Do B/W Movies Encode better? What settings?

[Cornucopia]

If I've got Black-and-White movies capped and want to make VCD or DVD, wouldn't they be more efficient with a given bitrate--no color info to worry about? If so, what would the best settings be in an encoder such as TMPGEnc?

TIA,
Scott

[Sulik]

It's automatically going to be more efficient, because the chroma information is basically constant (like encoding a black screen), so it will save bitrate for the luminance plane.

[lordsmurf]

Be sure it is TRUE black and white... as in lack of color... not like Lucy re-runs that haves red or blue hues (because of the broadcaster)...

be sure to drop saturation of the capture software to 0% color

yes, it uses less data, so smaller bitrate can be gotten away with

[Cornucopia]

Yes, these are 40's mystery movies that I've got on VHS, so I'm sure they're truly B/W. I'm sure there's a little RGB noise/moire because of VHS, but I would always DeSaturate 1st in pre-processing. I was thinking, was there a tweak to the DCT Matrix table that would ensure that no info was getting used up for chroma? Stuff like that.

Scott

[D_Knife]

lordsmurf said

Be sure it is TRUE black and white... as in lack of color... not like Lucy re-runs that haves red or blue hues (because of the broadcaster)...

be sure to drop saturation of the capture software to 0% color

yes, it uses less data, so smaller bitrate can be gotten away with

If you were capturing from a DV converter - say a ADVC-100 could you use the grayscale filter in vdub to use less bitrate?? or does this have to be done on capture only?

[Cornucopia]

Capture is usually Canopus DVStorm, and yes I've already grayscaled/desaturated the DV.avi (usually after the fact-I've got the space and the time). I'm mainly asking about MPEG Encoding.

Scott

[Gazorgan]

I have The SevenSamuri on DVD.

It's a long B&W classic film. I have found that the bitrate savings from no color are offset by the noisey masters used. These old movies are mastered from old film. It has all the pops and artifacts inherent in a piece of celluoid that has been around awhile.

I have never seen a 'digitally remastered' black and white film.

I don't think your going to see a significant savings in bitrate, some, but not as much as you may think.

[lordsmurf]

I have The SevenSamuri on DVD. It's a long B&W classic film. I have found that the bitrate savings from no color are offset by the noisey masters used. These old movies are mastered from old film. It has all the pops and artifacts inherent in a piece of celluoid that has been around awhile. I have never seen a 'digitally remastered' black and white film. I don't think your going to see a significant savings in bitrate, some, but not as much as you may think.

Filter. Always filter. I use ATI VideoSoap on medium to heavy filters. I'm nostalgic and all myself when it comes to "film grain" but not when the grain is obnoxious. I'd just assume clean it up perfect.

There are quite a few digitally remastered films. In fact, some films like Citizen Kane have been blasted by critics as being "too clean", whatever the hell that means. I'm not a fan of dirt and grain.

There is savings, and the one account I remember vividly is calculating a film to fill 4.1 GB, and when I was done, it filled up maybe 3.3GB. This due to B&W, but that's the most extreme case, some were far less dramatic.