I’m afraid I know very little about this long-running series, other than, for some odd reason, the movies have not been reissued on DVD or Bluray, that I can tell. So, the laserdisc was sent to me for capture, yay. Looks like something I might be into.
So the rest of this is tech wonkery:
I have, for some time, been peeling further away from Windows systems. As of a few months ago, I got rid of my Windows install entirely, and now use Windows in a KVM virtual machine with VirtIO GPU passthrough when I need to use Windows. My capture and filtering process has been Linux-based for some time already. (Manjaro, if anyone cares)
I was also doing my DVD conversion in Windows, using AVStoDVD. However, that doesn’t work in Linux, even using WINE – at least, I haven’t been able to make it work. So, starting with the last title I released, A Penguin’s Memory, I switched over to usineg DevedeNG.
But something funny happened when I tried DevedeNG on this title: The resulting DVD was unusually small. It was still high bitrate, but several gigs smaller than, say, a volume of Miracle Girls, which is almost exactly the same length. I puzzled over this for a while, and then pulled the files into my Windows virtual machine to run them through on AVStoDVD, because I’m still pretty new to Devede. Well, AVStoDVD informed me that my movie file was in a 3:2 aspect ration instead of 3:4, and that I’d need to convert it to generate a compliant DVD. But my resolution is 720x480, same as anything else I’ve ever captured, so I have no idea why it would think my aspect ratio is in any way wrong.
In the end, I told Avs2DVD to convert to DVD format, but leave the aspect ratio alone. So, the resulting files are not quite DVD compliant, maybe, I guess? And the results are still kinda on the small side. I think maybe its because of the letterboxing, though, as my DVD of the Lensman movie is a bit small too.