I really like the early years of the CW “Arrow-verse” TV shows (Arrow, The Flash, etc). Not every episode was a classic, but they nailed a lighter tone to the Snyder movies. They also did annual cross-over stories, including a version of “Crisis on Infinite Earths”. The first one “Invasion!” was a fairly successful attempt but fell between two stools of standalone story and ongoing series episodes. The DVD’s of these crossovers are just the individual episodes on a disc, with ad break pauses and episode recaps. So my sudden, out-of-nowhere thought was to edit “Invasion!” into one single movie-length story.
I ripped the DVD, opened DaVinci Resolve and imported the episodes. I hit my first snag in seconds. Each episode still had credits burned into the lower-third of the early scenes. This might be OK in the first episode, but I can’t have them show up again at the start of the second and third acts, so I was going to have to crop them out. I set the project to a 2.40 aspect ratio, which worked on all but one credit (which I did a slight zoom on). That meant I had to treat the entire thing as an open matte and go through the whole 2 hours re-framing every single shot. I accidentally put in 2 hours of my Friday night starting the process, only finally shutting the PC down to make dinner.
Saturday was a lovely sunny day. I thought I’d make the most of it, going to the gym and having an al-fresco lunch. Had to be home by mid-afternoon to get family dinner in the slow cooker though, so I was at a loose end by 3pm. Well, I might as well do a little more editing…
Four hours pass.
Never noticed it, just locked into the timeline. I’d reframed two episodes and hit the first ad break on the last, never even getting out of my chair. I think something about editing just grabs me by the autism and refuses to let go. Scrub through shot, pick frame, set level, repeat. I keyframed a couple of tilts into camera moves as well, but that was about it.
By Sunday morning I was all in, mind was on nothing else. Hyper-fixation, I suppose. Another two hours go by, ending with creating a colour grade. Nothing too extreme (this wasn’t going to turn into Joss Whedon’s “Justice League”), but better than how basic cable looks. I set off the render job and finally went to find something else to do.
Without the recaps, end credits and a couple of non-essential scenes the whole thing now runs 1 hour 51 minutes. As in, you can watch the whole thing in on sitting. You can still kind of tell where one episode moves to the next story-wise, but flows a lot better. I can’t upload it, obviously. That sucks.
I’ve also made a start on the next one: “Crisis on Earth-X”. Four episodes of that one.
