How Much Quality Gained with 60Bps? 115 Bps? (33% and 50% Steal)

[TomBrooklyn]

I backed up Pride and Predjudice using 25% reduction on Extras and blanking just the trailers and the foreign languages and subtitles. According to Preview/Edit, the feature went off at 3360 Bps and the Extras at 2905 Bps. The extras look fine. The movie looked pretty good, but I think it can look better. This is a period movie and the costumes and scenery are a big part of it so I would like to eek a bit more quality out of it.

I did "Prepares" at 33% and 50% and from Preview/Edit it seemed like I didn't get a great deal more Bps for the feature although the Extras dropped off quite a bit.

At 25% Steal the feature is 3360 and the extras 2905 Bps.

At 33% Steal the feature would be 3420 and the extras 1900 Bps.

At 50% Steal the feature would be 3475 and the extras 1420 Bps.

I plan to redo the project and see the results for myself, but in the meantime, I was wondering if I could expect much difference from the 60 Bps I would get added to the feature using 33% Steal?

Even at 50%, the Bps increase doesn't sound large at 115 Bps. Is that likely to make a significant difference in the final result? And I suspect the extras will look suffer quite a bit because they'll be down to 1420 then.

...I was just thinking...would even a 60 Bps bitrate increase to the Feature be more effective than it might sound at first because 60 Bps is the average for every second, but RB will allocate those bits to the frames and scenes where they will do the most good?

[jdobbs]

It's unlikely that 60Kbs will improve the picture at any noticable level. But sometimes when you're on the edge it might be enough to "Push it over". On the other hand, the change from 2905 to 1900 in your extras will almost assuredly show a significant degradation.

[blutach]

If you're a BR freak for the movie, you could consider 1/2D1 encoding for the extras (I've had pretty good results at 1/2D1 at 2000 kbps for extras).

Many people regard the extras as less valuable to back up than the movie, so blanking all of the them would give you the best result for the flick.

Regards

[RickA]

Must you really have the extras? Being a 'movie only' kind of guy I use the reauthor mode in DVDShrink to strip out the movie and any unwanted language tracks. Then run through DVD-RB as needed.

If you like the extras and really want them, consider putting them on their own disc. As reasonable as the price of good media is why make the quality of your movie suffer more then it has to?

For example, the movie you like is just over 2 hours long and there is a 50 minute making of extra that you really like. Put each of them on their own disc and have full quality of both. Or your episode disc has 6 episodes on it, split it into 2 discs with 3 each on it. Odds are you will watch them back to back anyway. If you want to skip an episode it is only a few clicks away on the remote. If you must have menus get a program that lets you do that. Just my humble two cents worth.

Cheers,
Rick