My Laserdisc Wishlist to sync

[sertoli]

My Laserdisc Wishlist to sync:

The General (1927) [LV21476] (piano score by William Perry)
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
Blow-Up: Criterion (1967)
Life of Oharu: Criterion (1952)
Grand Illusion: Criterion (1937)
Sansho the Bailiff: Criterion (1954)
The Seven Samurai: Criterion (1954)
The Third Man (1949)
Walkabout: Criterion (1971)

[Moshrom]

We have 2001. I synced it years (!) ago, but I feel it has some EQ issues that makes it sound a bit odd.

[pipefan413]

I have two different Japanese releases of The Third Man en route. Will take a bit of time to arrive but it'll happen. Digital PCM on both, which I don't think any of the US ones have.

[Moshrom]

I have two different Japanese releases of The Third Man en route. Will take a bit of time to arrive but it'll happen. Digital PCM on both, which I don't think any of the US ones have.

That's great news! This is one that really needs to be synced visually, not just with waveforms.

[pipefan413]

I have two different Japanese releases of The Third Man en route. Will take a bit of time to arrive but it'll happen. Digital PCM on both, which I don't think any of the US ones have.

That's great news! This is one that really needs to be synced visually, not just with waveforms.

Aye? What makes it particularly important for this one in particular?

I've been doing everything visually anyway: capturing the video and analogue audio in sync with each other first, then resampling the analogue audio to 44.1 kHz for alignment purposes (acting as a target waveform) and aligning the bit perfect PCM to that. From there, I take it to AviSynth and line up the video to inform where the most significant edit points will be, doing some of the actual editing in AviSynth as well, sometimes doing other more precise bits in an external editor like RX, REAPER or just Audacity depending on what I'm doing exactly. While working in AviSynth I'm feeding it out to VirtualDub to check if obvious big waveform spikes match up with the video (often they don't on many official releases e.g. the mosquito smack at the start of NEAR DARK or the door knock after the LD side change on MRS DOUBTFIRE, which are both out of sync on... I think every official release, at least the ones I checked).

I'm by no means an expert with DAWs though so my workflow tends to be kind of chaotic as I experiment with using different software for different tasks, which is frustrating because I like to be organised. But if I can't get some software to do exactly what I want then I'll switch to something else. For instance, I currently won't use anything other than RX for dithering because it has really good auto-blanking, so I'll do all the other editing as 32-bit float and dither at the end in RX so it only dithers the edit points and everything else remains "bit perfect". But RX doesn't seem to be the best thing to use for actual sync edits so if I'm editing waveforms directly rather than cutting frames in AviSynth I'll usually switch to Audacity for simple individual sample-level alignment cutting or REAPER if I'm crossfading.

My Laserdisc Wishlist to sync:

The General (1927) [LV21476] (piano score by William Perry)
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
Blow-Up: Criterion (1967)
Life of Oharu: Criterion (1952)
Grand Illusion: Criterion (1937)
Sansho the Bailiff: Criterion (1954)
The Seven Samurai: Criterion (1954)
The Third Man (1949)
Walkabout: Criterion (1971)

I can probably grab Sansho in the next week or so.

I've got the MGM 5.1 DVD which apparently has directional dialogue. No laserdiscs yet but I'm down to grab whatever.

[Moshrom]

Aye? What makes it particularly important for this one in particular?

Just that the StudioCanal restoration's audio is completely out of sync in various places, especially at the end of the film. My visual syncing workflow is pretty simple: just AviSynth trims until the two sources are frame-accurate and then making edits in iZotope before or after those edit points, putting them where they're most seamless. As long as I can't detect the edits aurally, I'm fine with it.

I've come across too many discs, usually older ones, with slightly wonky A/V sync, so I usually do most things with waveforms in Reaper now.

[pipefan413]

Aye? What makes it particularly important for this one in particular?

Just that the StudioCanal restoration's audio is completely out of sync in various places, especially at the end of the film. My visual syncing workflow is pretty simple: just AviSynth trims until the two sources are frame-accurate and then making edits in iZotope before or after those edit points, putting them where they're most seamless. As long as I can't detect the edits aurally, I'm fine with it.

I've come across too many discs, usually older ones, with slightly wonky A/V sync, so I usually do most things with waveforms in Reaper now.

Ah, right, I'm with you. You meant vs specifically targeting the waveform of the video it's being synced to, that should have been clear but for some reason in my head waveform syncing didn't necessarily mean that; I've found that I often don't trust the audio sync of the target anyway so I only use it as a guide and then make as few edits as possible to end up at a good compromise in the end (I'm still using the waveform but not cutting aggressively to follow it closely). In some cases that means completely ignoring sync in the target waveform because it's clearly way off, then checking at a later point to see if it still works, repeat as required.

I'm finding that to be honest most LaserDiscs I've edited so far don't have brilliant sync and neither do lots of the DVDs and some Blu-rays, though mostly the newer releases get it more accurate. So what you're saying definitely checks out!

Thanks for this, I appreciate it.

[sertoli]

I have two different Japanese releases of The Third Man en route. Will take a bit of time to arrive but it'll happen. Digital PCM on both, which I don't think any of the US ones have.

Excellent news.