Re-encoding

[Ham]

What's the best way to re-encode a large movie to a smaller size and keep quality loss at a minimum?

Any guides would be appreciated.

[Enchanter]

Virtualdub and 2-pass compression mode (supported by most recent codecs) are your best bets. Resizing the movie to a smaller size (and, if possible, use smoother filters to improve the compressibility of the resized video) will further minimise quality loss.

[Ham]

These are the steps I followed (divx 5.1) but I got a bigger file than I want, can you tell me if I'm doing this right?

- set the audio (96kbps) to direct stream copy

- use a bitrate calc to get bitrate with the audio bitrate at 96kbps

- set codec configuration to 'Multipass, 1st pass' and batch the job

- set codec configuration to 'Multipass, nth pass' and batch the job

- load the job control and start encoding

I left all the other settings at default, but I'm not sure what I should set 'Max bitrate' at, and I don't know what to set the slow/fast 'Psychovisual Enhancements' to.

[shiny#3]

the max bitrate is used to encode the movieparts
containing fast change of picture content (like in action scenes), so this depends on
the kind of the movie....

the max bitrate of an action movie should not be
very much higher than the average bitrate you
calculated if you encode an action movie.....lower the min
bitrated if neccesary....make sure that the low bitrates
are not completly used by the credits screens of the movie...

[Ham]

Do I keep running subsequent passes with a lower bitrate until I get a right file size?

I got a .bin and .log file on the 1st pass, so I assume you only do the 1st pass once for the movie?!?