DVD debacle
I spent part of the morning working my way through the first hour of A Lizard in a Woman's Skin, cataloguing all the instances in which I'll have to mix and match the audio when I come to do my composite version, which will marry the audio from the cut American print version with the video of the uncut Italian version, and I think I've got a feeling for what Federal Video have done.
Wherever possible, they seem to have used the same good quality but cut American print that Media Blasters used for their release. Now, as many people are probably aware, for one reason or another Media Blasters, in addition to this print, used another, poorer quality one which had severe discolouration and print damage. (The scene were Florinda Bolkan is chased by the hippy at the asylum is probably the worst affected.) For these scenes, and for the material that was missing from the American print, Federal Video have used another print, which is more damaged and has a more compressed greyscale than the "main" print, but looks significantly better, in these scenes, than either Media Blasters' cut print, or (of course) their uncut, VHS-sourced, fullscreen version.
I have, however, come across one discrepancy. This takes place during the orgy/dinner crosscutting scene near the start of the film, which is differently edited depending on whether you're watching the US or Italian version. The Italian version (and this applies to both Federal Video's release and the VHS-sourced version provided by Media Blasters) is missing an extended shot of Anita Strindberg approaching and then canoodling with a comatose man. The missing material, featuring some notable buttock action courtesy of Ms. Strindberg, is included as a deleted scene on both Federal Video and Media Blasters' releases. For the latter, it is hidden as an easter egg, and is an incredibly poor quality VHS dupe, but Federal Video's version looks almost perfect, and I intend to splice this in for my composite version. This may lead to some audio issues, since I belive that inserting it would make the scene longer than either the US or Italian versions, but if need be I will steal some additional music from either an earlier scene or the score CD.
There's more missing from the American print than I'd previously realised, by the way. In addition to the world-famous "eviscerated dogs" scene (the effects of which were so convincing that they landed Lucio Fulci in court) and much of the sapphic dream sequences, various gore shots have been trimmed, and an entire sequence involving Carol realising her guilt in the Julia Durer murder before the police discover it has been sent to the scrapyard. For this scene, quite a lot of dialogue has been lost, so I'll probably have to subtitle it myself (hopefully I can get player generated subs to work; otherwise I'll have to burn them into the image itself).
See - that wasn't so hard, was it?
Update, 15:26: Well, I've now managed to successfully reintegrate the missing Anita Strindberg scene. I've no idea why Federal Video didn't do this themselves, because the requisite audio exists in the American print, so I didn't even have to do any looping or borrowing from other scenes. It took me about 10 minutes in Goldwave and then Adobe Premiere, and now I have on my hands a "perfect" Italian copy of the film running to its full length - something that, to the best of my knowledge, does not currently exist anywhere in commercial form. Up next: inserting the English dialogue, which is going to take considerably longer.
Update #2, 17:18: The first 28 minutes are now properly synchronised. I suspect I'll have to leave the subtitling till last, and then I'll be able to see whether or not creating player generated subs is a straightforward task.
2 Comments:
I am very curious if you could give a few technical details on your project. Are you editing an mpeg2 in premiere natively or did you have to encode the video in an AVI compatable codec first and then re-encode after your work in premiere? If you had to convert MPEG2 to AVI back to MPEG2 did you end up with any visible loss of video quality and what did you encode to MPEG2 with? Also concerning the video you converted from NTSC to PAL did end up with any weird interlacing artifacts? Thanks a lot for any info.
By Anonymous, at 00:00
I encoded the video to Huffyuv (AVI) format and worked from it, then re-output it in MPEG2 once I was finished. To my eyes there is a slight loss of image quality due to having to encode at a slightly lower bit rate to fit the final file on a dual layer disc, but the difference is pretty minor. I didn't do any standards conversion (the only video material I was working with was PAL, as the Anita Strindberg scene I spliced in was included on the Italian DVD as a deleted scene, and it was the only piece of footage I had to add) so there are no interlacing problems.
By Whiggles, at 00:06
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