Haunted was originally created with off-air tapes from two countries and source from at least one other country as well, which we got by magical means we won't go into. The original mix of sources meant that we had problems with mismatched colors, uneven aspect ratios, different visual-quality levels, you name it. It was absolutely the best source we could get at the time, and we did the best we could with it, and we've always been proud of the results, but it was never as pretty as it should have been.

In 2006, though, shiny shiny DVDs came out. We'd been thinking vaguely about remastering since we got them, but had other stuff going on and never got to it. Then, in spring 2007, we happened across an Odyssey 5 fan page that gave a countdown clock to the day the Earth explodes -- August 7, 2007. Clearly, this was A Sign that it was time to remaster Haunted, because, man, what better day could there be for releasing a remaster?

So after we finished our Vividcon premiere vid, we recaptured all the clips, which was easier than we'd hoped since we still remembered where most of them had come from. And thanks to Seah's compulsive saving of any file we might conceivably need some day, we had everything we needed to easily remaster the vid: the original project file so we could recreate the precise effects we'd used, and the original exported .avi, so we could line up the new clips perfectly in the vid, down to the frame.

At that point, it was just slogging: trim a new clip and put it on the timeline, line it up by spot-checking frames at the beginning, end, and middle against the original .avi and adjust as needed, and then apply any effects that were on the original clip in the original project file. It took a day to recapture the clips, and 2-3 days to rebuild the vid and doublecheck it for any missing effects or problems. It would have taken a lot longer without the original files; we tweak nearly every clip when we vid, and Haunted was definitely no exception.

We made almost no changes, other than to slightly alter the tint on the blue section where they're all dying on the shuttle and to adjust one or two clips by a few frames because they worked better that way with the widescreen images. Any changes you think you see are actually probably due to that widescreen effect; there's a lot more visible at the sides of every clip.

The widescreen explains the rather odd sizes on the vid, as well -- both large and small versions are cropped to get rid of surrounding black space from the letterboxing on the source clips.

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