House of Leaves

The logo question. First of all, no, my source has the CW logo and I used two ways around it. First zooming into the clips, till it isn’t visible anymore. (Sam with the Crossroad Demon) This is the easiest way. Second I used a (multiply) layer with black for the Dean part of the sequence from 3x01 or with the red apple, when he drowned lust in holy water, because zooming in would equal Dean’s nostrils instead of any expression or a wider shot with both of them. It was pretty easy because I already decided that this would be in B/W and the logo was in a dark place.

There is also a third option, something I started to play around seriously once ‘Jesus Christ’ was finished, because the next vid will need more scenes from S3. Avisynth or to be precise a filter in avisynth. I’m not sure if you already know this source option? I already introduced some vidders to it, so I hope you don’t mind if I just copy from a mail?

There is a fantastic and throughout guide over at http://www.animemusicvideos.org/guides/avtech/ more to the point here http://www.animemusicvideos.org/guides/avtech/amvappintro.html, which explains the steps you need to take in more detail and accuracy than necessary, because the first ten times I read it, I just went 'Huh?'. Further details are gathered at http://avisynth.org/mediawiki/Main_Page

What it boils down to? You get a program package from the second link named AMVapp. Rip your DVDs with DVDdecrypter, put the vobs through an indexing program named DGIndex and get two files. One a d2v-surfix and another one we work with has the ending avs. This is a text file you can play with MediaPlayerClassic or edit in Notepad or with AvsP (The avisynth editor I use, because you can drag and drop files and work with tabs) http://avisynth.org/qwerpoi/

The text of the avs file looks something like that:

mpeg2source("C:\Mixed\13th Trailer\13thwarrior.d2v")

Now this is a script and you can apply a number of filters in it, but my basic DVD script looks something like this:

mpeg2source("C:\Mixed\Supernatural\Season 2\Index\SPN2x16-2x19.d2v")
Telecide(order=1,guide=1) #1 for Top Field First or Telecide(order=0) for Bottom.
Decimate(cycle=5, mode=2)
AssumeFPS(25) # for my PAL framerate

If there is interlacing.

Or:

mpeg2source("C:\Mixed\13th Trailer\13thwarrior.d2v",cpu=4)
Telecide(order=1,guide=2)
Crop(4, 72, -4, -72)

If I need to crop a movie in 2.35:1. For normal tv shows in letterbox format you don't need cropping. Anyway your advantage to encoding is that you can edit directly your vobs without losing quality during encodes. You can change cropping, interlacing, resizing and a number of things with just one line in a script. Instantly without waiting and biting your nails. For example I have the whole nine seasons of xfiles in two sets of avs. One 4:3 and the other 16:9, both together are less than a MG.

You can also directly edit downloaded avis with this script in Premiere:

AVISource("C:\Mixed\Supernatural\Season 2\Supernatural 2x20 What Is and What Should Never Be HD.avi", audio=false)

Or

AVISource("C:\Mixed\Supernatural\Season 2\Supernatural 2x20 What Is and What Should Never Be HD.avi")
KillAudio()

And now with the xlogo filter:

FFmpegSource("C:\Mixed\Supernatural\Season 3\Supernatural 3x01 The Magnificent Seven.mkv")
Trim(0,56312)
converttoRGB32 xlogo("C:\Mixed\Supernatural\Season 3\cwlogo2.bmp",868,564,5)
LanczosResize(720,596)
AssumeFPS(25)

Obviously I wouldn't go back to clipping or encoding, it's just so easy to do it with a few lines in a script instead of going through the hassle of encodes to feed Premiere with codecs it accepts. I know this is a lot of information and it's possible that you already familiar with avisynth, but if you are starting out? This is the way to go...