WAGNER IN VENICE - Narrated by OW

[Le Chiffre]

Beautiful, meditative documentary about the great German composer's work in Venice. Orson Welles reads Wagner's words.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SPAO0HCRCBI

[Terry]

Ooo, the speed wobble doesn't do this one any favors.

https://archive.org/details/wagnerevenezia

[Le Chiffre]

No, that's unlistenable too, given how important the music is to it. One of my favorite Welles-narrated programs, I think it deserves to be on Blu ray, along with Sentinels and the three cartoons he did for Stephen Bosustow in the early 70s.

[Terry]

I don't see any good copies of this one currently, but this one has better sound:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LfYaj6hn5Bk

[Le Chiffre]

Better sound, but Welles's narration enters while the opening music (The Flying Dutchman Overture) is still loud, whereas in the other one, it enters while the music is quieting down, which sounds much more appropriate. I don't know how that could happen unless the one at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LfYaj6hn5Bk is a faulty sound mix that somehow got out of the lab. Strange.

Anyway, here's a third one that gets it right (at least the beginning), although the picture quality could be a lot better. The version at Archive actually looks better:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMip_U_SAtA&t=81s

I guess the best thing to do would be to combine the visuals from the Archive version with the sound from the two YouTube versions, if that can be done.

[Terry]

Pairing up the good video with the good audio in some editing software would be easy enough, but I'm certain they wouldn't sync properly, and editing or time-stretching the audio to fit would assume nightmare proportions, at least for me.

[Le Chiffre]

The syncing might not have to be totally precise since there is no dialogue, only narration, but they do seem to be at slightly different speeds, so that could be a problem.

[Le Chiffre]

Operation went pretty easily I'm glad to say. Result is not bad, although I think some picture quality got lost along the way. I'll take it over the other versions out there though, until something better comes along:
https://vimeo.com/266438111