Noisy Commercial DVD's

[e1miran]

A little wordy, but here goes:

I am a newbie at making DVD backups. The first DVD I tried was 007-Die Another Day that ran ~2:12.000. I first used DVD Shrink and encoded without menu's, extras, unneeded soundtracks/subtitles. The main movie showed a compression setting of about 90%. I thought that this would still look great because on the forum almost everyone says that this will still look excellent at this rate.

I played it in my standalone and noticed lots of noise in the background, i.e.: pixel movement on walls that were not-in-focus in the scene, and pixel movement in shadows on people. I thought that the result was not very good.

I thought it was that Shrink could not handle the compression well, so I tried trial versions of IC8 and Intervideo DVD Copy. I achieved no considerable improvement with regards to the visible noise.

So I decided to move onto another DVD, this time making sure that it was shorter in length. I proceeded to successfully backup about 5 others that needed no compression (or just compression on the credits) to get a 1:1 backup of the main movie - after stripping menu's & extras (I'm not a big fan of these).

Well after learning how to use mixed compression in Shrink to render the credits as still pictures, I decided to go back to Die Another Day. This time with mixed compression, I was able to transcode with a compression setting of only about 98% ---COOL! Then I checked the result and it was still noisy - maybe just a very little less so. I couldn't understand it, why the noise?

So I went back to the original, commercially made source DVD and viewed it. Guess what? The noise was present there, too! So all along I was getting very good backups of this movie. I had just never really noticed the noise in this DVD until I viewed the backup with a critical eye. This was a surprise to me since I generally thought DVD's to be noiseless, pristine renderings of the movies.

I'm sure some of you have had similar experiences with noisey source DVD's.

[chipy66]

apparently running the deep analysis with dvdshrink brings out a better result...dont know if it would make a different with above 90% compression anyways though

[LeoNapier]

Which version of DVDShrink are you using?
There have been some probs with quality output with versions 3.16 or 3.17... not sure which one though....
Does the compressed DVD have quality issues when played from yr hard drive? (with powerDVD etc. etc.).
I have done a backup with DVDShrink version 3.05 b and the results were excellent...
If yr compressed DVD looks OK when played from yr hard drive, it might be a prob with yr standalone player not liking yr backups, or DVD-r media.

Hope this helps,

LeoNapier

[LeoNapier]

oopsy...

have done a backup with DVDShrink version 3.05 b and the results were excellent

I meant a backup of 007 Die Another Day!!
Getting a bit senile at my old age!!!!


LeoNapier

[LeoNapier]

Now I am definately sure I ve gone senile!

So I went back to the original, commercially made source DVD and viewed it. Guess what? The noise was present there, too! So all along I was getting very good backups of this movie. I had just never really noticed the noise in this DVD until I viewed the backup with a critical eye. This was a surprise to me since I generally thought DVD's to be noiseless, pristine renderings of the movies.

I COMPLETELY missed that paragraph of yr post!!
Sorry about that....
Commercial DVDs are supposed near about perfect but defectives do exist. Did you have the same symptoms with other titles? If thats the case, maybe yr standalone DVD player might have a prob? It you only get noise probs on this title it could be a defective DVD.

[adam]

Commercial DVDs are far from a pristine transfer of the original print. The resolution has been decreased by about 6 times and even with as high a bitrate as the DVD standard allows, it is still highly compressed. Even at 8-9Mbits, there are some types of images that just don't compress well so its very common to see artifacts on commercial DVDs. And then of course not all studios do as good of a transfer as others. I have seen some horrible quality DVDs.

Watch some HDTV footage and you will quickly realize just how low quality a DVD can be.