.vcf for Memento or Virgin Suicides

Hi- The theory behind curve compression is that the eye won't notice when bits are taken away during scenes of high motion. But motion isn't just people running around fighting and shooting at each other. Among the highest motion scenes are those with fire, water, smoke, fog, or even a close up of a tree with the leaves blowing in the wind. If you enable curve compression, those types of scenes won't get their full percentage of bit rate the way static scenes will. And you can't tell when played full speed. Well, that's not really true. Maybe you can sense or feel it doesn't look as good. And, as encoders, we like to stop the movie at many different places to study how it looks, and many of us want all the scenes to look good. Luma compression works in a similar way-some believe that you can't tell when bits have been taken away during very bright or very dark scenes. So, probably all three contributed to the improvement (with a fire you would have both motion compression and luma compression stealing the precious bits), but mainly not using motion compression. I don't know Virgin Suicides (I know Memento very well and love it much), but maybe you should do a compression check on it with GKnot. Some movies can't be compressed to 1 CD and look good, no matter what you do. You might also consider lowering the resolution, lowering audio quality, and putting on some smoothers. Maybe it is a very "noisy" movie and doesn't compress well, and you'll have to go to 2 CDs. Maybe the problem is in the source. Before encoding, open the VFAPI in Nandub and scroll to the places that look bad in the finished .avi. Maybe you'll see the same problems before you ever encode it. But I'm glad for you that you've learned a bit about improving the quality of your movies. Good Luck sid and thanks for the kind words.