Just completed all of “Thursday”. Spent a lot more time on lip-synch than I thought I wanted to, but then I’m much more of a perfectionist now than when I first made FBBB. Ash’s “That didn’t come out right, did it?” is much funnier in synch, methinks. It’s fun to edit these characters again. It feels good to be editing something period.

I actually rerecorded some dialogue for the ASUX promo due to pops I couldn’t filter out. I’m content that I was able to match my old performance, though I did have to work a bit at “dirtying” up the audio to match the crappy microphone I used the first time. I might still have it buried in a closet somewhere, maybe I should dig it out should the need arise to rerecord something else.

Speaking of perfectionism, I decided in a fit of self-loathing to see what FBBB would look like if I were to recapture the footage from DVD rather than from the MiniDV master I’ve been using. The result is enough to make me sigh, but not enough to make me reconsider. It would be sharper and the colors more natural, but the contrast is not as night and day as ReDux was to its original. Again, I am resolved to press on, in the hope that the time I save in not having to recapture everything can be applied to getting a new project rolling.

I circled what stuck out to me the most, how the lines on Ripley’s bathrobe are blurrier in the MiniDV master, but overall, the difference is slight. At least, slight enough.

Here’s the plan. Though the MiniDV master is a tad soft compared to how ReDux turned out, I’m not going to do a complete overhaul of the video. I was considering picking up Cowboy Bebop Remix for that purpose, but after reading that the video transfer is exactly the same as the 2000 release, I decided it wasn’t necessary. The difference really is negligible. Instead my focus will be on technical tweaks, mostly remixing the soundtrack where possible (the louds in FBBB are way too loud) and cleaning up lip-synch and rogue interlaced frames that slipped through. I will also have to recapture clips where noticeable frame dropping occured in the export to tape. And finally I will update the end credit roll for changes in licensing that have occurred and to put the proper date at the end (2002).

I’m going to go through the video pretty much chronologically. I changed the Sokodei logo to the widescreen version that now appears in front of Nescaflowne and ReDux. The only real change I considered to the opening was redoing the “video rack” shot so that the signs don’t “float” over the rack. However, it seems that would require making MASSIVE picture files in order for the signs to remain both fixed and legible, which I’m not sure my old PC can handle the rendering for. I’m going to fiddle with it a bit more but since the shot already works so well, I won’t be too heartbroken if I can’t fix it.

Just read that Ernest Lehman, the man who wrote the screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, has passed away.

What does this have to do with Fanboy Bebop? Keanu and Ash are both fans of the movie, as revealed by that they both felt like quoting Cary Grant (”What’s a man supposed to do without his clothes for 20 minutes?” “Yeah, and in all the right places too.”) before having sex with Ripley.

No doubt they’ll be firing up the DVD today in tribute.