dvdshrink 3.2 aec & max sharpness test

[As7r080y]

greetings,

after my little bitch i decided to take some time out and do a little investigating on my finds with aec enabled and maximum sharpness compression method.

to begin with i know a lot of people are still confused by the undocumented compression methods that dvdshrink has, so hopefully my experience here will shed some light on the matter.

Source DVD: Astroboy Collection (animation)
Region: PAL
DVDshrink version: 3.2.0.15
Percentage Compression: 65%
options selected: AEC enabled, Maximum Sharpness

I firstly used maximum smoothness on the first test run, and found there to be a lot of pixelation and artifacts especially when there was high motion scenes, which in this dvd's case is about 95% of the time as its animation action. i was totally not happy with the outcome and then decided to use the maximum sharpness option.

The maximum sharpness option proved to be very effective in this instance and was very clear with little artifacts and pixelation to be seen, even in high motion scenes.

conclusion:

ok so thinking back to the days when i use to encode vcd and svcds with tmpgenc i remember using the sharpness and smoothness/softness effects to produce a clearer picture. the difference between both methods of compression are different thou in the sense that if your video had a lot of high motion scenes then you would use the smoothness effect to slightly blur out the pixelation or if there was no high motion scenes eg... drama then you would use the sharpness effect to bring out the clarity even more without producing noticable pixelation. in this instance with dvdshrink thou, it seems that maximum sharpness has the effect of smoothing out high motion scenes for better picture quality and vice versa for maximum smoothness on low motion scenes will produce a clearer picture.. i hope your all with me on this on. ;)

the only thing i dont really understand is how the percentage of compression will effect both compression methods, in different scenarios...im guessing that it may not even matter as the quality difference will be unnoticable whichever compression method you use.

my understanding of all this:

seems that if your movie has high motion scenes eg. action or fast pace moving scenes then use the maximum sharpness method. if your movie has low motion scenes eg.. drama, talking not much movement on screen then use the maximum smoothness option.

i could be totally wrong in my interperetations of all this, if anyone would like to comment on this or corrent me please do so.

[dragongodz]

i know a lot of people are still confused by the undocumented compression methods that dvdshrink has
go read the replies to your little rant. the difference in how AEC modes works IS explained.
second, where are the lots of people ? sure not here.

i could be totally wrong in my interperetations of all this, if anyone would like to comment on this or corrent me please do so.
as you wish. your test is flawed for 1 simple reason, its too limited. 1 movie proves nothing except for that 1 movie. i can give you an example of how its wrong. ddlooping did a blind test ages ago with LOTR comparing dvdshrink, instantcopy and dvd2one. dvdshrink did very well with this movie. now he also wrote in a thread here that he tested on terminator 2 aswell and guess what, dvdshrink did not do too good.
so if you really want to try and gain any idea of under what situations to use which mode you need to test more dvd of varying types, quality, compression amounts etc etc etc. the more movies the more likly your results will actually mean something useful.

[gizzin]

Don't use DVDshrink?

[MSlv]

If I only use Deep Analisys, would the final quality be much worse than with aem enabled? I did LOTR1&3 and Spider-man 1&2 and the quality was pretty good, but far from the original quality. At least on my PC LCD and on my Rear Projection TV. On the regular CRT TV, you can barely see any differrence.

I want to know this. I know that AEC takes a lot of time, especially if you need to test max sharpness vs. max smoothness, but if the final quality of the DVD is much better, then I'd thik it's worth the time.

So... max sharpness smoothes the fast motion scenes and max smoothness smooths low motion scenes?

[dragongodz]

first go read this.
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=80406&perpage=20&pagenumber=2

now to answer your questions.

If I only use Deep Analisys, would the final quality be much worse than with aem enabled?
yes AEC should increase the quality because the whole point of AEC is to reduce error propegation. Deep Analisys is to spread the compression reduction to frames that can handle it but takes in no account of any quality hit that may or may not cause. generally you should get a bit better quality overall with it. AEC is specifically for quality though so will do much more.

I know that AEC takes a lot of time, especially if you need to test max sharpness vs. max smoothness, but if the final quality of the DVD is much better, then I'd thik it's worth the time.
try for yourself on 1 of the dvds you werent happy with and decide for yourself. the default sharp appears to me to work well most of the time. besides you dont have to even test a whole dvd, just do part of it at the compression level doing the whole film would take.

So... max sharpness smoothes the fast motion scenes and max smoothness smooths low motion scenes?
no thats not how it work but i assume you have read that link i gave ?
possible worst case results to the modes -
sharp - may cause some blocking and some unsmooth playback.
smooth - may cause pulsing and/or loss of detail.

i wont bother to go in to why those can happen because if a person cant work it out by what i said is being done in the other post then they wont understand if i tell them. so its not worth my time.

[MSlv]

After reading the thread from the link you provided, I came up with the conclusion that for 95% of the movies the default sharp will do, and that you should test first to see if max sharp works for you... Or at least that's what I understood. Anyway, I'm off to do some testing!

[MSlv]

I did Matrix Reloaded and Harry Potter 3 full dvd backup with the max sharpness and the movie was almost identical to the original DVD!
Matrix (124m) was at ~78% and Harry Potter 3 (136m) at ~70%. Even the menus & extras looked decent with minimum compression artefacts. And it only took me less than 100 minutes per movie, w/o first ripping it to hdd!
Why lose time with DVDRB and CCE when DVD Shrink does the job almost as good as it gets in the least time possible? And it's free!