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I Know I Am Probably Doing This Wrong…
But I am in a jam and thought I could start digging my way out by posting here. Thanks for your patience.
I am Doug Robinson, a professional music producer living in Central Mexico (and loving it).
For the past two years, I have been working with an unprofessional video editor–not my choice, he was on the project before I was. The project is this: a 29 minute slideshow of paintings by a terrific artist, with some creative edits and an original nine-movement score (mine). I’ve acted as a co-producer on the project as well. The video editor was a friend of the artist–not such much today, though.
Here is our situation today: the video editor’s house and office were robbed and he has lost everything–computers, cameras, cash, backup drives–it is all gone. All he has remaining of our project is an mpeg2 file and DVD burned from that file. No cloud, no off-site storage. Just an mpeg2 file and a DVD, which actually looks better than the file on both my Macs and a PC where I tested it.
Of course, we had just signed on for a world premiere at the Cervantino International Arts Festival in October, where we’d hoped to sell about 300 copies of the finished work, which is pretty cool.
Ok, that’s bad enough, right? But wait–there’s a little more.
The file is jittery in a lot of places, no doubt due to the fact that it is an mpeg 2 and that he created it.
The DVD is almost perfect, except for two tiny visual stutters, about a frame each, within the first 27 seconds. I don’t know how I can show you exactly what I’m talking about–here is a link to an earlier version of the project: https://vimeo.com/7981381
You won’t see the jitter problem in this version, but I can describe it easily: right around 26 seconds, an image moves from left to right. On the DVD and the file, the image stops for an instant, jumps backwards about 1/8th of an inch then starts moving forward again, then does the same thing one more time. It looks like about a frame’s jump, maybe slightly more each time.
We can’t burn and sell DVDs from it with these obvious jumps in the first 26 seconds.
I think I have a solution, and I am looking for someone who is open to being hired to fix it. Here is my solution, prefaced by things you should know upfront:
1. I cannot give you any original files–consider them lost forever
Actually, that’s the only really important thing you need to know!
Ok, here is my solution–please tell me if I am onto something, or if I have to just write off two year’s worth of work–the artist will not agree to pressing DVDs with those two incidences of jitter:
1. I send someone the DVD
2. They rip the visuals as lossless-ly as possible, and create a new file minus the music
3. They cut out the jerky frames and perform a crossfade (that’s how I would handle it in music production, but you will surely have other language for it)
4. They then lay in the music again from a stereo Wav file I send–luckily, the music is largely ambient and not so tightly synced to the picture that a few frames will make a difference.
5. At that point, a new file is created with both the edited picture and new soundtrack, which I then send off to a DVD duplication house for authoring and duplication.
Am I crazy, or could this work? I know we’d probably lose a generation of quality in there somewhere, but it might be the only way to save this project, which is very important to me.
Thank you for reading along and if you have any suggestions, please do not hesitate to post or contact me privately at Jazzooo @ aol.com.
Many thanks,
Doug
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6 Replies
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Just a quick update–I figured out how to load the file into iMovie (I know, I know–I’m just a musician!) and advance it one frame at a time.
The paintings move from left to right and right to left in the beginning, one movement per frame. At 00:28:08, the image does not advance and instead stay in the same place as 00:28:07. Then at 00:28:09, it resumes movement but from the correct spot in the timeline, producing the illusion of a stutter. This happens again about a second later. And that is all.
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Another solution may be to make a freeze frame of the entire frame and crop out everything but the the “good” image. Place this small cropped image on a black background which only covers the lower third of the screen (to allow for the dissolve of the upper moving image). Remember, this is layered, not merged.
At the point the video stutters, back up 1 frame, and lay in the above composition. Manually move the small cropped image and black lower third into position, where the image would be if the video had not stuttered. Keyframe the movement. Then, cut back to the original video when the stuttering is done. In fact, since it’s on the screen for a while without anything else, you could do this “cut away” for a few seconds until the image moves off screen. You could even do this at the very beginning of the image moving from the left….redo the entire movement across the screen. With this method, which would eliminate any matching issues. In essence, redoing the entire movement with a mask over the “wrong” video.
This can be done in Avid, but would probably be easier in After Effects…or heck, even FCP. It’s not hard at all.
Hard to describe, hope this makes sense. I suggest asking around and offering pay, perhaps even in the Jobs Offered forums here. We all work hard and would like to be compensated.
~Michael
.: michael kammes mpse
.: senior technology & workflow consultant
.: audio specialist . act fcp . acsr
.: michaelkammes.com
.: twitter: @michaelkammes
.: facebook: /mkammesHear me pontificate: Speaking Schedule .
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Thanks, Michael–
“We all work hard and would like to be compensated.”
This was part of my original post:
“I think I have a solution, and I am looking for someone who is open to being hired to fix it.” I totally agree that whoever fixes this should be paid. I don’t know anyone here and I couldn’t find that ‘jobs’ forum. I’ll look again tomorrow, thanks.
Doug
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I would be tempted to simply take the opening frame of the shot in question, freeze it, and recreate the move from scratch, then rejoin the piece for the next shot.
Glenn
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Well, that is an easier way of explaining what I tried to do in the last portion of the post 😉
~Michael
.: michael kammes mpse
.: senior technology & workflow consultant
.: audio specialist . act fcp . acsr
.: michaelkammes.com
.: twitter: @michaelkammes
.: facebook: /mkammesHear me pontificate: Speaking Schedule .
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You guys are amazing–thank you.
Right now, I am in a tiny little neighborhood of hell that I didn’t expect I’d encounter–I can’t make a copy of the original (let’s call it the ‘master’ DVD). I want to send the DVD to an editor to work from, but it is my only copy.
I am a newbie at DVD ripping and burning. In the past 24 hours, I have bought 3 software programs and downloaded 3 free ones.
And I believe I’ve just discovered that the DVD is copy-protected. Why this original editor would copy-protect a test DVD I will never know. I don’t know how to determine what kind of copy protection he used either.
Does anyone have a suggestion for a program I can use to defeat copy protection, then losslessly rip or copy this DVD into my Intel Mac OS 10.6.8, and then burn the resulting DVD in Toast, one of my new acquisitions?
many, many thanks–I have been at this for going on 3 days now, and the deadline is right on top of me. I need to get the DVD out in Fed Ex today.
Doug
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