Help with Ripping audio from a VCD (2 discs) to put 1 DVD for a movie.

[shuya_nanahara]

Hello, The Day the Earth Stood Still is coming out in Thailand on February 5 and there's going to be a DVD and VCD release of the film. The DVD only contains a Thai dubbed audio track. There is a VCD release of the film and it will have English audio. Also, most likely the DVD is going to be NTSC while the VCD is going to be PAL formatted. Is there a program that can help me sync the audio from both VCD discs and have it match up with the video?

I know that bootleggers who sync audio from cams to those Russian R5 DVDs do it but I need help. The movie is getting shipped out to me on Feb 5th.

[jman98]

A program such as BeSweet GUI can convert the sound from PAL framerates to NTSC. Do note that ANY editing differences between the DVD and VCD copies of the film will make the sound go out of sync when you combine them. Audacity might also be able to do the framerate conversion. This is going to be challenging for you to do.

Thai DVDs are a real mixed bag. If you get a DVD-9 they can be OK but if they decide to release this on DVD-5, you may not like what you get. I've got one Thai DVD (legit release) where they took a DVD-9 master and converted in a half-assed way to DVD-5 and it has tons of macroblocks in it. I could have done a better job converting it myself to DVD-5 size with several freely available programs on the internet.

[filmboss80]

Your location is listed as the United States. You simply cannot wait for the US DVD release? Are you so impatient that you'd spend hours demuxing, resynching audio to picture, and reauthoring a DVD just to get a jumpstart on the US release?

I am missing something here...

Come to think of it, this thread gives me a similar idea. I, too, would like to replace the audio to The Day the Earth Stood Still. But, in my case, I want to replace the Keanu Reeves version with the audio from the Michael Rennie version. Cool.

[shuya_nanahara]

Thai DVDs are a real mixed bag. If you get a DVD-9 they can be OK but if they decide to release this on DVD-5, you may not like what you get. I've got one Thai DVD (legit release) where they took a DVD-9 master and converted in a half-assed way to DVD-5 and it has tons of macroblocks in it. I could have done a better job converting it myself to DVD-5 size with several freely available programs on the internet.

Yeah, I've bought a load of R3 DVDs from Thailand. Yeah, I got the DVD for DOLLS the Beat Takeshi movie and it was crappy quality.

I've bought my Thailand releases from eThaiCD.com. The DVDs vary in price but the VCDs are usually $8.50 for the American films. I've been buying the VCDs from there mostly. I got 28 Weeks Later, AVP:R, Speed Racer, Horton Hears a Who!, and Babylon A.D. on VCD a good time before their US DVD releases. The one thing that sucks though is that they are in Full Screen and have Thai subs burned into the picture.

I saw The Day The Earth Stood Still last week at the local dollar theater and I enjoyed it. So I am planning on getting the Thai release but I don't want a crappy cropped and subtitled copy but I'd rather have a nice good Widescreen copy. Even if I had to go through a bunch of processes to have it in English and in Widescreen.

[manono]

The one thing that sucks though is that they are in Full Screen and have Thai subs burned into the picture.

Those are the only things that suck? It's VCD! Me, I can't stand to watch those things. I'd much prefer to wait a few weeks for a decent release of a movie I like. And $8.50 (plus shipping) for a lousy VCD? Whatta rip-off.

Even if I had to go through a bunch of processes to have it in English and in Widescreen.

Are you saying you'd take an already panned-and-scanned "fullscreen" release, crop more from the top and bottom and reencode it, just so you can say you have the widescreen version (and remove the Thai hard-subs)? Don't you realize that doing that (depending on the original aspect ratio) can leave you with less than half of the original movie?

In addition to stretching the audio as described by jman98 you also have to resample it, as VCD is 44,100HZ and DVD has to be 48,000HZ.

[shuya_nanahara]

The one thing that sucks though is that they are in Full Screen and have Thai subs burned into the picture.

Those are the only things that suck? It's VCD! Me, I can't stand to watch those things. I'd much prefer to wait a few weeks for a decent release of a movie I like. And $8.50 (plus shipping) for a lousy VCD? Whatta rip-off.

Even if I had to go through a bunch of processes to have it in English and in Widescreen.

Are you saying you'd take an already panned-and-scanned "fullscreen" release, crop more from the top and bottom and reencode it, just so you can say you have the widescreen version (and remove the Thai hard-subs)? Don't you realize that doing that (depending on the original aspect ratio) can leave you with less than half of the original movie?

In addition to stretching the audio as described by jman98 you also have to resample it, as VCD is 44,100HZ and DVD has to be 48,000HZ.

I was talking about the DVD. The DVD is in Widescreen but does not have English audio. For the VCD, I'm talking about ripping the audio from it and syncing it to the DVD.

[manono]

Oh yeah, you're right. I apologize for getting carried away. Still, buying an inferior DVD, in addition to buying a way overpriced VCD, just so you can get the audio from one to add to the other and make an even more inferior copy seems like a real waste of both time and money, given that the better quality R1 DVD will be out not too soon after that.

You have the instructions how to do it now. But you have to hope that the edits are the same so the converted audio synchs up. If it's off by the same amount all the way through, then that's easy to fix. If you get a progressive asynch when all done (gets worse as the movie goes along), then either you did something wrong or it's pretty hopeless without some serious editing of the audio track.

[tomlee59]

As manono implies, you won't know how much of a challenge you're really facing until you just try it. If you get lucky, it will be straightforward. If not, be prepared to get intimate with Audacity.

Audacity has a "tempo change" feature that allows you to adjust the total duration to match. If there are sync jumps at various spots (e.g., at scene changes), you can simply add brief silences or delete short segments to maintain sync.

Be forewarned, however, that the VCD version may be somewhat different from the DVD version, so maintaining sync throughout may turn out to be a fair bit of work. Again, you won't know until you try it.

Good luck!