Emerging from a week of time off, intense beer drinking, and MPEG encoding....
I have to say that you guys have made some *truly* amazing breakthroughs in the last couple of months here. In the last week, using the new templates, faerydust, and C3D, I have successfully made the following encodes at a quality that is visually indistinguishable from the DVD on my 27" TV:
Star Wars: Attack of the Clones (143 min, high action) 544x480
American Ninja (95 min, high action) 704x480
Autumn in New York (104 min, low action) 704x480
To top it off, the source for Star Wars was a DivX that I downloaded just for sh*ts and giggles to see what I could do with a dirty source like that, and 3 people I have shown it to have sworn it was a DVD. If I can get 95 minutes of martial arts at 704x480 and 143 minutes of Star Wars at 544x480, that raises some questions in my mind....
1) Is there anything beyond the capability of the VCD format at this point? Not very long ago, a 352x240 LBR encode of The Green Mile was experimental and of questionable quality. Today, I don't see going from a 143 minutes of high action to 180 minutes of low action as being much of a stretch. Can a high quality 544x480 encode of The Green Mile be within reach now? And if so, what's left to conquer? The Green Mile and Contact on 1 CD?
Actually... I see we have a new template for that too.
2) Have the MPEG compression techniques pioneered here reached a point where MPEG is now in a position to challenge DivX as the format of choice for video distribution? In the case of Star Wars, when a 1-CD MPEG looks as good or better than a 2-CD DivX, I have to wonder....
Anyway, I'm going to crawl back into my case of Sam Adams Winter Lager now for the remainder of the week.
Oh yeah... in case anybody is wondering, here is my script for Star Wars:
AviSource("Z:\DVL_EP2B.AVI", false)
LegalClip()
GripCrop( 544, 480, overscan=3 )
GripSize()
faerydust()
Convolution3d(preset="movieLQ")
LegalClip()
Gripborders()
#Sampler(length=24)
