help me put Fiction in sequence Pulp correct

January 29, 2008 3:18 AM

Prompted by the 'reversed' Memento, I want to re-cut my Pulp Fiction DVD so that the events play out in sequence. What tools should I be looking into?

The purpose is really to see if one of my most favourite films stands up as straight film, or is it's beauty in the fact that the storyline jumps about and I fell smart for putting it all together.

I am not too fussed about keeping the 5.1 audio since the redux will be for my own enjoyment and I don't have 5.1 sound!

The way I am planning just now is to rip the DVD to an AVI
Splice the AVI into the separate sections. eg the cafe, visiting Vincent Vega, Jack Rabbit Slim's Twist contest....
Sequence these AVI's in correct order so that they become one big AVI
convert to divx
enjoy.

Is that the most efficient method? Is there a tool that will do it all? Does this already exist and am I wasting my time?

posted by MarvinJ to media & arts (9 comments total)

Searching "pulp fiction"+chronological turns up some pretty interesting material if you are going to do this.
posted by B(oYo)BIES at 3:45 AM on January 29

It does already exist. I am having a hell of a time finding it on google before 7am, but I accidentially started to watch it once, and was totally confused because the order was 'wrong'.
posted by cobaltnine at 3:52 AM on January 29

Video search: "pulp fiction"+order comes up with a few. Longest is 30 minutes.
posted by B(oYo)BIES at 4:08 AM on January 29

The fanedit.org site has a bunch of interesting edits of movies including a chronological edit of Pulp Fiction.

I hear that the Kill Bill X is good.

Also check out the Matrix edits.

Perhaps these will give you more ideas..
posted by ogami at 4:42 AM on January 29 [3 favorites]

There's an essay in Good Scripts, Bad Scripts about why Pulp Fiction works the way it's structured and why it wouldn't told chronologically. Might be worth checking out.
posted by rottytooth at 4:55 AM on January 29

Thanks Ogami. that looks like it could have saved me a lot of work, will dl one of those edits tonight and see if it's what I am after. Hurrah!
posted by MarvinJ at 5:21 AM on January 29

Virtualdub will do this and its free/open source. You'll first need to rip that DVD into a big mpeg file. Once you have the mpeg you can edit it to your hearts content with virtualdub. If you spend 30+ minutes with some virtualdub tutorials you should be able to do this in a few hours.
posted by damn dirty ape at 7:03 AM on January 29

You can do it with Vidomi. It's free and reasonably easy to use. You can select different sections of the imported video (e.g. the ripped VOB files) in any order and then recode them into DivX output.
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 8:44 AM on January 29

Two suggestions: Consider ripping and encoding the entire movie. That way, you already have your AVI file with all scenes at the same framerate, bitrate, dimensions in one shot and don't need to transcode from an intermediate file. Then, using a tool like Avidemux (cross platform), cut and join the scenes appropriately on keyframes, which will only join streams and remux the file rather than transcode. I recommend Avidemux because it handles variable bitrate audio sync better than Virtualdub/Virtualdubmod and can open, play, index, and encode ripped .VOBs in one application unlike Virtualdub/Virtualdubmod. Basically, it wraps DGIndex into the encoder and allows you to use a GUI for filters rather than writing an Avisynth script. MeGUI and AutoMKV are also good encoding choices but don't allow cutting and joining and are only for Windows.
posted by Inspector.Gadget at 11:41 AM on January 29