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The Godfather Chronological Edit: FULL HD Rebuild - MAX LENGTH 10h 5min

Wraith

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BONUS CHOICES

Hi...well I decided to have a little play with the newly fixed captions and yes, more issues.

I use a 2K monitor, which means that when manipulating screen grabs I don't loose resolution or fidelity. It also means I can see imperfections that can mbe harder to see on an HD monitor.

Point in fact, the screen grabs of the chair for the new titles have issues. There are not that many frames before The Godfather Part II caption appear...3 Secs before and 1 or 2 secs after. Now, this is from the restoration version and there are still specs and flecks visible...so, using a little contrast and gamma trickery, I've taken the best 3 frames, and chosen the best one. I've then taken the other two, and where there is an imperfection, I've done what restorers do, snip a clean piece from another frame and paste it in over the imperfection.

I now have a clean plate.

The chair shot from the AMC version is not suitable, for a few reasons I will explain tomorrow when I answe or the question I left hanging in my previous post.

Now I need to decide how to best add in the new captions. I have a few choices, rotoscope, overlay, or assembled stills overlays with animation. That would actually be the best, but has issues of creating 26 perfectly aligned stills, so that whe you cross fade between them, the chair is pixel perfectly positioned. Root would take too long, and overlay will look poor. Adding in captions with a title generator would be far easier but as I said, every font I found had issues, so no go. Even AMC appear to have made a W for their credits and it is just the wrong W. So, I will carry on with rebuilding a clean stable opening. I mean, I could just open like the theatrical versions, but that is not what any of the chronological versions do, and I'm not going to take the easy way out...NOPE!

I will need to run a few tests since I want to faithfully achieve the quasi glow cross fade. This may require quite a bit of work, but I may get lucky.

When I started this, I had no idea the rabbit hole this would end up being. I just thought, rearrange part 2, bolt on Young Vito to the beginning and Michael on the end....nope, it ain't the quick.

The titles have to be great right down to the Paramount logo. I mean, if you watch that thing..the classic 70s one, there is frame registration jitter and animation overlay jitter in different directions that screams "not as restored as you think". Now, the funny thing is, many films which undergo restoration are subjected to removing that flickering registration error, and the GF trilogy of films have enjoyed that. The films are all fairly stable however, someone decided to skip the opening and closing credits. So I decided to try to fix it. I've waited a long time to be able to do this, and CODA finally made it possible, so I may as well do it to the best of my abilities.

I hope the little video about the captions gives you a sense of the challenge.

Back with more madness tomorrow.
W
 

Wraith

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UPDATE

Lighter day today cleaning up the credit captions for compositing.

Nothing new to report.

See you in a few days with a credit roll preview.

W
 

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OOOOO

Forgot to give ya'll the answer to the question I left you all with...Why do the letters in the credit have a slope....?

Well, in the theatrical version of Part II, you can see the wall architraving running horizontally with an upward tilt from left to right. If you place Credit titles in that area, as was done for all the chrono edits, and the letters are true flat to the horizontal, they appear wrong, coz of the upward slope of the arcitrave. Now, if you put about a 1 to 2 degree slope on them, they are till not perfect but they look correct. If you aligne the letters perfectly with the decor (so too speak) then the issue is that they have an obvious upward slope and look like they are going to slide off the screen. Now, AMC got round this in  arather clever way. They took the footage of the chair, and rotated it slightly so that the letters can go in correctly flat  aligned with the decor but in doing so had to zoom the image slightly.

I have elected to go with the original solve, since I get a much cleaner grab of the chair, and the letters I captured are from that environment so the film grain will match...there you have it. The shit we do for perfection...and yes, I'm doing a pixel clen up and decided to go for a true compositing rather than an overlay or rotoscope, which is the most time consuming, but the result looks great. All the other approaches have something off. I have done this before for other edits this way, but for far less material and no one has ever commented or noticed, so that tells me the technique works.

That's it for today...tomorrow, more clean up and plate compositing..maybe the day after too.

Adios amigos!

W
 

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UPDATE.

MORE PROGRESS ON THE CREDITS.

Today I cleaned up 24 of the 28 of the newly aligned cast credits for the rebuilt opening titles. My choice was either clean up 24 letters (neither Q or X are used ) in upper and lowe case for two sizes and remake each credit cleaner or clean up each credit that I already assembled and aligned...which saves building them again....I went with the latter. Just 4 left. I'll get them done tomorrow and then next week build the two openings. I will not be changing much at all, just replicating what is there but cleaner. Same for the films. There will be some tiny tweaks to facilitate transitions and a few additions, but that is it...this is very much a preservation exercise.

In my head,mit is all done, I just need to make it real.

Once the credits are completed I will list The Godfather: La Fine, which just needs artwork completed. This has already previewed and I'm glad to say is ready. It will also form the basis of the end of this edit...except, I need to invert the changes I made to Coda ...what do I mean by that? I'll let you all know tomorrow.

W
 

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UPDATE

Clean up completed on all credits title cards.....

Compositing next.

Fingers crossed...

W
 

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UPDATE

Compositing begun.....

That's gonna be easy...? YES, if you cleaned it all up enough, which I had not, so I had to zoom in and tidy up a few captions further. I also cleaned up the BIG GODFATHER marionette logo card too.

So no issues now...?

NOPE

I have to get pixel perfect alignment since I am not using a title generator... so I have to line them all up by hand. So I placed a single white pixex on the background plate on the lower left of where the lowere left corner of the caption must land...DONE...EASY FROM HERE ? NOPE... Tom Hagen...."T", lower left corner does not exist coz the Ts center is offset to the right....so another pixel is placed....

5 Captions done and will test render to see if they look OK on the big TV...if all is well, THEN it should be plane sailing and the Edit can then begin to be polished.

I'll come back on what I meant about the INVERTED PART 3 in a while...

W
 

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INVERSION BONUS


So, what On earth do I mean by doing an inverted edit of my Godafether La Fine Edit?

For my GF3 edit, I took the new Coda edit, subjected it to a four way comparison (Dir Cur, Theatrical VHS, and Trology) to determine what was new in it, I found about 9 mins missing and restored those back while preserving the new brighter non green Hue color grade and added about 60 Sec never seen before, plus fixed a few things ( see my other thread).

For this edit, I need to preserve the old color grade, so I need to add in all the bits I added but use the older blu Ray as the source, and add in the 4 or 5 new shots from Coda. This avoids my having to color grade Coda to look like the older versions.

It's less work and means it is true to the blu Ray's Coppola Restoration.. I will also be adding in all the fixes, new subtitles and the like to this edit.

Now you know.

W
Ps
The titles test looks sweet.
Tomorrow, build the title sequence....finally!
Test will follow.
 

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UPDATE

So, here is a test render of some of the new opening AND the AMC open for comparison AND for the TRILOGY edit. There will NOT be a full preview of the opening. This is the preview of it.

It starts with the new version. You will note it is STABLE AS A ROCK. Then I have a slight gamma corrected piece over Al Pacino....is that better? OPEN Q. It then goes on to AMC...very unstable, then back to my stable chair plate and then the TRILOGY EDIT to show you the crap font. Also note the change in framing to the chair to get rid of the tilt I mentioned. The TRILOGY captions are far more stable than AMC, and that was the VHS release, so go figure. The Theatrical Part 2, very little wobble, but some...then back to mine.

I'm guessing, the AMC was a new HD SCAN from the SAGA negative, but the registration wobble was introduced during that, so NO RESTORATION. Why, well the edit shows the exact transitions as SAGA, and the captions wobble differently, which tells me they had some shake, but the AMC scan introduced more. In fact no other version I have is so unstable. They then took that HD file and removed the 25 mins I showed in earlier posts.

VIEWS...Please let me know otherwise I will procced with how I have done it.

Thanks and enjoy...OH, no music due to Copyright notifications and the like.
Enjoy
W
ps
Does anyone have a STABLE 70s Paramount Stars and Logo. All my Blu Rays have registration wobble, and stabilization creates other unwanted effects.
 

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UPDATE

COMPOSITING COMPLETED!

New title cards also created for Paramount Pictures Presents, An American Zoetrope Productions and A WRAITH Preservation.

Timings for on screen credits checked and all insertion and outsertion (is that a word?...it is NOW) were placed in the edit time line, and all captions dropped in and assembled. Transition timing also checked.

Tomorrow I will apply the transitions and RENDER (the opening).....

If all goes well, I will begin the edit polish (which is rough cut at the mo,) starting with dropping in the little bits etc that are missing.
Then I will complete an HD version of the new Vegas transition (no useful footage in Oceans 11 alas, the Sinatra version that is) and drop that in.

Then I will drop in the two Intermission cards and finally tackle the closing credits for both movies...which will be a PITR!.

That's All Folks!

W
 

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UPDATE

Opening credits for FILM 1 completed!

Editing begun!!

Spent 2 hours on the first transition from very young Vito Andolini/Corleone to first shot of Young Vito (De Niro)....why so long? Well, the AMC transition is a shit hack job. The audio just segues from one to the other, the overlap of the Godfather theme with the signing Very Young Vito is so awful, out of time and just a mess. I checked out SAGA, EPIC and TRILOGY edits, and they are all crap IMHO!

BUT

it can be fixed....There is a break in the music as Young Vito fades in, and its a good starting point for the end of the transition. There is also a nice break in the singing of Very Young Vito....so these scenes are BEGGING to be crossfaded...in fact (per my earlier theory about the structure of GF PArt 2)...it was shot with that intent. The non- chronological structure came later (see earlier posts as to why I believe this to be true).

So that is what I have done. The transition is perfect and the sacrifice was to loose 6 secs of material in total (4secs from Very Young Vito and 2 secs from Young Vito). I will post a comparison of ALL versions for you to compare. IMO it is better to have a smooth and visibly and audibly clean transition than have the extra 6 secs. I did a version where I slowed the underlying footage during the crossfade in order to keep the run time the same, and extended the silence before Very Young Vito starts to sing. This was audio acceptable BUT the slowing down during the cross fade looked more shitty than the audio mess from the other versions...so there you have it.

Tomorrow, I will actually do the opening credits for Film 2, since I'm in the zone.

Run time for Film 1 stands at 4h 37 min and 42 secs (without the additions and new end credits), with the Intermission card at 2 hrs 31 min.

That is my lot for today....Off to catch up on The Expanse S5!!!!!!

W
 

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OPEN QUESTION


Should Film 2 have a Recap... "Previously on The Godfather Opus"...?

I'm not enamored of the idea frankly...
 

Wraith

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...sometimes...one needs reassurance...
Thanks
W
 

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I will be doing an analysis of the TRUE RUN TIMES of all versions...I bet that apart from the 25 mins CUT by AMC, there are at least 15 minutes of credits and recaps...making it even shorter.....
 

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BONUS UPDATE: NOTHING EXCEEDS LIKE EXCESS

OH TO HELL WITH IT!

I went and did the Film 2 opening today as well. Divorce may follow, but HEY, ART HAS A PRICE!

Frankly, I'm tired of dicking around with technical stuff...it needs to be done, and done well, but having got into the edit today with FILM 1, I really just want to get on and BUILD THIS MONSTER...so the decks are now clear...YIPPEEE...the edit build can progress apace now.

So tomorrow, I will drop in the 7 additional segments for Film 1 apart from all the other extra material already documented. These extra extras, which are either unique to AMC or the Theatrical version and NOT in any extended versions are:
1 Extended walk away down street by Young Vito
2 An extra shot of Jack Waltz kissing the actress (which is actually an alt take truncated in the extended versions in favour of an Alt take
3 Tom kisses his wife in a fade out
4 Longer vehicle shot at Corleone compound
5 Longer post Intermission establishing shot of compound NOT in Theatrical but marred by a logo in the extended
6 Extra shot of Don Vito in bed
7 Alt take of Connie (may not be useable if unable to sensibly incorporate).

That will take a while for sure together with assembling the Chrono flow from scratch and NOT using any AMC transitions which are marred by fades to black for ad breaks. This is a real re-build which is why I will bill this as a "preservation" and "reconstruction".

That's it for today.

Don't forget the Cannolis

W
 

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UPDATE

I was distracted...by?

The new opening titles for Film 1 and 2.

I rendered and watched these, over and over AND I HATED THEM. The visuals were fine, but the music is wrong and a tad tight on time. If feels off (details later).

The version used for the AMC and a Novel for Television (NFT) is fine BUT it is made of 3 cues used in the theatrical versions. This worked for the AMC/ NFT, ubt I need to be true to the originals in tone, want each film to have slightly differing music open BUT both with the Godfather fanfare.

So I went back to the extended CE CDs and made what I needed. This had the happy accident of giving 10 secs more time which was great coz I wanted to include a BASED and Gordon Willis credit. All the chronological versions credit Gordon Willis (Cinematography), upfront, and now I can too.

Which meant...back to my Godfather Scrabble bank of lettering...and guess what? I needed small font lower case "f", "v" and "y" plus small upper case N.

So i spent the day on that rewarding and exciting task, aligning them and dropping them in.

JOB DONE...Happy with the openings of both Film 1 and Film 2. Film 2 is coming in at 5h 30min with the Intermission at 2hr 34 min...as things stand.

Tomorrow I will return to the task I posted about yesterday...PHEW....

Be seeing you!

W
 

Wraith

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BONUS GEEKINESS

SO, what was wrong with the music for the opening?

I think that the openings for the chronological edits (except Epic), are all too long! On the other hand, I do like to see the cast list, it raises expectations, the music sets the mood and, it's a sign of respect and used to be legally required to show per the unions who the main filmmakers are.

All that changed in the 60s and 70s when FOR DRAMATIC REASONS More films opened cold. Today you watch a Marvel Movie or JJ Trek and have you ever noticed that you get the opening credits at the end of the movie followed by the end credits back to back. That's coz the unions said, ok you want to start in a black screen, name of movie and then "I believe in America". That's fine, but credit at end please ...twice....

Now, for the chrono edit I'm working on, that is not a consideration coz that scene is nearl 80 min away...So I want a traditional opening.

In my head I wanted the GF fanfare and then the waltz for the credit roll. The issue with the AMC and others is that the music is made of of 3 cues, one from each of the 3 movies...BUT it's too long and plays the GF fanfare twice...its clumsy, grates in the ears since the source used has distortion and it means names appear at a point in the second fanfare and it feels odd, even more so when the waltz kicks in. So I resolved all that now, and have a satisfying opening and Gordon Willis gets a deserved Mention too.

The best thing is I got to further polish the timings and Both films will have very similar openings but with a subtle mood difference...but I won't say why...that would spoil it.

So, tomorrow I will begin the next phase of the edit. I may also do a small test for the end credit rolls. Those of you who have seen my Alien Covenant edits will have seen I expand credits to include all unlisted names that appear on IMDB. I felt that these people toiled in the films for ages and also deserve their day on the silver plasma/OLED/ cathode ray tv.... A friend of mine in VFX worked for years on movies befor getting an on screen shout, and I thought it would be nice to give them some daylight since I'm manipulating their hard work...so credit, where it's due I say! I'd like to encourage other editors to do the same...imagine one of them sees your version and their name is there ...when before it was not. Come on, we all know what a thrill it was when you first saw your name in a movie, albeit your faneditor avatar....That you out there...

Sermons and geekiness over.

Adios amigos

W
 

Wraith

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NO UPDATE

FONT TWEAKING

Still fine tuning those credits, but I think it is there now.

Bear in mind, these were made in the 70s, soi they would have been drawn by hand...how can I be sure? Well, when I made the credit for Gordon Willis, the "y" I took, from "Kay" had a long tail which overlapped into the "h" on "Photography"...so I had to use the shorter tail from the "g" I was using. That led to me discovering that the large "R" I had isolated was shorter by 4 pixels than all the other Rs used. This threw out the alignment on loads of credits which were not perfect.

Since these already have a slight 1 degree lean, I I'm limited to how much they can be fixed.

But....I WILL POST THE CREDITS tonight, silent for you to see how much more stable they are.

That's it.

SEEYA

W
 

Wraith

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BONUS PREVIEW
WORK-IN-PROGRESS

Below is the SILENT core of the opening credit roll to Film 1.

After the first 3 credits, I drop the AMC version in on the left for comparison. IT HAS NOT BEEN ALTERED. Try watch on a big screen to see how bad the registration error wobble is. The framing position of the AMC is also as broadcast. Points to note: The AMC Logo is rock solid. Also, notice I have lowered the position of the Credits so the upper slopping dado rail does not make the alignment issues so obvious. It then return to full screen for the new captions at the end. I have deliberately left out music and the full intro and Logo for dramatic purposes. There is not a single caption that has not been realigned or reworked, in fact the cleanest was Marlon Brando's. A few needed almost every letter moved, tidied up or even replaced. Clemenza was placed partially over the chair to stop it going too far to the right in the 4:3 safe area...appalling! It will be interesting to see if the YouTube algo picks up on this since none of this is actual material per-se from any version. It is a full recreation...from scratch!!!! (apart from the chair, which I bought at a yard sale.... :) NOT)

Comments welcome, since I'm dyslexic and typos can creep in (yes yes yes..."you say De Niro, and I say DeNiro"). That WAS like that on the VHS and original Theatrical Release in case new readers have not read earlier posts....

Enjoy.

Tomorrow, Film 2 fine tune opening...THEN back to the editing. PROMISE

ENERGISE

W
 
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BONUS VIDEO ON THE WAY!!!!!!
 
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