The Resolution Conflict

[AscAnsio]

Hi fellas,

Last week I bought the Godfather: Coppola Restoration DVDs and copied them to my hard drive. Now I want to convert the VOB files with DVDFab to avi/h264 in high quality for editing them in sony vegas pro and making a trailer for my personal web site. Bu I have a problem about original resolution of the films. In DVDFab it says the input original resolution of the film is 1024*574 but when I play the film in Media Player Classic, in the information tab it says the resolution of the film as 720*576. Which one is true? So I2ll pick the right one for my convert.

And I have some additional questions for you:
1)For best quality, should I leave the framerate same as the source or make it 30 fps which is the top value on the list?

2)What about the 2 pass encoding for higher quality? Is it really worth the time?

3)Which container should I prefer for h264? I thought it would be best to use avi. Because I'll use these parts I converted in video editing tools like Corel Video Studio or Premiere Pro. I'm not sure if MKV or another codec would be appropriate.

[AlanHK]

If it's a PAL DVD, it's 720x576.
See https://www.videohelp.com/dvd

[jagabo]

Yes, PAL DVD will never be encoded at more than 720x576. For online streaming you'll want to adjust the frame size for square pixel encoding. ~720x400 for 16:9 material, 720x540 for 4:3 material.

1) Leave the frame rate alone unless you're mixing videos of different frame rates.

2) It depends on your video. Generally, 2-pass will give better quality when using low bitrates. But if a source is very noisy or is all high "action" shots it won't make much difference.

3) AVI isn't a good choice for h.264. If you plan on streaming video h.264 in FLV or MOV/MP4 will be better (many people will have Flash or Quicktime installed already). Or WMV3/VC1 in WMV.

[AscAnsio]

Thank you for your answers about the resolution. And about the h264 thing, DVDFab only lets you to convert DVD to h264 in AVI or MKV. I don't have these options in FLV or WMV. And I can't edit MKV files in video editing tools like Sony Vegas or Ulead VideoStudio so I have to go on with AVI, am I wrong?


Now I converted the first chapter of the movie which is about 7 min length and it takes 250 MB for 4400 kbps, 2 pass encoding, framerate as same and 720* resolution for the best quality. Is 250 MB too much for these settings, what's your opinion?

[poisondeathray]

Do the editing first on the native format (i.e MPEG2 from the DVD), then encode to h.264. You will have extra quality loss by converting it to h.264, editing then converting to h.264 again (if you are using vegas, it will re-encode). Start with the original format, and edit that. Also MPEG2 is much easier to edit than h.264

The numbers don't mean anything to me. Use your eyes. Some people can tolerate low quality. Some people are very picky. On some sources, that bitrate might be too low. On others, too high. Content complexity varies and requires different bitrate