- Jun 24, 2001
- 24,195
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OK, I've had several examples now.
First, Cowboy Bebop The Movie
Second, The Missing
Third, Katsuhiro Otomo's "Memories"
When I got Cowboy Bebop, I thought it would be the perfect movie to test DVD Shrink with. After all, animation with re-used cells and large areas of simplistic colors and detail should compress easily, leaving ample room for compression of fast-motion high-detail scenes. Because it was my first use of DVD Shrink, I set it to "automatic."
When the DVD menu plays on the finished copy, you are "treated" to the worst video degradation I have ever seen. It is a fast-motion flyby with many up-close (AKA, full-screen) detailed objects. I understand that it was low-priority because it was not part of the actual movie, so I let the actual movie play. First thing I noticed were the speckly grainy low-quality JPEG-like artifacts wherever a color met a line or angle. Reviewing the original movie showed none of this. It wasn't just because I was viewing it on a VGA monitor. Playback on TV with progressive-scan only made it more apparent.
So I made a second copy, this time secifically telling it to make everything optional a "slide-show" with no audio, removing all additional audio tracks and coming VERY close to fitting the entire movie on one DVD without compression. VERY close, but not quite so I still had to set it to slightly recompress the main movie. If only it would let me replace all trailers and extras with a single-screen "Not Available" message. Anyway, the results looked the exact same as the previous attempt, despite dedicating nearly the entire 4.7GB DVD to the feature.
Then comes The Missing. Almost all of the extras were on a scond disc, leaving only a few trailers on the movie disc. I removed as much as possible and made them all silent slide-show. It was a pretty long movie, so it still wouldn't fit without recompressing the feature movie. I tried it, and saw seemingly acceptable results. I watched for a few minutes, then decided to fast-forward to a scene with a blue-sky and horizon. Ack. You couldn't miss the artifacting even if you weren't looking for it and didn't previously know it was a copied disc. Granted, I have seen worse in ACTUAL DVDs (The Postman's sky scenes were so bad I almost returned it to Wal-Mart to get my $5.88 back but then a friend asked me to give it to him. Very bad encoding problem.).
Then I tried Katsuhiro Otomo's "Memories." I knew better than to waste a disc by this point. Sure enough, no matter how I configured it the single-disc images looked bad when mounted and played as a real disc. Because Memories is a collection of three different short-films, it was easy to seperate the three shortfilms uncompressed onto two DVDs (Just like episodic DVDs/Television series DVDs). Of course, that was fine because DVD Shrink didn't touch the features.
Each time I bring this up in other forums, I'm attacked by a wave of people saying that there is no perceptable loss of quality. I have VERY bad eyesight and yet DVD Shrink always renders eye-sores for me (Very near-sighted in one eye, far sighted in the other, legally blind in my left "weak" eye, red/green color blind, etc). However, the sheer number of people claiming that "it's just you" seems to validate their claims. Has anyone else been as underwhelmed as I have? Is the vast majority playing back their copies on interlaced 13" 4:3 displays (Even then, the kind of artifacts I see in blue sky scenes would be painfully apparent)? How could one NOT notice the difference?! It's not that I don't know how to use the program.
I've just started archiving my DVDs uncompressed on my fileserver. There should be enough space there until dual-layered drives and media are released and fall significantly in price. I hate to say it, but DVD Shrink's inadequacy is what forces me to resort to that.
First, Cowboy Bebop The Movie
Second, The Missing
Third, Katsuhiro Otomo's "Memories"
When I got Cowboy Bebop, I thought it would be the perfect movie to test DVD Shrink with. After all, animation with re-used cells and large areas of simplistic colors and detail should compress easily, leaving ample room for compression of fast-motion high-detail scenes. Because it was my first use of DVD Shrink, I set it to "automatic."
When the DVD menu plays on the finished copy, you are "treated" to the worst video degradation I have ever seen. It is a fast-motion flyby with many up-close (AKA, full-screen) detailed objects. I understand that it was low-priority because it was not part of the actual movie, so I let the actual movie play. First thing I noticed were the speckly grainy low-quality JPEG-like artifacts wherever a color met a line or angle. Reviewing the original movie showed none of this. It wasn't just because I was viewing it on a VGA monitor. Playback on TV with progressive-scan only made it more apparent.
So I made a second copy, this time secifically telling it to make everything optional a "slide-show" with no audio, removing all additional audio tracks and coming VERY close to fitting the entire movie on one DVD without compression. VERY close, but not quite so I still had to set it to slightly recompress the main movie. If only it would let me replace all trailers and extras with a single-screen "Not Available" message. Anyway, the results looked the exact same as the previous attempt, despite dedicating nearly the entire 4.7GB DVD to the feature.
Then comes The Missing. Almost all of the extras were on a scond disc, leaving only a few trailers on the movie disc. I removed as much as possible and made them all silent slide-show. It was a pretty long movie, so it still wouldn't fit without recompressing the feature movie. I tried it, and saw seemingly acceptable results. I watched for a few minutes, then decided to fast-forward to a scene with a blue-sky and horizon. Ack. You couldn't miss the artifacting even if you weren't looking for it and didn't previously know it was a copied disc. Granted, I have seen worse in ACTUAL DVDs (The Postman's sky scenes were so bad I almost returned it to Wal-Mart to get my $5.88 back but then a friend asked me to give it to him. Very bad encoding problem.).
Then I tried Katsuhiro Otomo's "Memories." I knew better than to waste a disc by this point. Sure enough, no matter how I configured it the single-disc images looked bad when mounted and played as a real disc. Because Memories is a collection of three different short-films, it was easy to seperate the three shortfilms uncompressed onto two DVDs (Just like episodic DVDs/Television series DVDs). Of course, that was fine because DVD Shrink didn't touch the features.
Each time I bring this up in other forums, I'm attacked by a wave of people saying that there is no perceptable loss of quality. I have VERY bad eyesight and yet DVD Shrink always renders eye-sores for me (Very near-sighted in one eye, far sighted in the other, legally blind in my left "weak" eye, red/green color blind, etc). However, the sheer number of people claiming that "it's just you" seems to validate their claims. Has anyone else been as underwhelmed as I have? Is the vast majority playing back their copies on interlaced 13" 4:3 displays (Even then, the kind of artifacts I see in blue sky scenes would be painfully apparent)? How could one NOT notice the difference?! It's not that I don't know how to use the program.
I've just started archiving my DVDs uncompressed on my fileserver. There should be enough space there until dual-layered drives and media are released and fall significantly in price. I hate to say it, but DVD Shrink's inadequacy is what forces me to resort to that.
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