Instant Copy results on a difficult one

[SupaCoopa]

I've been hearing about Instant Copy a lot, so I thought give it a try. I wanted to see how it would perform on the most difficult of a situation, that being the SW II DVD. The movie is quite long (148' in PAL) and the disc is THX certified, which means video and audio quality are supposed to be near perfect. There is next to nothing more than the movie on the disc, so I chose to do a "mirror" backup without leaving anything out.

I used Hidden Settings Editor and loaded the "Recommended Options". Instant Copy said it would shrink the movie by 61% and after a couple of hours the backup disc was ready. Surely that was fast by any means. I grabbed my pop-corn and sit down to watch the clone of "The Clones", haha nice one

From the beggining, I noticed some pixelation, which of course I expected. The first shock came in chapter 6 were Natalie is attacked by worms while sleeping. Hey, surely this is not DivX? Then, on chapter 23 where the two lovebirds talk by the fireplace, disaster stroke again. I used to think that only VCD could macroblock this way, now I don't. To cut a long story short, every single dark-lit scene of the movie was destroyed. The bright outdoor scenes were very nicely transcoded indeed, even lightning-fast-moving ones were very close to the original. But I just couldn't bear any nightly or indoor scene, and this was only on a 28" TV. Just out of curiosity, I went through the problematic scenes checking the bitrate. I was surprised to see that it was about 1.8 - 1.9 while on the "good" scenes it was around 5.5 - 6.0 and on some cases it was topping at 9.8. This leads me to believe that Instant Copy does not "analyze" the movie in a good manner. I thought 1.8 on DVD resolution is only good for closing credits. Instant Copy disagrees and loses the game for me.

The matter is that my other clone, made with CCE Basic which costs about the same as IC, looks nicer. Sure there is some pixelation here and there, but it's not distracting. The bitrate doesn't ever go below 2.8 where it shouldn't, colourful bright scenes look fab as ever but the main difference is in dark and shady ones where CCE wins hands down. It may take a good eight hours for the same job IC does in two, but it pays. And I may have to do all the work by myself but I can eventually have a back-up that I can actually watch.

[mkelley]

So did you try DVDShrink 2.3 on the same test?

I'd be curious to know how it fares -- in similar tests it performed much better than IC.

(It doesn't really matter to me -- I *never* compress a movie, and backed up "Clones" using DVDXCopy. Same as original and looks perfect, and with my multidisc players it takes but two seconds to switch to the second disk from the comfort of my chair. Also took less than an hour, *including* the burns to disk).

[neomaine]

SupaCoopa,

Wow, 61% is a little tight.

Being an IC7 user almost exclusively, I use TMPGenc when doing a movie only. And, it does come out better/smoother because there is no overhead for menus and extras. My cuttoff is 70% and then I go for movie only. Up to that point, IC7 seems great.

However, keeping the menus and extras, I always make sure they get as little bitrate as possible. Plain and simple, although I want the menus and extras, I don't care what they really look like. At worst, they'll come out looking like someone's first attempt at a VCD. Though most of the time you can't even tell.

- Make sure that you get the reqistry hack that allows you to change the percentage and/or eliminate the extras such as foreign languages, extra sound, deleted scenes and other things. It gives you the ability to choose from 'automatic' to 'custom' settings. It goes through a couple of things and then brings up the custom screen. I consider it to be the true strength of IC. 8)

-Find the main movie (usually the longest title set) keep track of it.

-On the main movie title, if you haven't setup IC to ignore them, remove any unwanted sound tracks (good savings) or subtitles (minimal savings).

-On all the other titles, bring that % line down to the minumum, 30%.

-Once you've robbed Peter (sounds and extras) its time to pay Paul and give the main movie whatever additional percentage you can. If you can get to 70%, I think you'll be just fine. Otherwise, it time for the encoder of your choice, sans menus and extras.

If I get a DVD that has both 4:3 and widescreen, I'll usually give the 4:3 the old 30% :P and let my ding dong kids who like the 4:3 suffer so I can have the widescreen with all the bitrate.