Reduction level?

[Indigo]

Hello. I was wondering about the reduction level that the Preparation step outputs. Since there is nothing much one can do after having decided which audio tracks and subs to remove "before" the preperation step I was wondering what are reasonable lvls. I get "Reduction level for DVD-5: 49%" for my project. Now is that good? bad? How should I interpret this? That the main movie will have a reduced quality of 49%? If that is the case it seems that it should be some bad quality after all the work is done. The reason I ask is that I have only worked with dvdsrink before. (Before I get thrown out of here for mentioning it...my defence is that one has to start somewhere.) :P Anyway...are the reduction lvl something like the ones calculated in dvd shrink?

Thanks.

[jdobbs]

Reduction level is not really important in and of itself. If you have a movie that was only lightly compressed in its original authoring, it can be compressed @ 49% and still look good while there may be other cases in which you reduce at an 70% and it looks worse.

Probably a better key to the quality that is likely in the reduction is the bitrate as it more closely reflects and is related to quality of output. But, you have to be careful, because even that isn't a 100% indicator. Low action movies, for example, generally need less bitrate than one filled with fast movement and explosions.

The bottom line is: let it run, look at the quality, and decide whether it is good enough.

One thing I'm very confident in saying is that at whatever bitrate you get, CCE will give you the best results possible. QuEnc will do very well also. At lower bitrates it is unlikely that ReJig will give good quality (but it is extremely fast) but at medium and higher bitrates it is competitive with other transcoders. As for ProCoder, I don't have enough experience to make a good judgement.

[Indigo]

Thanks for the quick answer. I guess I'll let RB crunch with the default options and see how things come out. :)