Size of rip?

[loverboy]

I'm about to rip another movie for release here & am dithering about filesize. Although the general standard still appears to be 700mb or 1400mb split CD why? Ghost started me thinking when he questioned why we were still working within CD capacity when DVD's have made them pretty obsolete. FLL has also just released 'Nadia' at around the 1400mb mark that appears to have been well received & the quality improvement if not vast IS noticeable. My own feeling would be to go for a compromise of around about 1000mb but what do you guys think?

Cheers!

[emuler]

Perhaps it helps people to gauge the quality without looking at the technical details. 1 CD, 2 CD (2x700 or 1400 - makes no difference to most people, like ghost pointed out). Then there are others - DVDR (full DVD), half DVD, 1/3 DVD. In the final analysis, it is a matter of convenience, as the target media is DVD. 700 MB versions fit on a CD, or 6 to a DVD.

[Amadeus]

I like larger files for quality purposes. The 700s look nice on a 15" screen, but what about 17 or higher. Sheer laziness has kept me from patching my computer to my flat screen, but that will soon happen.

[FLL]

I start with 700MB (1CD) for a 90 minute or so movie and look for reasons to increase it, if no good ones are found I stay there. In general, smaller is better as long as the picture quality is good, because people can download it more quickly and it takes up a smaller portion of their hard drive. TheLost does only 2CD or 3CD rips, and I appreciate that when I am watching them on the TV, but his rips and other large rips are good for Usenet but aren't shared very widely on eMule because not many people think the quality is worth double the space and time.

Every rip has different factors: running time, source picture quality, and (probably the most important, to me) the reason the movie is worth watching in the first place (story vs. scenery).

I usually rip at 700 and then again at a larger size (sometimes several times) to get an idea of how increasing size will increase quality. The Nadia DVD was surprisingly crisp and increasing filesize increased rip quality greatly, and given the fact that the details of the scenery were most of the attraction of the movie I went to 2CD.

Rule of thumb is that for most rips 1CD for 90 minutes or so is usually good. Since Glamour was a 2 hour movie, and the source DVD quality wasn't that good, 1CD WS quality was just too poor at 1CD so I went higher. The fact it was fulfilling a FLM request also made a difference to me.

VHS rips are trickier. The underlying quality is lower so the file size should be lower, right? In some cases this is true, the Don't Go to Sleep ripper did a good job of getting a clean picture which compressed well. But many VHS rips are of lower source picture quality which ironically results in a larger size because they are less compressible, and cleaning them up with filters results in too much loss of detail (and the detail is already on the low side). I have one I am having trouble deciding between 500 and 900, will probably just end up at 700, heh.

In the end do what I try to do: make a rip that pleases you and you think will please your audience

[ghost]

set the bitrate to 1400 and quality should be very good. Don't think in filesizes!

[katzenjammer]

I'm mostly following the fileheaven-originating AFR-standard, this means 1/3, 1/4 and 1/2 DVDr for my rips.. not so many have been posted here, but maybe a new one will surface soon... guess sometime during the weekend/early next week.

[FLL]

set the bitrate to 1400 and quality should be very good. Don't think in filesizes!

My problem with that (i.e. the reason I don't do it) is that it completely ignores how well the file is compressed and how it looks. Bit rate is a simple calculation: size of the video portion of the file divided by the running time. I agree setting a target bitrate can be a pretty safe way to do it and can save time worrying about it, so for many people (most?) it's a good approach. Not my style though, part of the fun for me of the hobby of ripping/releasing is producing what by my standards is a better result, even if it's a lot more work.

[emuler]

But with weird file sizes it becomes awkward to archive them on DVDs. You have to find a combination of movies that will all fit on the DVD without wasting too much space.

Also, many times the source is not good enough to warrant such a high bit rate. Making a humongous file from a poor VHS is quite simply a waste.

[katzenjammer]

yupp, but no big deal.. 1/4 dvdr is my standard nowadays.. in most cases i waste less than 1.1 mb space per DVD... In rare occasions up to 6-8 mbs, so it is not that hard to do. Also, i keep my movies on HDs... DVDs becoming more and more a hazzle... but still trying to keep backups on it as well.