snow white

After Dick's 100th birthday, the lion kingdom finally downloaded Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, 1 of a growing number of movies only available in over 8GB.  Not sure if it's because of increased hard drive sizes or because of deterrence.  

 

Lions thus resumed the practice of transcoding most everything to a lower bitrate.  Unlike the previous trend, all 6 channels of audio are being retained since the mixdown process sux.

The last transcode was the despecialized star wars in 2021.  The ages old process of rendering fractional copies at different Q values resumed, but now using H.265 & manual ffmpeg arguments.  The easiest solution is rendering multiple passes of video to ffmpeg, normalizing the audio to ffmpeg, & then multiplexing with the ffmpeg command line.  If the audio doesn't require normalizing, it's smartest to demux the original in ffmpeg.  Pirated audio ranges from 128kbit to 1.4Mbit.

None of this process requires cinelerra & doing it all in ffmpeg would probably yield better results in less time.  There's a 2 pass usage which would just entail making a script.

1 new problem is deinterlacing 59.94fps to 23.97fps.  That requires a 1st decimate down to 29.97 + IVTC + a 2nd decimate down to 23.97.  The interlaced frames are actually dupped to create 59.94 but they're not dupped to exactly 2 frames per input frame.  Helas, this process is probably faster without OpenGL, since every step is done in the CPU & OpenGL mode copies every step back to the GPU.

The mane use of Cinelerra was always transcoding.  It transcoded hundreds of TV shows, deleting commercials, deinterlacing.  After the end of the TV era, it transcoded many sound files for bluetooth speakers & was manely used for playing downloaded videos.

 

There is definite quality loss, even with H.265 at 2.7-4megabit.  It's an artifact of constant Q instead of constant bitrate.  The ffmpeg documentation still says constant Q gives better overall quality.

Still lightyears beyond the 1.1megabit copy lions downloaded in 2020.  In most cases, it's replacing film grain with less appealing ringing.  If we really wanted every detail of Tom Hank's 32 year old face, we would be paying up for the highest resolution physical media.

A rough go of transcoding a bunch of 6GB+ movies, fixing audio synchronization problems, interlacing problems, manually dialing in the bitrate, freed up maybe 100GB of the hard drive.  It hardly seemed worth the trouble or the decrease in quality.

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Chitty Chitty Bang Bang wasn't good enough to keep in its original bitrate.  It was written by Ian Fleming of James Bond fame.  He only lived to age 56 & only saw 2 of his books become movies.  The Ian Fleming novels powered all the James Bond movies until 2006.  The last one made from his novels was Casino Royale 2006.

Young lion never saw the complete movie & only remembered the car getting destroyed in a fire, while also gaining super powers.  Young lion presumed the ghost of the driver killed in the fire haunted it.  Today's viewing revealed the car didn't have any super powers & it implied the driver survived because the seat was still intact.

 

The hero prop didn't show up until 48 minutes. 

A lot of south France in Summer.

There was a bit of James Bond in the car transformations. 
Seem to recall after only flying purely in the imagination, the ending pay off was that it flew in real life. 

Be prepared to do a lot of fast forwarding through the many musical numbers, eventually most of it, for that matter.  The musical candy bit only vaguely came back after watching it.

That was a failed product in the 80's.

 

 38 year old Sally Ann Howes was hitting the wall & quite the snob.

 

 When it got to the guys in the air vent costumes, it was time to hit fast forward & wrap it up.  For all of Ian Fleming's greatness & the lore around this movie, there really wasn't much to it.  The book was based on a kid book.

 

 

Noted he dropped the hottie off at her father's mansion & then she reappeared in the car, 6 minutes later.  That might have been the most unintentionally intriguing scene because it recalled tales of letting go & the bird flying back.

Didn't remember the 3rd act at all.  The child catcher & the revenge of the kids was replicated in Indiana Jones.  Interestingly, the real life characters were not reincarnated as characters in the dream like the wizard of oz.

Remembered how the car transformed into an airplane but not the context.

In keeping with movies of the time, marriage was the end game.  The payoff wasn't what lions remembered.  It left open the idea of the flying being imagined.  According to the books, none of the adventures were imagined & the car really flew.  The movie made the adventures imaginary, implying the flying was imagined.  There were a lot of imagined flying payoffs in movies.

All built up in the last 40 years.

So Dick had arthritis by age 40, but managed to work around it.  A lot of animals manage to work around it with a reduced calorie diet, herbs, or reduced loading, though his motto was to keep moving.  Arthritis might be asymptomatic in rare instances.  He was also a heavy smoker for most of his life.  He voted for Bernie Sanders.