How to eek more quality out of LONG movies

[SteelSpy]

What can I do to get a better quality rip??

I have been making backup copies of a lot of my DVD's.
I use DVD Shrink & Nero Recode, in addition to DVD Decryptor.
I am starting to get a little picky about quality, and I am noticing that longer movies really suffer. I don't see much differnce between using DVDShrink or Nero Recode. They seem pretty comparable.

I'll give three movies to use as example.
Harry Potter & Sorcerer's Stone
Apocalypse Now Redux
Stargate Ultimate Edition

All three of these I have seen significant video quality loss. Again, maybe I am being to picky.

I use DVD Shrink.
I choose Reauthor.
I grab ONLY the actual movie - usually Title 1
I remove the end of the title to drop the credits.
I drop all audio tracks except the one I desire. Usually DTS if available.

I know DTS is fatter, but I would like the best possible quality.

These movies are viewed on progressive scan DVD Player. Sony DVP-NS755V. Component out to my Panasonic Enhanced Def Plasma.
So defects show up VERY clearly.

Is there any options in Recode, Shrink or some other prog's that will let me eliminate the defects, and still fit these titles on a DVD-R.

The Defects I am referring to is stuff like the following:

If there is a light shining in a dark area, you don't see a smooth transition from light to dark. You see rings around the light as the light fades into the darkness. Noticeable in the beginning of Sorcerers Stone.

Beginning credits in Stargate as the pan the camera around the stargate/hieroglyphics. All the motion in the background makes squigglies appear around the edges of the white lettering used for the credits.

The palm trees swaying in the beginning of Apocalypse Now. All of the motion causes heavy ?artifacting?

SO....

For 2 hour plus movies that I want to make pristine copies of, how do I get the same quality rip as I do with 90 minute movies. Is there something additonal I can do? Any useful guides? I have perused a few guides, but ain't found the right answer yet.

Thanx

SteelSpy

[foulplay]

I've ripped about 30 movies, using DVDshrink and Anydvd, even at 55% compression, I've never experienced this effect, if anything the most noticeable change is back to VHS quality! Pictures become softer and noisier!

[bigshotceo]

This is going to seem obvious, but it's the best way: rip to 2 DVDrs.

When it comes to shorter movies, you can keep a higher bitrate (and therefore higher quality). But when it comes to longer movies, the bitrate has to go down a lot to fit it onto one DVDr.

Unless you're really adamant (sp?) on only using one DVD, I'd REALLY suggest splitting it.

[FulciLives]

This is going to seem obvious, but it's the best way: rip to 2 DVDrs.

When it comes to shorter movies, you can keep a higher bitrate (and therefore higher quality). But when it comes to longer movies, the bitrate has to go down a lot to fit it onto one DVDr.

Unless you're really adamant (sp?) on only using one DVD, I'd REALLY suggest splitting it.

I agree and there are tools like DVDFab that make it fairly easy too.

The only other option if you want to keep it on one DVD is to re-encode it using CINEMA CRAFT ENCODER or TMPGEnc Plus doing a multi-pass VBR encode. I did this with MATRIX RELOADED and the CCE re-encode looked better than the transcoded DVD2ONE version I did.

Also please note that dual layer DVD burners are not that far away either ...

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[SteelSpy]

All Right!

If I use TMPGEnc Plus to re encode the movie and fit it to 1 DVD-R, where I am gonna suffer? Bitrate? What is the practical side of this? What am I gonna notice as far as difference while watching?
Recommended settings?

Thanx

[bigshotceo]

All Right!

If I use TMPGEnc Plus to re encode the movie and fit it to 1 DVD-R, where I am gonna suffer? Bitrate? What is the practical side of this? What am I gonna notice as far as difference while watching?
Recommended settings?

Thanx

Where you're gonna suffer is overall quality. Items might become more blocky, fuzzy, etc. In other words, it might slip closer to vhs quality. As for what you'll notice, that's subjective. It depends on the viewer and what it's viewed on. On a 20 inch tv, you'll probably not notice anything. On a 60-inch plasma TV, you'll probably notice the artifacts, etc...

[sublime053]

I actually just backed up Apocalypse Now Redux, and I copied only the movie using re-author mode, and it came out pretty good... no noticeable quality loss whatsoever. (dvdshrink)

Did you try using the deep analysis button?

[FulciLives]

All Right!

If I use TMPGEnc Plus to re encode the movie and fit it to 1 DVD-R, where I am gonna suffer? Bitrate? What is the practical side of this? What am I gonna notice as far as difference while watching?
Recommended settings?

Thanx

You will loose some quality of course when you re-encode the original but you loose MORE with a transcoder (such as DVDShrink or DVD2ONE etc.) than if you use a true encoder such as TMPGEnc Plus or CCE

If the movie is VERY long you can try re-encoding it at 352x480/576 since that looks better at low bitrates than 720x480/576 and the lack of resolution will not be all that noticeable on a normal sized TV (probably anything around 50" or less).

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[SteelSpy]

I actually just backed up Apocalypse Now Redux, and I copied only the movie using re-author mode, and it came out pretty good... no noticeable quality loss whatsoever. (dvdshrink)

Did you try using the deep analysis button?

Yeah, I always use the Deep Analysis.

What are you viewing the movie on?
42 plasma might show more defects...

Sounds like it is past time that I learn TMPGEnc Plus or CCE

[SaSi]

One of the "problems" of Plasma screens is exactly the one you describe: Constant luminance curves around the transition from light to darkness. This effect is due to the fact that the plasma cells are totaly digital. On or Off only. So the s/w inside the plasma screen tries to "fix" it by oscilating between on and off depending on luminance.

This is not to say that your plasma screen is rubbish. Far from that. Just that it "enhances" the low quality and quantization noise of the frames when transcoded.

With 3 hour movies, even my 21" CRT shows quite awful artifacts and quantization noise.

The best way I've gone round this is demuxing the video to a single .m2v file and feeding this to Mainconcept to re-encode with a two pass VBR to reach the required file size. Even better, is to copy the Quantization matrix coefficients from CCE for Very Low Bitrate onto MainConcept and encode with them. Additionally, you must disable half pixel search, increase motion search to at least 10-12 horizontaly and 4-6 vertically (this tells the encoder to spend more time and search more area around each macroblock for motion, so that it can - hopefully - encode more part of the picture as a motion delta). Also, using a precision of 10 bits instead of 8 or 9 will increase bitrate requirements by a little but visible decrease the effects you see.

All the above are "tweaks" and settings you can use in Tmpgenc or CCE as well.

(I guess the real answer behind all this is : Re-Encode with a proper MPEG encoder rather than transcode, which is the obvious trouth).

Also, when the movie is real long, I don't even think of keeping the DTS soundtrack. It's just too much to aslk.

Of course, if you demux the movie to audio and video, you can split them in two segments and author two movie only DVDs with them on two separate disks. This way you can keep the original video and audio, save the time in encoding (several hours) and have no quality issues altogether.

[Kingnog]

Are you sure the original doesnt do that? (for stargate and harry potter...I've seen the white edges/not-smooth transition on original dvd's)

[Thunder In Paradise]

An obvious solution would be to drop the DTS track in favor of the DD 5.1 track. This will usually save you atleast, ATLEAST 300-400MB extra of room, that you can use for improving video quality. Yes, both the DTS and the DD 5.1 track can be kept on The Fast and The Furious without any quality loss, but most long movies (Dr. Zhivago, Apocalypse Now Redux) need everything but the movie and sound to go.

[Rommie]

Yes, I did a very long movie recently and I wasn't happy with DVDShrink (for once) so I re-did it using Cinemacraft.

I'm used to using DVD2SVCD so i used its interface to set it up the way I wanted... the results were great... no observable difference from the original for me (on my cheap gear)

[mistermickster]

Take a look at the Forum over on KVCD.net.

They'll sort you out