Help with using weight zones

[Luminaria]

Hey guys

Im encoding a an anime dvd right know where all the episodes, unfortunatly, were placed on the same program chain on the dvd. I'm going for 3 eps per cd, and there are 3 episodes on the dvd im on right now.

Im using zones right now to force keyframes at the begining of each episode so I can cut them properly in nandub. Is it possible for me to use weight zones so that each segment (episode) of the larger file gets the same percent of the total filesize?

So, right now im shooting for a resulting size of 700mb after audio and interleaving overhead. If i set each episodes zone weight to .33 will each zone get 33% of the total aloted video file size? That way after i cut with nandub each episode will be 233mb instead of some arbitrary filesize that adds up to 700mb with the other two resulting episodes.

I dont know if I explained this well enough or not... let me know if I need to be clearer.

[Neo Neko]

That is not the way the zones work unfortunatly. The percentage IIRC has very little to do with the total bitrate for an entire encode. Meerly it adjusts the way the codec performs bitrate allocation to each of those segments. If it worked the way you imply then with 3 zones set with a weight of 1 would yield a file triple the size of a file with only a single zone set with a weight of 1. But this is not what happens. Wether you do a single pass with a bitrate or quantizer or a two pass with a bitrate or file size there is an average bitrate or quantizer value which is applied to your encode. The weight in each zones controls how much of that average gets used in that particular zone. Setting 3 zones with .33 means that your whole entire encode gets encoded with only .33 of whatever bitrate, filesize, or quantizer you tell it to use.(Well not exactly. The codec tries to overcome horribly flawed settings in extreme cases.) This would mean in the case of Bitrate or file size your video will be awfully undersized. If in your case you set the final file size in Xvid to 600Mb with three zones weighted at .33 your file in it's worst case instance would only be 198Mb!!! Chances are the codec would notice that these settings are awfully low and try to compensate for them so you might actually have a varriance of 100Mb or so. But it will not be close to the 600Mb you wanted.

The only way and I do mean the only way to have 3 equal sized clips is to encode each clip as a separate job. Anytime you encode as a single job the bitrate is allocated on a per job basis.

[manono]

And if you care anything about having equal quality among the 3 episodes on the CD, you wouldn't want to make them each 233 MB anyway.

But if you don't care about that, then one way around the problem is to split the episodes in DVD2AVI. It may give you problems with the subs, but you can work that out.

That way after i cut with nandub each episode will be 233mb instead of some arbitrary filesize that adds up to 700mb

It's hardly arbitrary.

[Luminaria]

I see, thanks for the info. The subs are the biggest problem actualy. If i wanted the dub track then it would be no problem taking a segment out of the middle of a PGC, but the subtitles have a fixed timeing value.

I could OCR the bitmap subs to srt or ssa, but you'll loose any sign translations, or other subs that arent on the bottom of the screen. oh well...