DoItFast4U & Soft Encode

[brashquido]

Hi All,

Just wondering if there was anyway I can sucessfully process the demuxed AC3 files created by DoItFast4U so that I can re-encode them at a lower bitrate using Soft Encode?

I wouldn't normally consider this, but one of my latest projects (The Minority Report, PAL, region 4) has a huge movie VTS of about 7.3GB with a 448kbps English AC3, 754kbps DTS, 192kbps commentary, and 192kbps Russian soundtracks. With all these included there is only enough space left for a video bitrate of about 2174kbps which isn't enough for artifact free video. I've even tried 9 pass encoding using the Robshot-Bach template and the results still weren't acceptable (would using another template improve on this?).

Anyway, I've decided to drop the commentary and Russian soundtrack, and have increased the DVD-R calculation size to the max which has enabled me to increase the video bitrate to 2582kbps. I was just thinking if I could convert the 448kbps (20Khz range) AC3 to something like 320kbps (15.8Khz range) I would save around 120MB which is equal to about another 200kbps for the video.

[Eyes`Only]

You could, but 200kbps is just not much at all bud, IMO it isn't worth the loss of quality.

Any movie that is 7gigs just for the main movie should have excellent quality, which could mean that even at 2582 you should get quite a decent output.

[brashquido]

I've encoded it at 2584 and will see the results tonight. I guess I'll have to take the manual CCE route if the quiality isn't accceptable. Problem being it's over 2 hours long and has a lot of action scenes in it :( . I still might look into the re-encoding of the AC3 files depending on the above results. 200kbps isn't that much, but it's nearly a 10% increase from what I had. I really don't want to do this though, as you said Eyes, it's not worth the quality loss.