Then I got a cunning plan to improve re-code quality and make the disc 100% film so a divx could work.
This involved:
Taking a clip that involved a transition effect or was cropped/reencoded with CCE.
Exporting it as a stream copy (without the transition) or just using the raw clip in the latter case.
Removing pulldown flags.
Moving back into Womble as 23.976 video. Adding back the transition/effect if there was one.
Exporting it re-encoded as the software required to match the official DVD video.
Adding back the pulldown flags.
Reinserting the clip into the edit.
Got that? Visual quality did NOT improve on the recodes. After spending a few hours doing 4 clips like this (there's about a dozen for each film) I had a transition come up very short of it's original length after doing this.
I packed it in...
Currently I'm burning all the first discs as we speak. I did find a problem that no-one might ever see but I need feedback on.
On some of the areas were Womble did it's Womble-y thing, a standalone unit I tested it on coughed.
Don't get me wrong PowerDVD is just fine with it and the standalone is a fairly old (and quirky) Sony.
On M2 it was just a short fraction of a second hiccup in music during a transition. On M3 I found a line of dialog that went out of sync.
That's just what I saw in a casual look at the scenes were I know there's re-encoding.
I'm sending these discs out anyway because I can't judge standalone compatibility against that unit.
If there are more reports of this I might have to go back to what I was doing last night. I need not say that it will be some serious work involved in getting that to work right.
It's more important to get these mailed than to do a lot of work that might not be noticed by anyone else.