"Best" Post Processing Suggestions

[flixcosmos]

Seeing that there's folks here far more experience than myself, I was hoping some of you could share your post processing suggestions. Historically when ripping blurays I've always run them through Handbrake, but I'm not 100% sure what best practice is anymore, what presets to use, etc, especially with respect to content from AS.

Case in point, I'm currently downloading House, one of my old favorite shows, but at over 4Gb per episode, and 8 seasons with over 20 episodes each, we're talking 640Gb for just one show. If someone could just point me in the right direction around compression and best practices for post processing that'd be fantastic. I don't want to kill the quality, but there's a theoretical limit on the amount of space I have at my disposal

 

[supersonik]

first of all this is pandoras box
if you open it there is a flood of basics you have to read and understand to get everything set to your needs in future.

also there is no "allround" if you want quality and compression in a short time.
because its a delta you can have 2 of them but at no point every 3. no matter which codec you're using in the end.


handbrake has proven in the past with their unique builds of x264/5 and ffmepg which were altering the luma and brightness of the content, they arent a good choice for encoding at all.

hence you go full "cli" with ffmpeg
or with a powerful tool collection in a "gui" with staxrip.

first of all what are you specs in the rig, to determinate if its even possible to process encoding on it in a modest time.

 

[sycor]

Honestly with my TV shows, downloading full 1080p is just not worth it in my opinion, especially not older stuff. For older stuff I usually just grab 720 or even as low as 960x540. If it's something heavy on visuals (mostly sci-fi type shows) I'll go higher, but still 720 is usually good me. Granted I don't have perfect vision, but on my 50in TV with my Nvidia shield using Plex, the quality is good at 720 for a Tv show. But you also need to take in to account if the show was filmed and released in 1080, or was remastered, or is just being upscaled by the provider.

But if you really want 1080, then you can start out testing just the standard x265 presets for HB. Do a couple episodes and then tweak the settings for your preference.

Or just buy more storage. That's what I'm planning to do since my NAS is getting a little more full than I would like. Time to upgrade the drives.

 

[Hoth80]

This is on your preference. 4GB is already 40% reduction from Blu-ray.

House Blu-ray rip is 6.5-7.5GB for most episode. Total series 1.23TB no extras.

How much quality you want to lose? No one can answer for you.

 

[DeadPixel]

This is a personal preference its impossible to answer, there really is no best practice.

I can understand when backing up blu rays, some people want to reduce the size but for most streaming providers they do a good enough job of reducing the size. If you find the 1080p downloads from Amazon too large, maybe just consider grabbing the 720p instead.

 

[KEYSER SOZE]

When in doubt always buy more storage. Remember, just because you have 60TB+ of NAS storage doesn’t mean you have a problem that requires an intervention.

 

[flixcosmos]

When in doubt always buy more storage. Remember, just because you have 60TB+ of NAS storage doesn’t mean you have a problem that requires an intervention.

I think my problem is that I'm admitting I do have a problem. LOL.

This is on your preference. 4GB is already 40% reduction from Blu-ray.

House Blu-ray rip is 6.5-7.5GB for most episode. Total series 1.23TB no extras.

How much quality you want to lose? No one can answer for you.

I honestly didn't do the comparison to Blu-ray rips, and honestly that's what I guess I should have done, since that really makes my numbers feel not so bad. I think my post came from a place of "most of my older content came from PlayOn so it's only 720p/stereo, and there's only 4TB left on my NAS so what do I do"... but the simple answer is buy more storage and suck it up.

first of all what are you specs in the rig, to determinate if its even possible to process encoding on it in a modest time.

Like many here I suppose, there's a few rigs at the ready. My VM host is a dual Xenon for CPU intensive operations, and my main gaming computer has a 2080Ti for those things that require a decent GPU. I'm generally a fan of scripting things out (mainly PowerShell), but I hadn't heard of staxrip, I'll take a look at that and see what's up.

Thanks for all the comments everyone.

 

[XC_3730C]

720p is good enough for me for most shows (now if Disney+ supported 1080p, I would grab Tmsomecshows from there). I came from PlayOn Desktop to AS recently (before that I would grab SD quality shows) so I know all about lesser quality. For me it comes down to replay value as far as shows. I am not gonna grab an entire series and have it take up so much space if I don't believe I will watch it again.

 

[RedFox 1]

720p is good enough for me for most shows (now if Disney+ supported 1080p, I would grab Tmsomecshows from there). I came from PlayOn Desktop to AS recently (before that I would grab SD quality shows) so I know all about lesser quality. For me it comes down to replay value as far as shows. I am not gonna grab an entire series and have it take up so much space if I don't believe I will watch it again.

I agree 720p is great for me also, it saves a lot of space on my hard drives and it gives me a great picture. Sometimes if there are a lot of special effects I use 1080P but no higher because my equipment will not support it.

 

[supersonik]

@flixcosmos please keep in mind that gpu based encodes result in less quality output. especially with everything below the rtx 3000 series.
because the nvenc (nvidia encoder) version before the 3000 series are literally creating artifacts at some point.

so even if its less fast stay with cpu based encodes.
if you have questions to staxrip ask them here in thread or via pm.

 

[DQ]

I have changed how I do things over time but one thing that has stayed the same is this. Titles I REALLY like or that I think are especially beautiful I keep at a much higher rate than I do something "normal".

So whether I am using Handbrake or CloneBD the story remains the same for me.

I basically have 4 tiers of quality at this point.
1) 4k titles (I keep them lossless because quality is the point) - file size is roughly 60GB on average
2) My most favorite Blu-Rays titles - also kept lossless at about 35GB
3) High Quality (typically action movies I like) - kept at about 75% of quality with a size of 20GB give or take
4) Everything else and transcoded down to about 50% and size is around 15GB

There is no right/wrong way, only the way you personally like to do it and that might change over time.

 

[bdawg20000]

I have been weighing options here too as I am pretty new to this but the AP downloads are quite large. I have found though that by re-encoding and just reducing the bit-rate and help reduce the storage need. I haven't done a lot of quality comparison yet on them but this might be a viable option if you want to keep the frame size. This is a great article on explaining how everything works and what you trade for speed vs quality and such when streaming. - Video Encoding Settings for H.264 Excellence (lighterra.com) I would welcome any tips as well that anyone else has for post processing or their experience with re-encoding at a lower bit rate.

 

[MuttJunior]

I agree 720p is great for me also, it saves a lot of space on my hard drives and it gives me a great picture. Sometimes if there are a lot of special effects I use 1080P but no higher because my equipment will not support it.

Add me to the list for 720p. I watch movies/shows more for entertainment than to count the blackheads on an actor's nose. I've enven got some old shows form the 70's on DVD at 480p that are just fine for me. Still better than when I originally watched them on TV when they first came out.

 

[RedFox 1]

Add me to the list for 720p. I watch movies/shows more for entertainment than to count the blackheads on an actor's nose. I've enven got some old shows form the 70's on DVD at 480p that are just fine for me. Still better than when I originally watched them on TV when they first came out.

480p is what the old DVDs were before Bluray. We were fine with it for years.

 

[coopervid]

People with good eyesight want high resolution. They can tell the difference. But some people just don't care about resolution etc and just want to watch the show no matter how bad the video quality is.

 

[DannyBoi]

480p is what the old DVDs were before Bluray. We were fine with it for years.

It was vhs, dvds, 1080p hddvd then bluray

 

[zero269]

I'm currently downloading House, one of my old favorite shows, but at over 4Gb per episode, and 8 seasons with over 20 episodes each, we're talking 640Gb for just one show.

@flixcosmos
I'm with @sycor when it comes to downloads. I don't download everything at the highest possible resolution; especially for shows.

For example...

Movies
I reserve 1080 content for:

• Action movies that have a lot of action scenes or CG
• Full CG movies
• Remastered titles that were originally released prior to 2000
• My FAVORITE movies that I watch more often

Most everything else is 720p for movies.

Audio
I even choose a lower audio quality such as 512 kbps DD+ 5.1 versus the 640 kbps. I usually never go below 512. Obviously, these choices are dependent on what's available per title.

Shows
Same thing as movies. However, I am more inclined to pull down 720 for shows that might fit one of my 1080 criteria.

You really just have to ask yourself what really matters for a given title and what devices you are likely to watch it on.
Does you playback device or TV upscale 720 to look great. I have an 82" 4K Samsung, and play everything through a connected AppleTV 4K device.
I would be hard pressed to tell the difference if I didn't already know the source resolution.