Night of the Living Dead (1990) UNCUT - full color opening

[The Griff]

Hey gang. If you're reading this then you're probably aware that Tom Savini's 1990 remake of Night of the Living Dead has finally had a few moments of graphic violence restored for the UHD release.

https://www.movie-censorship.com/report.php?ID=325410

The opening has also been changed to black & white. Now, Savini has mentioned this idea over the years, but it always supposed to be a gradual transition from B&W to colour during the opening credits. As it is in this release, however, the film smash-cuts to colour right in the middle of a shot. I'm not a fan. The idea is simply too "meta" and kicks down the 4th wall.

I'd like to make my own version that keeps the entire opening in colour. I'd like to make it BDMV compatible, which should be easy enough, except I have no experience in fooling around with DV and Atmos tracks. If it were BD, I'd simply use TSMuxer to do the job as the disc uses seamless branching and it'd be easy to swap out one segment file with another, then remux as one total file built from the relevant playlist.

Unfortunately, that approach won't work here and I'm guessing it's maybe due to the presence of DV and/or Atmos. Does anyone here have any advice on how to tackle this? I'd like to avoid any re-encoding if at all possible.

Cheers!

[stwd4nder2]

I think re-encoding is going to be inevitable for this. And I'd imagine you'd have to re-grade the color shots to HDR, or just re-grade the entire film to SDR.

[LucasGodzilla]

Re-encoding would definitely have to be done to at least some extent.

The colorized opening would have to be regraded to relatively match up with the new HDR grade, but you could probably get away with a Dr. Dre match and a PQ conversion through ACES or Da Vinci's tonemapper.

Once you have the new opening encoded though, it 's probably possible to do the opening sequence swap with some MKV hackery, though creating a proper BD compatible output would almost certainly require a complete re-encode.

[The Griff]

Thanks guys. A bit more info: the disc features both the uncut and theatrical versions, both in Dolby Vision and with Atmos audio. This is achieved via seamless branching. So both the theatrical (colour) and uncut (b&w) files for the start run for the same duration and cut back over to the next segment of the movie at the exact same point. I was hoping to just swap out the uncut intro file for the theatrical one (so no regrading would be required) and trick something like TSMuxer into outputting my custom version as a single file but I get a "Cannot parse file" error when attempting to do so. I've had success when doing something similar with a seamlessly branched blu ray but it's not having a bar of it here.

I guess the alternative would be to customise the just the blu ray version but obviously losing some of UHD's video and audio benefits.

I might look into a making a MKV first and then take it from there. Thanks!

UPDATE: I attempted this using the BD version and TSMuxer and it worked exactly as I'd hoped. I was even able to keep the audio from the beginning of the uncut version which Savini had tweaked. I guess it's definitely a case of TSMuxer not liking UHD or, at least UHD with DV/Atmos.