Tonight I head up into the wilds of the Northwest Suburbs to spend some social time with avindair and GeekBoy and pick up the music tracks and "final cut" of the movie.

I put that in quotes, because while it is the final cut, because of some technical difficulties, I'm going to have to recreate the movie in Vegas and use my existing color-corrected footage, since it apparently didn't survive the "Premiereization".

Actually, it won't be that difficult. I will bring in the finished cut into my already-existing assembly cut project and use it as a template, then match the edits. I know there will be some sound replacements; I already have one entire scene that has new sound, and I know of a couple of sound effects that need to be updated/fixed.

After that, I need to normalize the dialogue between scenes, then bring in the music mix and do the final tweaking. Then final render.

After that, there is the encoding phase, which has its own set of problems. Aside from the data rate, there is the method by which black levels are represented in the video stream. In the color corrected footage, I crushed the black levels down to 0 IRE. I think that's part of the problem with Premiere, in that it doesn't like 0 IRE, so it bumps everything up to 7.5, which messes with the contrast and washes out the colors. I need to render to a format which doesn't rely on the black level, then use that to encode to an MPEG-2 video file.

I have two professional-level MPEG transcoders. Both of them can do VBR encoding, and I think both of them can do black restore if I can figure out how. And that's going to involve some comparisons, which will take some time.

I already have two days reserved this upcoming week for other projects, so I'm figuring I should be complete by next weekend. I'd SO like to be able to deliver a finalized DVD on Friday the 29th.