Ok, first, way to rip me apart for the term "overall bitrate" - I mean, of course, overall image quality. Which I will tell you again and again that the more passes you do, the better your DVD image will look. It might "seem" to you to be an excessive waste of PC resources for no additional advantage, but have you actually put that theory to test? Well I have, and I have the discs to prove it. Check out my post to a.b.starwars - I presume you own the original - and tell me that a 9 Pass isn't silky smooth. Note the aliasing of text in the reduced quality menus and the relative lack thereof in the introductory scroll and end credits (which is absolute HELL on an encoder). And I did a 2 Pass on the extras disc, and it looks like shit in comparison - with a much lower starting overall bitrate, I might add. Clearly not a waste of "PC resource". In fact, how long does a 3 Pass take really? Maybe 3 hours, sometimes 2. My 9 Pass discs usually take from 8 to 10 hours. Set it up while you sleep, let it run all night, get up in the morning to a beautiful encode. Really, what is your computer doing at night anyways? Take a look around the scene and notice that all the DVD release groups use 6-9 passes, why do you think that is? You think Cinema Craft Encoder does all those extra passes for fun? No. It's an option for a reason, most people are just to lazy to do some tests and find out. Now granted, laserdisc copies of Star Wars maybe don't have the highest bitrate to begin with, but when does it really count - STAR WARS, that's when. If I spent endless hours perfecting a laserdisc rip, you can bet I wouldn't cheap out on the encoding. What if, just what if, you would have "wasted" a few more hours of your pc's precious idle time and gone all out on the encoding? It would have looked even better, I guarantee you. Iron F'n Clad.
-Bongloads.
"Knowledge is power, hide it well."