Here`s - the Home Page for Michael Walter Stabosz

Hello, and welcome Rifftrax, the hilarious audio commentary by star of Mystery Science Theater 3000,
Michael J. Nelson. Perhaps, like me, you were thrilled to see Mike come back on to the scene so many
years after the end of MST3K. It is also likely you were disappointed to see that it wasn't exactly the
same as MST3K. Mike and friends are now riffing on more contemporary movies. It sounds good, but
because of those pesky copyright laws, he can't release a movie with riffs on it. Boo! Instead, all you
get is an MP3 file that you are told to play along side of the movie.
The very first Rifftrax product I ever purchased was for the Mariah Carey movie Glitter. Mike was
riffing with Mary Jo Pehl, a.k.a. Pearl Forester. I rented a copy of Glitter and popped it into my DVD
player. At the same time, I loaded up the MP3 file in Winamp on my computer, just a few feet away,
and pressed play there too. Listening to Mike's helpful introduction, I did some pausing and unpausing
on Winamp and my DVD player, and we were off. I was absolutely tickled pink by what was
happening. A movie was coming from one source, and a humorous commentary from the other. It was
syncing up so well too.
After the movie ended, I had some thoughts. First off, this would be hard to pause. To keep the sync
up, I need to pause both the movie and Winamp at the same time. That's trouble if I need to go to the
bathroom or answer the phone or something. Secondly, if I want to skip part of the movie, it would be
nearly impossible to jump forward on both the movie and the MP3 without them falling horribly out of
sync.
I thought it would be nice if I could get both video and Rifftrax commentary on one DVD. It would be
like the commentary track on any normal movie.
I figured there was some way to do this. I tried to figure it out for myself, but the task was too large,
and I didn't know where to start. Fortunately, SecretAgentSuperDragon wrote this guide. It was a
great start, but I thought a more comprehensive guide would work. My goal here is to make it clearer,
with some visual aids.
For today's lesson, we will be using The Day After Tomorrow.
You will need the following completely free pieces of software.
Rejig – Used for ripping the video and audio files from your DVD. The video becomes an M2V type
file, and the audio becomes an AC3 file. Also used for putting them back together in the end to create
new DVD files.
Chapter Xtractor (optional) – This is used to copy the chapter stops from the original DVD into the
reauthored final DVD. You can do without this, but your DVD won't have any chapters.
PX3Convert – Used to convert the AC3 file into a WAV file.
Audacity 1.3 – Used to create the audio file with the movie's audio and the Rifftrax combined. Also
allows editing of sound levels.
DVD Shrink – Used to reduce the size of you DVD files enough that they can fit on a single DVD.
DVD Decrypter – Used in tandem with Nero to burn the completed DVD.
Nero 9 Trial Version – Used to burn the completed DVD. The free version won't open after 30 days or
so, but you can still use it to burn through DVD Decrypter. No other burning software works with it.
DVD Decrypter – Used to burn the final prokect to DVD.
STEP ONE – Create space for your project.
This is a no-brainer. You'll need some space to keep the various files that the project creates. I have
mine set up in a hierarchical structure. All Rifftrax projects are kept in the folder C:\Video
Files\Rifftrax, with a sub folder for each riff. So we'll create a new folder, The Day After Tomorrow,
and put the files provided by Rifftrax in there. That's the MP3 file containing the riff and the Readme
file.
STEP TWO – Rip the DVD on to your hard drive
The next thing you'll have to do is disassemble the DVD through a process called demultiplexing. A
DVD is comprised of several VOB files, some IFO files, and some BUP files. That's just the way
DVDs are encoded. The VOB files contain the actual movie; other files are used to guide your DVD
player.
A VOB file contains the video and audio blended together. You need to take the video and audio apart
by demultiplexing it. Don't worry; the process copies the video and audio streams and they remain
intact on the DVD itself.
Here's what you do:
1) Open Rejig.
2) Select IFO Mode
3) Select Open Disk. You'll get a screen like this with the DVD drive selected. Again, click the
Open Disk button here.
4) Rejig will open up the DVD and show a lot of information.
It might look a little complex, but I'll explain the windows within.
Titles – This shows all the various collections of VOB files within the DVD structure. You'll notice
below how this DVD has several VTS segments, going up to VTS_08. Professionally rendered DVDs
will put a lot of different features in different VTS segments. Generally, the movie will be in one, and
special features will be relegated to other VTS segments. You can tell where the movie is by the
lengths listed next to each PGC. For example, notice VTS_08, PGC 0, has a runtime of 02:03:32 while
the other PGCs are much shorter. This indicates that this is the movie.
Luckily, Rejig is pretty smart and defaults to the movie file. You will want to take note of the VTS_08
though, for later.
Chapter/Cells – This basically just shows how many chapters there are. Don't worry about this.
Streams – Here lie the guts of the DVD. It shows you the video stream and every audio stream, and
every subtitle stream. There are different audio streams for different languages, and different streams
for commentary tracks. 0x84 and 0x85 are both commentary tracks.
Though it isn't readily apparent, the stream you want is the very first audio stream, 0x80. It's
ALWAYS this way. I've done over 100 Rifftrax reauthors and haven't seen a single DVD where 0x80
was NOT the regular, uncommentaried English audio stream.
5)
6)
7)
8)
Under the streams window, select the video stream and the first audio stream (0x80).
Under video options, select the radio button Demux Video.
Uncheck Correct AC3 Delay and Convert Subs to IFOEdit Sup format.
Under Output Directory, enter the location of your project folder (created in Step One).
Your screen should look like this:
9) Press “Process” and wait for the DVD to finish ripping. It should take about 10-15 minutes.
10) Once that finishes, Rejig will generate an M2V file for the video stream, and an AC3 file for the
audio stream. They'll have some weird names. The video stream starts with “MPEG”, and th
audio stream starts with “AC3”.
I always rename them to something more meaningful, so I can keep track of what files are what. So
after a little renaming, we have.....
STEP THREE (Optional) – Extract the chapters from your DVD.
1) Open up ChapterXtractor. It will look like this at first.
2) Click over to the Format tab.
3) The very first time you use this, you'll need to enter the character string %f\n inside the box
marked “Format”, then click the little folder icon right next to it.
4) Click the Open IFO button. Navigate to your DVD drive, and look inside the VIDEO_TS
folder. You'll see a list of IFO files, with names starting in VTS.
Remember when we were ripping the DVD in Rejig, and you saw a list of VTS segments?
You'll want to select the same one here. VTS_08_0.IFO. Select this and Chapter Xtractor will
pull up a list of chapter stops. The numbers actually refer to the frame in the movie.
5) Click “Save data”, and save in to your Rifftrax project folder. I'll call mine “Day After
Tommorrow Chapter Times”.
STEP FOUR – Convert the movie's audio stream to WAV format using PX3 Convert.
1) Open PX3Convert.
2) You'll see two fields, AC-3 File and WAV-File. You'll want to open the AC3 file you ripped
before in the AC-3 File box.
3) For the WAV-File box, you'll want to name the WAV file you're converting in to. There's a
glitch in PX3 Convert, and as a result, you'll have to add the .WAV extension at the end of the
file name. Most programs add the extension automatically, but PX3 Convert is too stupid to do
that. So remember to add the extension:
4) Leave all other options at their defaults, and hit the “Start Convert” button.
5) The Select audio codec screen will appear. Leave that alone and just hit OK to start the
conversion. It will take about 10 minutes.
STEP FIVE – Create audio track with combined movie audio and Rifftrax commentary.
Here's what could be the trickiest part of the process. You need to create the combined audio track.
This will be one audio file that has the movie's audio and the Rifftrax commentary in it. Like a real
commentary track, the movie's audio will be overshadowed. There's some advanced stuff you can do
to adjust the audio levels inside the track, at individual intervals. There's also an autoduck function
which you can use to make the movie's audio automatically lower in volume whenever a riff is being
spoken. However, as I said, that's advanced stuff. Here is just the basics.
1) Open Audacity 1.3. The screen will look blank at first.
2) In the lower left, see where it says “Project Rate”. Change that from 44100 to 48000.
3) Import the Rifftrax MP3 into Audacity. Go to File > Import > Audio, browse to your project
folder and select the Rifftrax MP3. It'll take a minute or two for the file to import. After that,
the Audacity window will look like this.
4) Next, import the WAV file of the movie's original audio. Repeat the previous step, selecting
the WAV of the movie's audio this time.
Afterwards, Audacity should look like this:
5) Save your project. It takes a while, probably about 20 minutes. When asked to Copy All Audio
into Project, say “Yes”.
6) Now we have to edit the Rifftrax commentary (the top stream) to sync it up with the movie's
audio (the bottom stream). Every Rifftrax comes with an introduction that lasts about 3
minutes. We need to cut out MOST of that introduction, but not all of it. The goal is to remove
the introduction, but leave a period of silence at the beginning of the Rifftrax. The period of
silence will play in the segment of the DVD before Mike tells you to unpause.
7) If you mouse over to the left hand side of the
So for example, in The Day After Tomorrow (actually a Rifftrax Presents, so Mike isn't there),
Kevin tells you to unpause the Rifftrax after the words “A Roland Emmerich Film” disappear.
If you watch the movie, you'll see this happens 45 seconds in. So we need to remove all of the
introduction, except for 45 seconds, and leave that 45 seconds silent
8) First off, if you want to get the cutting and pasting accurate, you'll need to zoom in. We don't
need to see the whole two hours of this project. Just the three minutes that the introduction
takes up will do fine. You can zoom in with the zoom tool. Look for the zoom icon around the
top right.
9) Here we've zoomed in to show 5 minutes and 15 seconds. Once you get the hang of Audacity,
you'll be able to do some more finessed zooms.
10) Mute the movie audio (2nd) track and press play to listen through the introduction until you are
told to pause. When this happens, Press STOP.
11) At the spot where you stopped, hold down the left mouse button and drag all the way left to the
start of the track. It may be hard to see where exactly that is, so you may want to zoom in
further.
12) Now, if you bring your cursor over to the left hand boundary of the stuff you've highlighted, it
will turn in to a pointing finger. When it does this, you can reduce the amount of area
highlighted by holding down the left mouse button. We need to cut everything except 45
seconds. So unhighlight 45 seconds.
From above, you can see the time is marked off in 15 second increments. If you zoom in
further, it will be marked off in smaller increments. That will probably be necessary for most
riffs in which the amount of silence you need is not a multiple of 5.
As I said, unhighlight 45 seconds.
13) Now hit Ctrl – X to delete that big chunk of the introduction.
14) Now you need to silence out the stuff that is left. Highlight the 45 seconds you left behind.
15) Select Generate > Silence. Hit OK, and you'll have 45 seconds of silence.
16) The Rifftrax and the movie audio should be synced up, but you'll want to verify. To verify,
open the Readme file and look for one of the Disembaudio sync lines. You'll notice the sync
lines list a time for the Rifftrax and the DVD. You'll want to use the time for the DVD.
For The Day After Tomorrow, the first sync line is “Yeah, I think i got the hang of it” at 3:18.
17) We want to zero in on the area where that line should be. I like to look at the 30 second
segment where it should be. If the Rifftrax is out of sync, it shouldn't be off by more than a
second or two.
18) Now press the “Fit Selection” button (it's near the zoom button).
19) Press play and listen for the sync line to come up.
20) It's possible that the Rifftrax will be out of sync by a small amount. I usually find that it's out of
sync by about 0.5 to 1.5 seconds. This might be within your tolerance. Me, I'm a perfectionist,
so I get it synced down to within about 0.05 seconds. It comes with experience.
You can trim it down for a more perfect sync, but that goes beyond the pale of a beginner's
tutorial.
If you notice that the movie line is coming first, you'll need to figure out how far off it is, then
cut that amount of audio from the riff track. Cut that amount out in the beginning, and all the
sync lines will fall in place.
If you notice that Disembaudio is coming first, you'll need to glue more silence in to the riff
track. Figure out how out of sync it is, highlight that much audio from anywhere in the track,
and hit Ctrl+C to copy. Jump back to the start of the track, and hit Ctrl+V to paste it back in.
Right after you paste it in, you'll see that it's highlighted. Select Generate > Silence to silence it
out.
Like I said, that level of finesse is an optional step for once you get used to the reauthoring
process. The Rifftrax and the movie were synced up pretty well as soon as you generated that
45 seconds of silence and cut out the rest of the introduction in the last step.
21) Your combined audio file is ready! Now to export it as an AC3. Go to File > Export >
Navigate to your folder for this reauthor project > save as type AC3 Files (Ffmpeg).
22) The movie and the Rifftrax will export as one combined AC3 file. This AC3 file will be an
audio track on your finished DVD, like a commentary track on a movie.
At this point, your project folder should look like this:
STEP SIX—Reassemble your files into a DVD
Now we have the basic elements of the final reauthored DVD:
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Movie video file – Day After Tomorrow.m2v
Unriffed audio file – Day After Tomorrow Original Audio.AC3
Riffed audio file – Day After Tomorrow Rifftrax.AC3
Chapter stops – Day After Tomorrow Chapter Times.txt
You have two choices here. You can make your final DVD with menus or without. If you want
menus, you can use DVD Lab Pro and follow this guide that I wrote.
Otherwise, continue following this guide, and we'll end up with a DVD that just has the video without
menus. You'll need to use the audio track switching button on your DVD player to switch between the
regular movie and the Rifftrax.
First, we need to return to Rejig.
1) Select “DVD Author”.
2) Notice the dots inside the squares next to the white boxes. You'll click on these to load up the
video and audio streams.
3) Click the box next to where it says “Video” and select the video file. In this case, Day After
Tomorrow.m2v
4) Click the box next to where it says “Audio” and select one of your AC3 files. The first one you
select will be the default that your DVD player selects when you play the DVD. I always use
the original audio as the default, because that's the way real DVDs are set up. You can set the
riff to be the default. Or you could just select the combined audio (audio with the Rifftrax
mixed in) as the only track. It's up to you.
5)
6)
7)
8)
9)
I will be selecting first the “Day After Tomorrow Original Audio.AC3” then the “Day After
Tomorrow Rifftrax.AC3”. As you'll see, you need to click the box and browse to each AC3 file
separately.
Skip past the area where it says “Subpicture”. We don't have any subtitles.
Where it says “Scene Changes / Chapters”, you'll want to select either PAL or NTSC,
depending on what DVD region and which Rifftrax you're using. If you're in North America,
select NTSC.
To the right of the “Scene Changes / Chapters” area, click the box and load the chapter times
file, “Day After Tomorrow Chapter Times”. The area will populate with the chapter stops you
extracted using ChapterXtractor.
Skip the next box. Since we don't have any subtitles, we don't need to copy any subtitle colors.
Finally, click the box next to output stream and navigate to your project folder. Rejig will
create two folders here, VIDEO_TS and AUDIO_TS. VIDEO_TS will hold a series of IFO,
BUP, and VOB files like a real DVD does. AUDIO_TS is always empty.
Rejig should look like kinda like this.
1. Press Create to begin compiling your DVD. This will take about 20 minutes. Afterwards, your
project folder will look like this:
STEP SEVEN – Use DVD Shrink to burn your project on to DVD
Here we reach the end. You have a DVD on your hard drive (that's what is in those VIDEO_TS and
AUDIO_TS folders). Now you just need to get it on to a DVD.
DVDs can only hold 4.7 Gb of data. Usually, the DVD files you create will be more than 4.7 Gb.
DVD Shrink compresses them to fit on a DVD.
1) Put a blank DVD-R or DVD-RW in your DVD burner drive.
2) Open DVD Shrink.
3) Click “Open Files”. Navigate to the VIDEO_TS folder you just created and hit OK.
4) You'll see the movie flash by really quickly. DVD Shrink will go through the movie in about
ten seconds. Then you'll see a summary of the DVD layout like so:
5) Click “Backup”. Move to the “Backup DVD” tab.
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For “Select Backup Target” switch to “ISO Image File and burn with DVD Decrypter.”
For “Select Target Image File”, click “Browse” and move to your project folder. Save the file
with a name like “The Day After Tomorrow”, as type “ISO file”. What this is doing is creating
an ISO file that you'll be able to open up with DVD Decrypter (or any DVD burning software)
and burn with whenever you need to make a copy.
6) Move over to the “Burn Settings” tab. You can set the volume label here. The volume label is
pretty meaningless; it's just the name of the DVD as seen in a Windows My Computer window,
or through DVD playback software. It'll be in all caps, and DVD Shrink doesn't allow spaces
(so you'll need to use underscores). DVD Shrink will generate a name automatically based on
the name of the ISO file. But you can change it if you want. It ought to look something like
this.
7) Finally, click “OK”.
DVD Shrink will go through an encoding process which will take 5-15 minutes. It's compressing the
DVD files and creating the ISO file. You'll be able to see the movie video zipping through if “Enable
Video Preview” is checked.
After it finishes this encoding process, it will automatically kick start DVD Decrypter and start burning
to DVD. Please note that DVD Decrypter is using Nero Burning Rom to burn the DVD. Only Nero
will work. You can use the free trial version for this. Even if the trial period has expired and you can't
launch Nero on its own, DVD Decrypter will be able to use it to create the DVD.
STEP NINE – Watch your completed reauthored DVD.
This part is easy. Pop that DVD into your DVD player and watch. Older DVD players might have
trouble reading it, in which case you'll just have to watch it on your computer, or get a newer DVD
player.