off -- which makes me suspect I'll be hit with a fusilade of accusations that we've remade the vid, not remastered it, and that it's not true to the original. I have no idea what state the copies of the vid floating around are in.

::hunkers down and waits for the crap to fly::

Date: 2006-07-12 09:53 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] morgandawn.livejournal.com
when we remastered Data's Dream we found out that VCR tape stretches so that the beats/edits move around. We tried capturing the vid from tape to DVD and then put it into the timeline. when we matched clip for clip, frame by frame, the audio timing was off to the original - this was due to the tape stretch.

I remember when sherrold & I were counting and then stopping (actually I was doing the clapping, she was doing the stop/start) - I think having a second copy to work from might be a help to justacat to approximate the timing (aka if tape stretches then not all stretches will be equal).

Date: 2006-07-12 10:24 pm (UTC)
From: [identity profile] gwyn-r.livejournal.com
Well, I know about tape stretch from my own remasters, but this doesn't seem to be it. The other vids that she's remastering from tape 2 are obviously fine. It makes no sense that it's just Tender Comrade at all to me. I don't know what could make one vid fall out of synch.

The weirdest thing is that the pauses all seem to be about right -- which I think has to be the hardest part of that. How can you approximate a couple people sitting around with the deck, counting and stopping? But it sounds pretty accurate, all the same, and it's only the clips messing us up. Very, very weird.

Stupid damn vids.

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