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Bedknobs and Broomsticks - With a Flair

ParanoidAndroid

ParanoidAndroid

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The very first film I had ideas to do a fanedit of, but delayed by a few years!

Another film I loved as a child, not knowing that there was a substantially longer version than the 117-minute theatrical cut most viewers are familiar with. Some 24 minutes had been removed prior to the 1971 wide release, and all but two minutes (footage for the song "A Step in the Right Direction" being missing) was restored for the 25th anniversary in 1996, this has been released on home video along with the shorter cut (albeit only in the form of incomplete deleted scenes on the blu-ray).

While it is nice to see the longer version, which contains some items I think should never have been deleted. it is not without problems. Some audio elements were missing, necessitating redubbing with either twenty-five years older cast members (Miss Price and Mr Jelk) or new performers (Professor Browne, Mrs Hobday and the children) to varying degrees of success. I am also not too fond of the way the restored song "With a Flair" is performed, a bit anemic and stop-start throughout.

Fortunately some of these aspects are readily rectified, the worst of the redubbing (mostly the children, sorry) has been removed here and I have recut "With a Flair" to the much more sprightly version from the soundtrack album. With the assistance of a BBC broadcast of the theatrical cut much more of the German dialogue (some of it quite funny) is presented in subtitles styled as closely to the original as I can manage.

Based on a 720p digital download from iTunes (easier to remove scenes than add them to the blu-ray, also means there is less quality variation), total of about 1 minute removed for a runtime of 138 minutes.
 
ParanoidAndroid said:
Based on a 720p digital download from iTunes (easier to remove scenes than add them to the blu-ray, also means there is less quality variation), total of about 1 minute removed for a runtime of 138 minutes.
Click to expand...
Doesn't it download in 1080p?
 
The way I made the downloaded video “useable” (that I’ve completely forgotten, was over three years ago) required an old version of iTunes and I think this restricted the resolution. But thanks for the prompt, had resigned myself to this file because of the rather convoluted process. I’ll have a look again to see if I missed something or if a new method is available to get 1080p, need to confirm that the film exists on iTunes in that resolution first!
 
Confirmed
bkbb.png

You need to set your downloading settings to 1080p in your preferences settings (Ctrl+,). If you don't select "download fullsize HD videos" it downloads in 720p. Tuneskit and similar programs do require an older version of itunes (v 12.9.0.67 or older), but the files still download in full 1080p.
 
The version you have there is the shorter cut, had a look myself and that is the only option that comes up when searching the film on iTunes. If I remember correctly the longer cut was only accessible through an old version of the software, would need to check on a computer I haven't got access to right now.
 
Am having a look making a version of the edit based mainly off the theatrical blu-ray as opposed to iTunes download, advantages include: 1080p (as opposed to 720p) resolution; higher bitrate and a sharper/ cleaner picture. The main issue with this is that not all the extra extended edition material is included in the deleted scenes, necessitating using digital download material to fill in gaps ranging from a few seconds to nearly a minute (pushing the bed from Portobello Road to the bookman's hideout).

Very annoyingly, the deleted scenes also fade in and out from black and cannot be used whole, is it generally preferred for the transitions between different sources to occur at cuts between shots or to cut in the middle of shots and thus maximise use of the better available (deleted scenes) footage?
 
ParanoidAndroid said:
Very annoyingly, the deleted scenes also fade in and out from black and cannot be used whole, is it generally preferred for the transitions between different sources to occur at cuts between shots or to cut in the middle of shots and thus maximise use of the better available (deleted scenes) footage?
Click to expand...
#staff
IFDB standards would require seamless transitions between scenes. Most often it is the audio that is most important in these scenarios. If the transition sounds right, the cut usually works.
 
Audio transitions are not much of an issue, generally use the digital download soundtrack throughout since I edited from it before, just the image quality variation that is giving me a headache!
 
Have decided to rebuild this older edit of mine, should a fair bit more polished than before with a higher bitrate and much improved colour matching between sources.
 
Timeline of the edit pretty much completed, main tasks now are to upscale the sections of video (from the Extended Edition) only available in 720p and do the colour matching to make the transitions as seamless as possible.

As with the first attempt, there are a few edits compared to the 139-minute version from 1996. Most instances with the redubbed children's voices have been removed (very obviously different from the original), "With a Flair" has been livened up (less pausing in the middle) by means of the soundtrack version of the song (also fixed a continuity error introduced in the older version) and Mr Brown no longer mouth off the bookman (the latter's response feels overly hostile at this point).

Out of curiosity, is there any (if only academic) interest in the even more heavily-truncated version from 1979, cutting nearly all the songs and running only 97 minutes?
 
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Nearly finished with the upscaling of the extended cut material not provided in the Blu-ray deleted scenes, not only are some scenes missing (e.g. Mr Brown conning Swinburne into pushing the bed) but the ones that are present fade in and out of black as they start and end, meaning that the first and last shot of each needs to be replaced by material from the inferior source.

Next task is to properly colour-correct the additional material to match the theatrical cut. While the deleted scenes from the Blu-ray have good detail, they are over bright and slightly brown-tinted. If they overlap with any theatrical cut material they will be shot matched to it, if not the extended cut material will need to be matched first and used as the reference instead. Very useful having DrDre's colour matching tool to hand!
 
Upscaling completed, apart from the stills that are going to be used to recreate the restoration credits. The Disney logo plate from 1985 (attached at the start and end of the 1996 recut) will be sourced from one of their animated films.

This redone version of the edit will have an English subtitle track, need to go through the .srt file to check for errors that always seem to crop up when using optical character recognition in Subtitle Edit.
 
Finished adding a redone version of the 1996 credits, as before they are now accompanied by “A Step in the Right Direction” (the song with missing footage) but no longer run short, as some fanediting credits now fill the extra ~20 seconds rather than black screen. The animated Disney logo (from 1985, only included on the extended cut) has been replaced by a HQ version from the Mulan (1998) Blu-ray as that had the same 1.66:1 aspect ratio.

Started tackling the subtitles today, while large chunks can be copied from the Blu-Ray’s there are numerous spelling errors and omissions, e.g. rather than write the words of the rabbit spell they simply say (CHANTING)! Hope to finish these over the next few days, then it’s onto colour matching. I am pondering whether to try my hand at rotoscoping in Resolve (Free Edition) to correct the obvious difference between the live-action and animation background grass on the football pitch, probably less difficult than time consuming!
 
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Audio work completed, about 2/3 the subtitles aligned/rewritten.

Also had a go at fixing an issue that has been bothering me for a while, the mismatch between the live-action foreground and animated background when Mr Browne is seen refereeing the football match. One shot in particular stood out as the following (animated-only) one changed the colour of the section of the field in question, think the effect of simply desaturating the grass works well enough.

https://imgur.com/a/kU8q3aU

Not quite as impressive as the amazing work done by @FreiGuy86 on their Roger Rabbit edit, but I think that it does the job. Certainly not as sophisticated, merely bruteforced a keyframed mask to avoid desaturating Mr Browne's boots, but not too much trouble as the shot is only a few seconds long.
 
After taking a (very) short break from Bedknobs and Broomsticks, I noticed a new issue in the extended version of Portobello Road. The shot of Paul defacing a bust has two segments where the frame rate is halved (frames duplicated), I can only assume that the additional music in the background needed more footage to play over and the original film material needed to lengthen the shot normally could not be located.

Although the restoration editor (I guess) tried to disguise this by utilising sections with less movement, the effect is still akin to video buffering, and was improved by replacing the duplication with interpolation (of equivalent sections from the theatrical cut) done in Flowframes.
 
For the past few days I have been struggling with the colour-matching of the first extended cut segment that appears in the film, where Mrs Hobday comes to the aid of Captain Greer, who is being accosted outside the museum.

These segments were intended to use the Full HD video from the Blu-ray’s deleted scenes and use a combination of LUT’s to get the right colour from the theatrical version (using shots with similar appearances) via the video from the iTunes-sourced extended cut. The issue was that the deleted scene footage appears to be faded in such a way that colour cannot be easily corrected, and that rather than a simple cast the necessary image information is missing.

This was worked around by utilising a technique I first learned about when seeing a special feature on the restoration of "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World", a lower resolution source with good colours (in this case the iTunes extended cut, once it itself has been adjusted) can be overlaid with a higher-resolution source without this information, in my case using the Luminosity composite mode in Davinci Resolve. Provided that the alignment is good (involving shifting, stretching and rotation), and using LUTs to get the same luminosity from the deleted scenes as the graded extended version shots, the results are just what I was hoping for!

https://imgur.com/hwD2PAc
 
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