Anyone sucessfully backup Alien?

[TheSeeker]

... without removing the seamless branching? Just wondering cause I have the quadrilogy here and have started with Alien. Well we all know about RB doesn't like large ILVU segments yet, and when I run the totally unpreprocessed dvd through rb's prepare phase I get a compression of like 29% (meaning it is leaving the ILVU segments uncompressed, Im using version 0.77, cce sp 2.70 avisynth 2.55 by the way) Anyways, I was just wondering if anyone had gotten this dvd to backup sucesfully with RB/cce combo, and how they did it.

[FilipeAmadeuO]

I´ve done sucessful all the Alien except the Alien 3.
Only the Alien 3 has very large seamless branching areas and is not possible to encode the film.
I´ve only removed the foreign languages

[TheSeeker]

I dont know.. Like I said when I run the first one through it has a reduction ratio of like 29 percent. That is pretty low. This must mean that there are fairly large interleaved segments.

EDIT: R1 ntsc disc by the way. FilipeAmadeu, what was your method when you sucessfully backed these up?

[wfn1]

sorry, it's probably the wrong forum for this but i tried alien r1 from the collectors edition and i had a problem akin to yours so i ended up doing it with the big3 (scenaid)

[wmansir]

Nothing wrong with giving alternatives.

I used Big3 for Aliens about a year ago. It was the only seamless branching disc I tried because at the time it was a real pain and while the final results were acceptable, it did have a slight pause when branching. The version of DIF4U I used was just before the one that really improved demuxing by CellID, it literally took half a day to demux with the old version. The release after that could do it in about the time of a regular disc demux (15 minutes). Also, I think Scenaid wasn't as mature at the time and I had to do a lot of manual tweaking to get the script right. I know the speed issue has been fixed, and Scenaid has really matured, but I don't know about the slight stuttering in the final results because I think that was a limitation of Scenarist, though it may have been worked out.

[wfn1]

wmansir,

it hasn't :/ it's not through a fault of scenaid but because scenarist has no real seamless branching support (as you have noted) so it has to be done the way it was done a year or so ago still. i also remember doing the title and adjusting somegthing like 90 id's duration by hand in scenarist because it was not prescise. the pause is more pronounced on some players while on other more modern ones you can barely notice it especially if you're not expecting it at a certain moment.

[t3rror]

I just backed this disc up from the quadrilogy set the other day. I am using the RB.77 with CCE 2.7 and it had no problems. I have the directors cut and theatrical on the same disc. I made a 1:1 copy minus the foreign languages.

I just finished watching this today, so I know it did alright. The quality was good enough that I couldn't tell it had been reencoded.

I hope that the situation someone earlier posted about Alien3 isn't the case, because I am about to backup that one this evening. I will have to let you all know how it turns out.

***EDIT***
Alien3 is giving me hella problems. I am trying to salvage using shrink before I take it into RB. If anyone has any other suggestions, they would be great right about now. Thanks jdobbs for your work.

[TheSeeker]

Originally posted by wfn1
wmansir,

it hasn't :/ it's not through a fault of scenaid but because scenarist has no real seamless branching support (as you have noted) so it has to be done the way it was done a year or so ago still.

And Scenarist is supposed to be the best Authoring program out there? With no seamless branching support I find that claim to be seriously suspect.

EDIT: I will be trying the big 3 out on this Alien disc. I dont want to get rid of one version and I dont want to use shrink or IC 8 so I guess I have no other choice...

[jdobbs]

Keep it around. I'm planning for DVD-RB to be reproducing large ILVU source DVDs pretty soon.

[TheSeeker]

Will do. I personally can think of no better discs to put some serious strain on your new ILVU code. These are the biggest pain in the butt dvd's I have ever encountered. But a fantastic set to have.