Holy crap, Seven Samurai is a big movie.

[krackato]

I'm doing the Criterion Collection of Seven Samurai and it's basically a Superbit. It's like 7gb just for the movie and using DVDshrink I'm having to compress it to 56% just for the movie and no menus or extras in ReAuthor mode using DVDshrink (although I did keep the commentary track).

Has anyone else compressed this DVD? On the one hand, I'm sure it's going to look good when I compress it, but on the other hand it's 56% just for the movie! I'll report back with how it looks.

Oh, and I'm using Maximum Sharpness AEC. I don't know when to use which AEC so maybe I'll also try the Default Sharp AEC.

[Imperial Zeppelin]

Sounds like a job for CCE...

[nwg]

It should look fine.

I did LOTR ROTK and that was 58% with default sharpness.

[wmansir]

Originally posted by nwg
It should look fine.

I did LOTR ROTK and that was 58% with default sharpness.

But there is a difference, ROTK is a modern clean transfer, 7S is among the worst transfers on DVD. I did it with Big3 last year, but I had to put in some noise filtering. DVD Shrink might do a decent job, after all it does have a natural noise filter/smoother because of it's method, but I don't know.

[aicha]

i've tested with volume label "SEVEN_SAMURAI_1217", i think because the source is not good, but when i'm looking my laserdisc SEVEN SAMURAI (with label Criterion Collection too) - i think this laserdisc more good than dvd.

[nwg]

But there is a difference, ROTK is a modern clean transfer, 7S is among the worst transfers on DVD. I did it with Big3 last year, but I had to put in some noise filtering. DVD Shrink might do a decent job, after all it does have a natural noise filter/smoother because of it's method, but I don't know.

Ok, that is true.

However, the average bitrate it low even on the commerical DVD.

[Tonio Roffo]

Well for jobs like that there's only one way:

Split :)

Sure I hate "breaks" when watching movies, but sometimes you just have to make a decision about it. For long running movies it doesn't really matter (LOTR movies deserve a little break :D )

for short movies that have high bitrates it's really a problem. A backup of R2 "Hero" (very grainy original, hard to compress), while trying to retain DTS, wasn't possible with the older shrink versions. Splitting these kind of movies is bad, because the running time is only about 1h40 -

With the new shrink you can easily drop compression to about 70% instead of 80% and retain the same visual quality.

Oh, also don't watch it frame by frame, but repeat a 20 second scene at normal playing rate and then ask yourself, am I satisfied with this - zooming and looking for macroblocks is not the way to go :p

[krackato]

Wow, I didn't realize it but it actually already has an intermission at Chapter 16. So spliting the movie really is the ideal way to go.

[quantum]

My NTSC copy was 3hrs 26 minutes. I used CCE and if I recall the final bitrate was low, around 2300kb. However I found the result satisfactory. There wasn't any obvious macro blocks. The original video is not good anyway.

[wmansir]

When I originally did this movie (first Divx 3.11, then SVCD, then DVD-R) what really annoyed me was the heavy amount of 'flicker' in the film. Of course a normal noise filter couldn't handle this, but Donald Graft has a Vdub Anti-flicker filter. Unfortunately, there are a couple of problems, mostly 1. It's difficult to use because in order to work as an Vdub filter it needs to use an external file and be done in a 2-pass way. and 2. It doesn't have a 'threshold' and just does simple brightness averaging within a sliding window of frames. This means it can have unintended effects around scene changes if the brightness changes significantly.

A fix for #2 is already on Donalds to-do list, hopefully he will just turn it into a AVS filter while he's at it to take care of #1. :)