Unacceptable artifacting - advice on settings?

[Gurm]

At the risk of displaying my ignorance...

I am using the latest DVD-RB (0.55), decodefix 1.10, decomb 5.10, avisynth 2.54, and CCE-SP Trial 2.67 (with ECLCCE of course) for my latest batch of tests.

I'm trying to back up the first disc of "Finding Nemo".

My CCE settings are the default.

I'm getting HORRIBLE artifacting. Edge artifacts, blurring, etc.

It just looks awful. "Real" movies aren't looking QUITE as terrible, but still pretty bad if I try to keep all the extras.

I'm not shooting for brilliance - I just want SVCD-quality visuals with most of the extras at their default settings. Nemo is a 100-minute movie, it fits on 2 SVCD's for a total of 1400MB. Even if the DVD video takes TWICE as much space, that's still only 2800MB, leaving a whopping 1400 for the menus and extras (which is more than they take uncompressed!). So why does the encode look so piss-poor? Should I bump it up to 3-pass? Should I change the bias and precision?

Advice, please!

Previous testing with DVD Rebuilder used CCE Basic 2.69 which was much better in quality than this setup, except for the occasional error 0004. What am I doing wrong?

- Gurm

[Gurm]

Ok on a hunch I tried fiddling with the settings a bit. Didn't add any passes, but changed the bias/precision to 10/24 and it might have helped a LITTLE but not very much at all.

*sigh* not entirely sure what the problem is here. :(

- Gurm

[PINOBIRD]

Try half d1 and half space for extras.

[jptheripper]

bump UP???? to 2 pass? you should be using 5 pass for a full movie with extras

[archaeo]

yes, anything greater than 65% compression warrants at least 3 pass...

[Lagoon]

The problem must be elsewhere.

The difference between 2-pass and 5-pass is nearly undistinguishable, it certainly wont make the backup go from god awful to excellent quality..

[wmansir]

Make sure Dynamic Assign Cell Birates is enabled. You can also use RB-Opt to go thru the individual cells and dramatically reduce the bitrate of those "visual commentary" cells that are virtually still frames, there are several of them.

[TheSeeker]

Hey, as we speak I am working with Finding Nemo. If your not overly concerned with the extras if I were you I would use DVDRemake or IFOEdit to strip out everything except the Directors commentary and the virtual aquariums. After stipping all that stuff out (As well as unneeded audio streams and sub streams) the project gets down to the 5.5 gb mark or so.. which is plenty small enough to even use IC8 or something, although rebuilder would provide even better quality. So my advice for you, and probably your best bet to increase the quality would be to strip out all the unwanted extras and audio streams.. I mean seriously, its not anime... if you speak and understand english why keep any other audio on there? and by the way settings of 25 for bias and 16 for qual prec are pretty standard for any movie and work pretty good for Nemo as well.

EDIT: Just my two cents... You have to make up your mind if you want good video quality for the movie portion or a complete backup because for the most part you can almost never have both. (Unless you jack the bitrate for the extras down to near incomprehension) In which case you wont want to watch them anyways... Besides the important thing is the movie right? Not what kind of coffee the director likes while he oversees editing or some such crap.

[Gurm]

Yeah, this is just part of my "backing up all my kid's movies because has very little regard for the integrity of the DVD's" project. I hope to rescue Nemo before it becomes too scratched and/or peanut-butter-encrusted to rescue.

So yes, maybe I will use remake to strip out most of the gobbledygoo, and just leave in the one or two cool things. :)

- Gurm

[TheSeeker]

Yea Im not really looking forward to when my son gets old enough to figure out how to open up the dvd cases. as it is he throws the cases all around anyways... I think some stern instruction on the proper handling of dvd will be in order.. Yea like that will do much good.

[Gurm]

Actually I have impressed upon my son now the importance of holding it by the middle and the edge. His hands are small, so it's funny to see him being VERY VERY CAREFUL with them. The issue is that he sets them down, and once he has set them down he forgets all about them... and puts toys on top, or sets down his sandwich, or...

- Gurm

[godhead]

I don't have kids, but this is the exact reason that I backed up my sister's Disney DVD collection for her. My nephew was horrible with DVDs, so this was a way to keep him and my niece from tearing them apart. The backups have just the movie and start playing right away, so it was easy to teach them how to use the DVD to watch the movies they wanted. That way the originals are put away so that if the kids scratch up the backups, we can easily create a new backup for them to destroy.

[Gurm]

Yes, I'll let you all know how a movie-only backup turns out a little later on today. LOL.

- Gurm

[Gurm]

I guess what I was originally getting at is this...

I have an SVCD backup of Nemo. It's on two discs (1400MB), and looks great.

It was also made with CCE (probably using DVD2SVCD, I don't remember but I imagine that's what I used).

I was simply wondering what it is that causes a 720x480 re-encode (at 2.8GB) to be so much worse than a 480x480 re-encode that's half the size?

- Gurm

[Dvdchap]

Originally posted by wmansir
Make sure Dynamic Assign Cell Birates is enabled. You can also use RB-Opt to go thru the individual cells and dramatically reduce the bitrate of those "visual commentary" cells that are virtually still frames, there are several of them.

Pardon my ignorance, but what is RB-Opt?

Thanks.

[wmansir]

RB-Opt is a third party tool written by robot1 that allows you to tweak settings. There's a link to it under the add-ons section of the Overview sticky.