There was a crowdfunding campaign for the re-edits and remasters of Assmonster and Antfarm Dickhole by a company that Bill Zebub refers to as “Indie-go-away” (citing the anti-indie film mentality). Both movies, which were shot in standard definition (DVD resolution) were to be upconverted to HD (eitehr 720p or 1080p).
Bill Zebub began actively re-editing these movies last week. A tragedy became a boon. The delay in this project was due to every external hard drive that stored the shots from the movies failed. The mastered movies from the original cuts are still intact. The main point of this is that, in order to re-edit, the original shots, not the master copy of the movie, are required.
Standard definition files are much larger when they are “.avi” files (as opposed to a compressed form, like h.264). Due to the huge file size of uncompressed video files, Bill Zebub transcoded only the footage that he needed, so a miniDV tape of 60 minutes would probably only contain about 10-20 minutes of footage to be used in the movie.
In those earlier days, there were always merciless deadlines. Bill Zebub did not have the time to transcode every bit of cool footage. Only the funniest or sexiest bloopers were saved.
The prosumer camera from those days used firewire, so that added delay to this project. You possibly might not even know what that word means. Suffice it to say that technology improves quickly, and it is often the case that older technology is no longer supported, or easy to incorporate into the new paradigm.
Whenever there is a delay, Bill Zebub likes to do something to show his appreciation of a fan’s patience. He is not arrogant and does not assume that all will smile at his every decree because he is the king of B movies, but he does write in the third person in blog posts.
Bill Zebub consulted with the tech guru at his preferred distro. Bluray discs CAN play standard definition footage (DVD quality). Why is this important? As mentioned, there was good and bad in the catastrophic failure of the hard drives. The transcodes were lost, which meant that every miniDV tape had to be transcoded in real time (Assmonster has 24 such tapes that are each an hour long that must be transcoded in real time. An hour of tape is an hour of transcoding).
How is that good? When Bill Zebub saw the raw footage, he was amazed at how much behind-the-scenes material was captured. In the early days he liked to keep the camera rolling. This actually proved useful in some disagreements. (There is no he-said/she-said ambiguity – the words are black-and-white, so-to-speak).
There might be 2 or more hours of never-before-seen footage in the upcoming Bluray! There are other films from the past that might get a re-edit, and if so, they would get this huge bonus content as well, whether they get upconverted to HD or remain in the DVD format.
Bill Zebub also wants to include a movie that was shot in HD. Perhaps INDIE DIRECTOR is a good candidate (and yes, it will be re-edited) So this disc might be 6-7 hours for the price of one Bluray.
