RU.08

Best of luck recovering from your operation poita, and I hope everything went really well. :)

Don’t you just wish someone would take the Theatrical Cut, reinsert in the first dream sequence and the CPU scene, and leave everything else alone?

Well I’ve done it. 720p version is on Demonoid, and here’s the download link for the playlist file if you want to generate a full quality copy (you need a copy of T2 Skynet to use the playlist).

None of this:

None of that:

Or any of this:

I wouldn't pay that page too much attention. They're not particularly forthcoming as to the real reason the Ep IV light-sabres came out the wrong colour, and you can compare the cropping directly to the Z-VCD which shows the top and bottom of a cinema projected image throughout. While it's not identical to the DVD version, it's certainly not like the bluray with the full extra 8%.

They don't have repeated footage, they're completely sequential. I believe Close Encounters has branching, Gladiator, and Apocalypse Now.

I should note that I believe that the maximum bit-rate needs to be considered when branching is involved. That is, the maximum A/V bitrate for Bluray is 48Mbps. At the point of branching both the current m2ts and the following m2ts files are loaded into memory together for 11 seconds - and even though they're sequential it would appear that the data rate for the final 11 seconds and the first 11 seconds of the following clip should add up to no more than 48Mbps. If the bitrate exceeds 48Mbps when the two parts are added together you would likely experience a non-seamless transition.

This is largely undocumented, and I'm mostly speculating, but I do believe that's how studio discs are authored - the professional authoring software like Sony Blu-print will ensure that the files get encoded to a conforming bitrate. If you want to do it manually you probably need to set the maximum video bit-rate to 20Mbps instead of 40, and ensure the audio adds up to 4Mbps or less. You may be able to join the video together - 20Mbps max 11.65 seconds + 40Mbps max (clip length - 23.3s) + 20Mbps max 11.65 seconds and so on.

Because I needed it to fit on a DVD-R.

With a file I encoded not long ago I compared the bitrates and it's only slightly "more cbr" when encoded with 2-pass. That could be due to the faster first pass settings, I certainly didn't use --slow-firstpass after all. But overall does it look like CBR? No it doesn't, it looks like a proper VBR.

No they don't have any blank space. Also, it's the same value on the Alien Anthology discs as well. And they don't have the same authoring - Alien was compressed with the Sirius Pixels AVC encoder, whereas BR and T2 are the Microsoft VC-1. If you like you could compare to the newer BR disc encoded with AVC and see what settings they use on that one.

Like a reel change ;)

Here's the BR BD, it has the same value:

As you can see in my screenshot, that number (11.65 seconds) is what was used on the T2 Skynet BD. I will have a look soon and see what value is on the BR BD. As I understand it, the next clip is pre-loaded 11.65 seconds in advance (at least I think that's what it means, but in any case it's required for seamless branching according to the topics I've read).

As for your question on audio, I don't know the exact procedure, however I assume you keep the same structure for all files - for example:

.M2TS structure:

Track 1: Video
Track 2: Audio A
Track 3: Audio B
Track 4: Audio C
Track 5: Audio D

And then flag which tracks are available to the .mpls using the .cpli, however exactly how to do that I have no idea. The only other thing I would say is that I would also assume you need your codec and encoding settings to be constant throughout. That is to say while there's nothing stopping you from going from AVC 1080p to MPEG2 480i mid-movie that kind of change would undoubtedly cause a less seamless playback, and even going from the same codec to a different profile or other changes within the encoding settings might cause a delay in playback also.

towne32 said:

Oops, looks like I added to my post right as you were responding. Thanks for clarifying, though.

And, actually, I know you're probably pretty busy, but if you were ever able to make a tutorial on this subject I would be incredibly grateful. In fact, the entire portion of the internet that's interested in the subject might be. Your replies here are the first I have ever seen, in fact, that offer a solution. Generally, on any forum or tutorial, you will see something like:

"well, you can do playlists and just deal with the 0.5-1 second delay as it switches streams"

or

"This cannot be done with free software. BDedit can likely be used to achieve this, but it is mostly undocumented. The software you would actually need is $3,000-50,000"

Should also add that the software that will not be named is incredibly difficult to use. A simpler solution would really be great. 

I haven't tried it myself. The entire procedure is detailed here and appears to be perfectly straightforward. You simply need to change the "c" tags and the in-time. Here's a screenshot of T2 Skynet Edition showing the settings on a real-world commercial disc with branching:

Yes switch the c tags to 5 (except the first file) and set the intime to 11.650 or similar.

The copyright proprietor has not licensed the program...

You can do it with BDedit on PC. Author your disc with the "non-seamless" version, and then use BDedit to set the MPLS files as seamless.

Yep, it's not complicated. Something like...

even=last
odd=eedi2().separatefields().selectodd().FrameDoubleFunction().selectodd()
interleave(even,odd).weave()

All you need is a frame interpolation function to double the framerate and return the "new" frames, I'm sure you could fine one through google. edit... you could probably use this one: http://compression.ru/video/frame_rate_conversion/index_en_msu.html

Depends on the TV brand as well. No-name brands will always look much worse than the top brands.

Well xvid didn't have crf (constant rate factor), it only had cq (constant quantizer) which is not the same. x264's 2-Pass works exactly as it should, if it didn't then CRF wouldn't work either since CRF is based off the same principal as 2-Pass - that is it keeps constant quality. CQ does not... it aims to keep the quantizers to a constant level, even when a scene doesn't need it, therefore 2-Pass will give you a better quality output at the same size as CQ-based encode.

VidFire recreates the missing fields. It doesn't "recover them" it makes new ones. Once a videotape is telerecorded onto film the missing fields are gone. You can actually use VidFire to "recreate" "missing" fields from material that originated on film and was never on videotape, if you wanted to. Which isn't to say it's bad technology at all, just that it is what it is. :)

No, I think you're better off using a consistent CRF or a consistent 2-pass bitrate setting. There are other ways to degrade picture quality without using different bitrates - for instance you could resize the scenes surrounding your inserted SD footage to make the transition more smooth, if desired (downscale to a resolution in-between and then upscale it again to degrade the quality).

The credits take up a negligible amount of space compared to the rest of the film anyway. So I agree with junh1024 on that one. For instance, in my encode for Jurassic Park the video file came to 3542.2 MB, yet the credits are only 147.1 MB of that. So by compressing that area of the film further I could only really save an extra 50 or 60 MB and that's being generous. Out of 3.45 GB, 50 MB is nothing.

However, he's wrong about 2-pass. CRF and 2-Pass are equivalent. The only difference is that CRF maintains consistent quality and achieves the desired level of quality, whereas 2-Pass maintains consistent quality and achieves the desired average bitrate. If you have a 2-Pass file and a CRF file that come out at the same size then they will be exactly the same quality. Which you can test yourself easily - set CRF quality to something low like 26 or 28 and encode, then take the average bitrate from the file you just encoded and encode again using 2-pass. The two encoded files will be exactly the same quality - they just came to it using two different routes.

Here's another tip... with 2-Pass you can't know the quality in advance. So my suggestion is you set the CRF to what you want and encode the file. Let's say you want the CRF at 18 or perhaps 19. Encode it and see what size it comes to. If it's well outside the size you're wanting then you should find a way to make the file more compressible instead of lowering the encoding quality to force it to fit the desired size. You could resize from 1080p to 720p for instance. De-grain, De-noise, etc. Once you get it to encode around the right size at the right quality then use 2-pass to get the exact size that you need.

Well, I was going to do a test encode but it turn out my file is too complicated and crashes the encoder!

So, in the meantime while I sulk about that, here's another pic from the BD. And no I'm not using a single frame of the BD in my project, but I'm just carrying on about the absurdity or inconsistency or whatever you want to call it - Lucas' Gawt-Dang Shenanigans perhaps - of Naboo's never-the-same capital city architecture.

Okay, so this huge hanger is supposedly positioned out the back of those dome shaped buildings, somewhere. See if you can figure it out.

Nope? Well it's not the main building because it looks different to that dome, and plus they walk away from it to get to the hanger. It's also none of the buildings to the right (the bridge-side) since we're given a pretty good view from the side. But wait, it can't be a dome to the left either because if it was we'd see the other right-hand side domes to the left of the picture - but we don't! So where is it located? Give up? I'll show you where it is:

If you squint really hard you can just make it out:

Wouldn't you know it, George forgot to show us the front of the building! It's somewhere there just of camera-view.

But I was thinking, perhaps a long time ago their building projects were simply much more efficient than they are today - it's not unreasonable to expect the Nabooians to build a bridge between when we see the city at the start of the film, and when we see it again towards the end of the film.

But, it turns out it wasn't a very useful bridge because:

By ROTJ (20-something years later) they decided to get rid of it entirely! And not just the bridge, but the building attached to it, and that spear-shaped building too. And in their place they grew more trees. Not to worry though, half the other buildings have changed as well. Seems the capital went under quite a bit of redevelopment over just 20 years! It's not as strange as those truly funky shadows happening to them roof-top gungans though!!

At least they have shadows unlike the guys standing on the far right here:

Which also brings into question - where did all the street lights go? You know the ones that were there just two shots ago:

If you look closely you'll notice they are there in the other shot, however they've mysteriously moved from in front of the celebrating Nabooians to inside them... it's very bizzare. Of course the ones on the near-side of the street are missing entirely in that shot - as are the giant violet and blue banners.

Plus where did all them trees go? You know the ones you saw from the Queen's view:

What a shame I just can't understand the brilliant artistic vision here. Then again, let's have another look. Here it is just after the Queen's window-pane shot:

And clearly some of the trees already went missing! Some of the street lights were missing too, and the ones that were there didn't cast shadows for some reason. At least they're not casting their shadows the wrong way though like everything else in that shot! You can quite easily identify the near buildings from the Queen's view with the ones above on the left and the right there, they haven't moved, just the damn trees and streetlights! Perhaps George meant to have CGI storm-troopers riding on walking trees or something?

However, there's quite an amazing thing since as well as building the bridge, they also managed to build a new arch by the end of the film:

Yeah yeah I know you can already see it earlier in the film from the Queen's window-panes - but it disappeared when she went outside. It was nowhere to be seen.

I'm pretty sure they had no, uh, fire-trucking clue which file they were supposed to be rendering Naboo from!! It was a flipping lucky-dip each time!!

Ah, well there's more than one way to do it, but one possible solution is to feed the SR part of your script just the luma, and use an alternate up-scaling method for the chroma.

And this is what I was wanting to post...

That's from my render or SR-v10, and there are many other examples of chroma-bleeding. Did you correct this in later versions of the script DrDre?

On the topic of telerecordings (/kinescope), I've never heard the term "low definition" applied to 405 and 625 line television. Especially not 625-line. I'm pretty sure you just call 405-line standard definition. Telerecordings reduced the 50i source to 25p by throwing away every other field, and recording it onto film. As the source however was videotape, it never existed in a higher resolution than what's available on the telerecording - it simply had the other fields as well - and you can't recover missing field information from existing fields.

I don't think you can get much out of such a source - the 16mm film doesn't reproduce the exact line-pattern of the source for a start, so you're working at a disadvantage in that you have a source that higher resolution than the material it contains, whereas SR is designed to work with a source that's lower resolution than the original material. Hope that makes sense.

We'll wait to hear from Vinnie. :)

Thanks for the kind words. That's enough of derailing this thread from the Team -1 version now though!

I don't think they intended to add the bridge, I think it was a result of re-rendering the scene from the wrong computer file. These screenshots are from the bluray:

Laserdisc: