Fixing the Hobbit Cartoon DVD

Some are aware that the DVD (and later releases) of The Hobbit (Rankin Bass) have a problem. Sound effects are missing from key moments in the DVD. Plate clinking in the beginning, The spider death sound, some of the sounds made by Smaug when attacking, and other sounds.

What I did was obtain the 1991 release of The hobbit on VHS. This version has all the correct sound effects but the quality of the video is not as good.

Later releases on VHS possibly have the same sound issue.

I had to rip the DVD version, then play that back and record it using OBS Studio.

I had to load the OBS MP4 file in to goldwave and pull the audio out to a wav file as Sony did not see the audio.

I replaced the DVD audio with the one I pulled using goldwave so I could have reference, and I had to align that audio to the DVD which was mostly easy.

I could not use the DVD ripped files as there is some weirdness from the VOB files that playing the DVD does not have.

I then loaded both videos in to Sony Vegas.

turned off the audio from the DVD and the Video from the VHS.

I split the VHS video at the silence in the fade in and out for the commercial breaks and realigned the VHS audio to the DVD video at each break.

the first part of the movie before the commercial break was particularly messed up, there appears to have been an edit in either the DVD or the VHS version.

Once I was satisfied with the alignment I re-encoded everything as a 720x480 mpeg2.

The results are pretty spot on.