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Then one day somebody on the movie forum posted about transferring their movies to disc sleeves which greatly reduced the storage volume. Most movies have the title on the spine, which he would cut out and insert in a spot at the top of the sleeve. Then he would cut out as much of the cover artwork as would fit in the sleeve. And the sleeves were double sided, so he would cut out as much of the back cover and put that in the back pocket of the sleeve along with a second disc if the movie came with one (a lot of blu-rays include a DVD copy or a disc with extras). The movies were easy to flip through by the top where the titles are. And he has particular boxes he liked that could hold up to 300 discs. I like that the artwork is preserved, it is just very compact now. So I bought some sleeves, boxes, and cutting board to cut down the artwork. He had recommended a Fiskars one, but I found a knockoff one by Firbon that works great, though I needed some extra blades eventually. The cutting board makes it easy to get perfectly straight cuts, parallel or perpendicular as needed.<\/p>\n
I did the DVD’s first, but I had only ordered blue sleeves, so eventually I ordered white sleeves for DVD’s and used the blue sleeves only for blu-rays, so I had to transfer the early batch of DVD’s over to the white sleeves. I am surprised how well the cover artwork can be trimmed down. Since the title was at the top, you could crop out the title to save some space. The DVD cases are bigger than blu-ray cases, so I had to make more extreme cropping to get the artwork down to size, often cutting off the left and\/or right edge of text on the back cover. Some DVD’s came in cases with cardboard front and back covers to reduce plastic, but those were really hard to slice and even a little bigger in size. <\/p>\n
I bought two boxes to hold the discs, but only filled up one box at first, with the DVD’s on one side and the blu-rays on the other. It was a lot of movies, over 200, and weighed about 15 pounds! But I still wanted to compress down some more, so I eventually put the DVD’s in one box and the blu-rays in the other. I saved a few DVD’s because they came with a nice case, slipcover, or were Disney titles which could potentially have re-sale or collector value. For the blu-rays I chose mostly bargain titles I had gotten over the years. I try not to buy anything I wouldn’t enjoy, but most people wouldn’t have heard of some of these movies and there were a lot I had never watched despite owning them for a few years now. In all I compressed 317 movies down, a few more blu-rays than DVD’s.<\/p>\n In the end, I was able to get all but the handful of DVD’s out from behind the blu-rays on the shelves and I probably saved 3 shelves worth of blu-rays (front of shelf). However, I used 2 shelves by moving the movies I put on top of the shelves to the inside of the bookcase where they won’t be subject to as much dust. So ultimately I only got one free shelf, but I could do another round of compressing. I still have about 70 empty blu-ray sleeves left and could order more. I also cleared out a bag of DVD’s I had in a closet. These were movies I had bought blu-rays or 4k discs for or they were some of Jeb’s DVD’s that didn’t make the shelf (Nacho Libre<\/em>). I also had some blu-rays I had bought from Redbox that were just bare discs (in the plastic Redbox case), so now those movies have homes too (in the picture of the boxes above, you can see the artwork for 1917<\/em>, a Redbox purchase, is just a laser printed copy of a cover I found online). The person who showed this off originally had compressed thousands of movies into a number of boxes, but fortunately I am not at that point yet (I only have 800 blu-rays).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I have been buying a lot of blu-rays the last few years. Entirely too many actually. But it has been a great time to buy them because streaming is killing the physical media business meaning there are tons of overstocks and great prices. I have bought hundreds of movies from Dollar Tree for $1 each … Continue reading “Compressing Movies”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":15,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4634","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4634","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/15"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4634"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4634\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4658,"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4634\/revisions\/4658"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4634"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4634"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fiveforks.com\/ted\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4634"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/a>For the back artwork, I got as much of the top as I could (basically a 12 cm x 12 cm square), but the bottom is where they usually have some key information like the year the movie came out, the rating, aspect ratio, sound, other languages, etc. So I would save the bottom part with that info and put it in front of the 12×12 square, at the bottom of the sleeve.<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n