The General (1926): Watch Buster Keaton’s Masterpiece of Masterpieces, Complete, Without Commercial Interruptions, and with William P. Perry’s Original Musical Score, at WEJB/NSU!

Re-posted by Nicholas Stix

Original Piano Score by William P. Perry (BluRay Quality, Full Movie)

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A complete and remastered version of this movie was released on BluRay by Kino International in 2009. It featured scores by Carl Davis, Robert Israel and Lee Irwin. However, there exists a piano score composed by William P. Perry which was done over a different copy of the movie which seemingly was in worse condition, with many lost frames and changes in the order of the scenes. There are certain scenes -e.g. when Anabelle talks to the Northern Generals in the house-which were lost.

This version of the movie was released on DVD by various companies. I wanted to enjoy the BluRay remaster and Perry's score at the same time. Nevertheless, the differences between the two versions of the movie would make this impossible without a full adaptation of the high definition release.

In order to do so, I had to make a frame-by-frame comparison of both sources to have them match in length. AviSynth helped me do this without having to shoot my head. It was a lot of work, though: I splitted manually the movie into 300 small parts, making sure each scene started in the same frame for both versions. I also changed the order some scenes appeared in to make them match. Finally, I obtained the high definition version with the proper length.

The thorough work allowed it to be automatically synchronized with the music.

Finally, the video was upscaled to 4K for better bitrate preservation. Otherwise, the stunning quality of the remaster would be completely destroyed by YouTube. This is the craziest thing I have ever done on my computer, though: due to the source being a 1080p BD (therefore, with great bitrate, not like the YouTube crap), the computational requirements were very high. So high, that I could only perform the encoding with the minimal compression; if I didn't, the encoder would crash due to lack of memory. This ended up with a 188 GB, 350 Mbps gigantic video. After discovering the limit for uploading to YouTube is 128 GB, I had to reconvert it with higher compression. This second processing, though, was much more affordable. So, after more than 24 hours of encoding, I managed to downgrade it to 32 GB. My FTTH connection did the rest of the work.

Other Complete, Silent Classics Available at WEJB/NSU:

C.B. DeMille’s The Squaw Man (1914);

D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation (1915);

D.W. Griffith’s Silent Masterpiece, Intolerance: Love’s Struggle Through the Ages (1916);

Charlie Chaplin’s Shoulder Arms (Video, 1918);

Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920);

One Week (1920): A Classic, Two-Reel, Buster Keaton Silent Comedy (Full Movie HD);

John Ford’s The Iron Horse (1924); and

The Lodger (1927, Silent), Alfred Hitchcock’s First Box Office Success.