Sometimes when you fiddle with something you figure it out

When I found out about yet one more piece of Wedding Peach animation that I still had not seen, I tried a bit of a websearch to find it. One website had a link - the key verb is HAD - but the file was removed and so was the link!

Then I found someone on Youtube uploaded a rather poor quality copy of it. The clip is the 3 girls Yuri, Hinagiku, and Momoko, on stage singing Virgin Love. This appeared on a Furil concert Laserdisc, but for some reason ADV never got the rights to it.

The problems with the clip from Youtube, aside from the asinine and annoying blockiness - Youtube allows for clips to be 150MB or 10 minutes, so when you're under the time limit, at least go for quality - is that when you have decoders that can play Flash Video media, they don't always transcode into other container formats well enough that the audio and video match up.

One converter I have can do the video from 23 to 29.97 frames per second. The video plays too fast at 23, and too slow at 29.97. There was a middle setting of 25 that I had to use when extracting the video by itself. Then I had to go back in and pull out the audio by itself.

If I couldn't adjust the playback speed of the video, but I do have Audacity and it can adjust the playing speed of the audio! In order to remotely have the video and audio synchronized for much at all, they'd have to play at almost the same length of time. The audio, I found out, was about 1.7 seconds too short! Audacity allowed me to adjust the speed by a small amount - -.8 percent. That's a Negative eight tenths of a percent speed reduction. This meant the audio would now run longer than the video, but under tests I performed using Windows Movie Maker, it pretty much synchronized well, much better than the program that had converted it.

I had used VLC to play the original file and it did a nice job - the video and audio remained aligned, but VLC as a stream converter, it's lacking in functionality. It can play the file it creates, but almost nothing else will. My Apex DVD player could play it...

But at any rate, I was able to convert the file, mix it back together, and even grabbed my translation of Virgin Love, and subbed about 95% of the clip. ^_^

If I can get a nice clearer copy and the dialogue translated a bit better than I did it, I'll resub it again.

Now that I figured out that Windows Movie Maker can do subtitles but not exactly where I'd like them, I might re-do the Hana Yori Dango movie... ^_-