Veronica Mars, s1 d1 R1

[J-Wo]

I'm encoding Veronica Mars R1, and noticing some bitrate anomalies with season 1 disc 1. This disc is showing a much lower avg bitrate compared to the other discs, even though all discs have 4 episodes approx 41 min each with 1 DD 2.0 audio track. When I load rebuilder.inf into RB-OPT, I noticed that episodes 2 and 3 of that disc are given a much lower bitrate that 1 and 4, but also that DVD-RB thinks those two episodes are 10 minutes longer than the others when they are not (I can confirm this in PgcEdit and when playing the disc). It's strange because this disc doesn't contain any deleted scenes for those episodes, or branching alternate endings, etc. Here's what RB-Opt reports about the bitrates:

VTS 1 - Vob-ID 2 (41:34) = 3311 Kbs
VTS 1 - Vob-ID 4 (53:23) = 2666 Kbs [should be 42:40]
VTS 1 - Vob-ID 6 (53:12) = 2669 Kbs [should be 42:31]
VTS 1 - Vob-ID 8 (42:47) = 3322 Kbs

I did also notice that RB-Opt reports ep 2 and 3 are interlaced material when it should be Progressive. Perhaps this is why it thinks the episodes are longer than they should be (is it reporting 29.97 fps when it should be 23.976?). I re-ran the prepare phase, this time selecting Disable Interlaced in DVD-RB's option tab, but it didn't fix the bitrate problem.

Please let me know if you guys have any insight on this one. Thanks (P.S. I am using DVD-Rb Pro v1.20.5, Avisynth 2.5.7.0, and CCE 2.70.2.6)

[J-Wo]

sighhh look like another case of hard telecining, in this case on only TWO episodes of this entire series! Doesn't make much sense, but oh well what can I do... :(

[jdobbs]

I hate it when that happens. Even worse is when they make hybrid sources. I remember one of the "Star Trek Next Generation" seasons in which a portion of the episodes randomly switched back and forth between 23.976fps telecined source and 29.97fps interlaced.

[J-Wo]

well I don't know if you can fault that, TNG is so old! I would imagine it was the special effects shots that were interlaced but the rest was telecined? I remember Babylon 5 was like that. But with Veronica Mars (and any other show shot in HD), these sort of things simply should not happen!

P.S. I got an email notification of your first reply, but I don't see the msg on the board.

P.P.S. I'm going to give this Big 3 method a try, first with this disc and then with CAMP