Should I remove seamless branching? with ifoedit?

[Mr.Zebra]

Just had a friendly question.

I'm backing up my retail of Independence Day...
It has the regular version, and the extended version...
It has seamless branching.

I don't really care about the regular version, only the extended version for this backup. I was going to remove the seamless branching with ifoedit, but then I though to myself...why?

Does doing this actually have any benefit? Wouldn't removing the seamless branching actually cause the extended ver to be screwed up?(since it's just the regular version branched to the extended footage at the appropriate times) ??

Thanks in advance for any advice/responses.

[2COOL]

Since you want to backup up the Extended version, you should be able to retain your regular version too as both have common cells. Are you keeping menus or movie only?

[Mr.Zebra]

I'm going to be keeping the menu, or at least at this point I certainly think I want to(I guess I'll see how the bitrate turns out at the end and if it's too low I'll reencode without the menu).

So there would be no benefit/advantage to removing the seamless branching in this instance correct?

I really can't think of one, and in fact I'd imagine it might mess it up, but I'm not too knowledgable on the topic and I wanted to make sure that my thoughts on it were correct.

I know removing the branching if keeping the regular version would be good, becuase then I could blank out the extended footage and not have any issues.

thanks again :)

[Mr.Zebra]

I guess, what I really want to knwo is, will removing the seamless branching via ifoedit affect(negatively) the playback of the extended version. Ofcourse i'm selecting to keep the extended ver in ifoedit before it strips.

I did a test run through ifoedit, just to see what would happen, and when I selected to remove the seamless branching, it did take off approximately 200mb of size.Though admittedly I don't know from where.

If I can save a couple hundred megs, and not have any bad side effects to the extended version, then I'll do it.

[mpucoder]

The way seamless branching works produces redundant data. The theatrical release is usually the director's cut without some scenes, so to make the theatrical version play the deleted scenes are skipped over. If the distance is too great some interleaving is done to reload the buffers, and make another leap. That data is the same in both versions.
As long as it plays smoothly then the angle/story was removed OK. You will end up with missing VobIDs, though.