Tutorial for Pre-Processing and Encoding Pristine 3-4GB Movies v1.1

Introduction to Encoding Tutorial



The purpose of this tutorial is to enable/empower any individual with no prior experience of encoding video or movies with the ability to compress high resolution video down to a fairly small file size, around 3GB, with little appreciable loss in quality from the original Blu-ray, and in some cases, perhaps arrive with a better looking encode than the original Blu-ray.  You may be wondering how some people are able to get Blu-ray encodes down to a very small size, while you are stuck with 9+GB files.  Storage is cheaper and cheaper, but let’s face it, if we can consistently get Blu-ray movies down to the sub-4GB or even sub 3GB size with little quality loss, then you can fit way more movies on that 4TB hard drive.
Another consideration for smaller movie files is streaming over a home network.  9 GB for a video file may not seem too big on your 32TB home server, but some home networks may not be able to handle streaming a video at 14 MBPS, not to mention a household in which several people are using different electronic devices.  Bandwidth starts become limited.
To start, getting movies compressed down to a small file size takes a LOT of computing power.  This means, the process will be slow.  As computers get faster, the process has become faster, but we are still talking an encoding speed of probably 1-2 frames per second.  The average movie will probably take a couple of days to encode on the average computer.

Why So Slow?



The actual encoding, or compression, process is not the slow part.  The slow part is PRE-PROCESSING.  Pre-processing the video from a Blu-ray source is key for small final video sizes that still look great on a big 65” screen.  Blu-ray is not an original source.  Video on Blu-ray has already been compressed immensely to fit onto the standard 25 GB or 50 GB Blu-ray disc.  Since Blu-ray standards only support 8-bit video, digital noise is often added to prevent a problem known as banding.  Note: with the newer H265 video standards emerging to handle 4K video, 10-bit video may be supported which will eliminate the banding problem.

Methods of Preprocessing



We will be using the power of AviSynth in this tutorial to preprocess Blu-ray video sources for optimum compression.  As a general rule, the more grain or noise we remove from a video source, the more detail we lose as well.  Objects such as hair tend to get blurred or destroyed in the de-noising process.  Some AviSynth plugins produce weird artifacts.  All of these things we want to avoid, and we can, albeit at the expense of processing speed.  The so-called scene releases know taking a couple days to encode a movie is trivial compared to the number of people downloading their releases, and with Intel’s CPUs using less electricity with greater computing power by each generation, the amount you will pay in electric bills taking a couple days to encode a two hour movie is becoming trivial as well.  Surely, much less than the $29.99 the movie industry expects you to pay for the Blu-ray after you paid $16 to see it in the theater.

Why StaxRip instead of MeGUI, RipBot, or another program?



StaxRip allows the user to edit anything they want in an easier fashion for a tutorial such as this.  Also, since StaxRip demuxes all streams first, it catches any stream errors before the encoding process starts.   This will save the user tremendous time in the long run.  Finally, StaxRip handles all subtitles automatically and well, without extra steps having to be performed like, say RipBot.  Finally, the information in this tutorial will be able to be adjusted to programs like RipBot for advanced users, but for people starting out that what top-quality rips with the least amount of headache, StaxRip is the way to go.  The initial setup takes a while, but once initial setup is completed, future encodes go much faster.

A Note on File-Size



There are some situations where you will probably not be able to get a movie successfully compressed to 4GB without losing quite a bit of quality.  One example of this is Transformers 3.  The problem here is there is so much detail with all the CGI that, unless you do some sort of smart blurring process, you will end up with some bad image breakup even if you do a 2-pass encode set to 4GB.  In these cases, you can try to set the CRF value to 22 or 23, and sacrifice quality for file size, or you could downsize to 720P.  Here is the key:  If you are downsizing a movie to 720P, you want to retain as much information as possible.  If you install AviSynth 2.6, as included in the archive with this tutorial, I have included a “Super Sharp” option in the custom StaxRip profiles.  This “Super Sharp” setting utilizes the Sync 256 resize algorithm.  Sync 256 retains twice as much detail as Lanczos, Spline64, Bicubic, or Bilinear.  This way, even though our movie is in 720P, it is an extremely sharp version, possibly indistinguishable from the 1080P version except on very large screens.   We always downsize as a last step after processing, to give the denoisers the maximum amount of information to work with.  For example, if we were to encode Transformers 3 with our exceptional Post-processing options discussed in this tutorial, the movie would be around 6GB.  Coincidently, most scene releases in 1080P of Transformers 3 are around this size.  Going to 720P but resizing with the “Super Sharp” (sinc 256) setting, the file size ends up right around 4GB, and looks amazing.

A Note on Audio Formats:



In this tutorial, we will be using the MKV container instead of the MP4 container.  We will be using AC3 encoded at 640 kbps, and a secondary AAC track down mixed to Dolby ProLogic II.  The AAC track will be encoded at around 160 kbps VBR using the qtaacenc, the best AAC encoder currently available (it uses Apple’s True Variable Bitrate AAC encoder packaged with QuickTime).  There are a couple reasons for this.  AC3 640 kbps is compatible with just about everything, and most receivers have built in support for Dynamic Range Compression (DRC) in case you want to watch the movie at night with neighbors around.  The secondary AAC track is for media players, such as the iPad and iPod, which need AAC audio support.  Neither the iPad or iPod support AC3, and none of them support an audio track in movies over 160 kbps stereo.  I will not speculate on why Apple makes such decisions, but there it is.  Now, I know Apple devices do not support MKV containers, but StaxRip will not allow AC3 audio to be placed in the MP4 container.  For this reason, most scene releases use 5.1 AAC audio in their videos.  If you wish to do so, feel free to encode the lossless audio to 5.1 AAC instead of AC3 and change the container from MKV to MP4.  There are however, a couple reasons I advise against this.  First, most media players still do not support 5.1 AAC, and neither do most receivers already in homes.  For example, the Western Digital Live players do support 5.1 AAC, but 5.1 AAC gets output to the receiver as 2.0 PCM.  Fairly pointless right?  Next, receivers that do support 5.1 AAC do not have DRC support for AAC audio.  Finally, savvy users will be able to demux and remux your MKV files to MP4 files if they need to do so for whatever reason.