musings on "The Godfather"

[AlecWest]

Well, last payday, I finally broke down and bought the 5-DVD set of The Godfather. This is one of those times I wished I'd rented the darned thing first. The reason I wanted the set is because someone here told me that the set included "deleted scenes." And what I wanted to do was re-edit the 3 films so it ran in chronological order, including ALL deleted scenes. It does ... but ...

The problem? The 3 films are in anamorphic widescreen ... and the deleted scenes are pan/scan (sigh). I still may go ahead and do it just for fun. But it will sure look funky when it switches from a widescreen presence to a pan/scan presence, then back to widescreen (double-sigh).

BTW, until today, I always thought that a lot of stuff used in Puzo's novels were fictionalized so as not to cast any aspersions on innocent people. One of those things I thought he "made up" was the name of the village in Sicily where Don Vito came from - Corleone. But recently, Italian authorities caught a "real life Godfather" whose base of operations was in the REAL "Corleone."

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,13509-2130382,00.html

However, to shed any connection to its Mafia and/or Cosa Nostra history, the village voted in 2003 to change it's name from Corleone to Cuor di Leone. Strangely, though, the village apparently doesn't want to shed it's Mafia history connections for tourism's sake. Three years earlier in 2000, when the name was still "Corleone," the town opened up a "Mafia Museum" ... and present at the innauguration ceremony was U.N. Secretary General, Kofi Annan (hmmmmmm).

[yoda313]

But it will sure look funky when it switches from a widescreen presence to a pan/scan presence, then back to widescreen (double-sigh).

Wouldn't there be some way to recrop the pan and scan to a forced animorphic widescreen?? Couldn't you make a hardcoded letterbox somehow??

[AlecWest]

But it will sure look funky when it switches from a widescreen presence to a pan/scan presence, then back to widescreen (double-sigh).

Wouldn't there be some way to recrop the pan and scan to a forced animorphic widescreen?? Couldn't you make a hardcoded letterbox somehow??

I'm open to suggestions. Anybody?

[yoda313]

I think you might be able to do it with "clip frame" in tmpgenc. Though I'm not sure about the exact numbers you'd need and which "keep aspect ratio" setting you'd need.

But the idea would be to shrink the pan and scan to fit inside of a widescreen box. Keep in mind which ratio your real movies are in 2.35:1 or 1.85:1. Then copy to match.

[yoda313]

Well I think the quickest way is to add what I guess are called "pillarbars". That way you get blackbars on the top and bottom but at least it wouldn't be quite as jarring as going from widescreen to total fullscreen.

Here's a shot of tmpgenc in the clip frame mode - choose arrange method:



The simplest way I found was to simply cut the height and width in half. That way you preserve the ratio but turn it into suedo widescreen. And the best part is you can tell tmpgenc to output to 16:9 if you wish. I'm sure there are more technical routes to take but assuming the dvd cutscenes are 720x480 in 4:3 then just do this simple conversion and you should get something rather decent though smaller of course.