How can I encode a "grainy" film to a decent quali

[Cobra]

Hi,

I am trying to encode a movie into DivX, but the encoder is having trouble making a decent job of it. I think it might be because the source has been filmed with a "grainy" effect which DivX has tried to preserve. Sadly, it doesn't seem to want to preserve important things like hair, which become a blocky mass!

Is there a filter I can run the .VOB files through to remove this effect, or otherwise tweak the DivX codec settings to make it work better? I have tried adjusting just about everything there is but it doesn't help much.

I am using DivX 5.0.2 Pro, and Vidomi to encode my video.

I have been trying to encode this for a couple of weeks now, and I would like very much to get these big files off my hard drive. Any help at all would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks,

CobraDMX

[videocheez]

What I've read many times here in the forum unfortunately is, "junk in yields junk out" You cannot create something that is not there. I experienced the same thing that you saw with the hair when compressing some DV to Divx. Instead of hair however i was filming my kids on the lawn. The grass was a big green blob. Fortunately i was working with near perfect source material so I was able to reencode a second time and by increasing the bitrate I was able to see individual blades of grass instead of the green blob.
In your case you are working with source material that someone did a poor job converting for your application and they probably didn't allocate enough bits that the video needed to see the hair.
stick around maybe some of the gurus here have a few tricks up there sleeves.

Goodluck,

VC

[Cobra]

Videocheez,

Thanks for the quick reply.

My apologies - I should have said what my source is.

My source is my DVD of 24 Series 2. I have the original .VOB files on my hard drive. The grainyness is a film effect used in the filming of the series. The image is brilliant, it's just DivX doesn't see it that way!

I would show you a screenshot, but my PC won't let me - the image keeps going black once I close DVD2AVI or PowerDVD! Obviously a copyright protection. I'll keep trying to get a shot to post up - a picture speaks a thousand words.

If anyone else knows how to deal with this video, your help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks again, Videocheez.

CobraDMX

[solarfox]

I would show you a screenshot, but my PC won't let me - the image keeps going black once I close DVD2AVI or PowerDVD! Obviously a copyright protection.

Actually, it's not. Most new video cards have on-board MPEG decoding hardware and all kinds of other "video overlay" capabilities, so most playback programs and codecs doesn't actually do the heavy lifting in the actual VGA graphics space anymore; they just tell the hardware card where they want the playback window and at what scale/resolution, then pass the MPEG stream directly to the hardware decoder. The video card then overlays the decoded video on top of the VGA desktop.

Unfortunately, what this means for most screenshot programs is that the decoded MPEG video doesn't actually "exist" in the video RAM which holds your desktop and applications windows; it's in its own separate space which the screenshot program can't access. So, all the screenshotter "sees" is the blank space which the DVD playback application has claimed from the Windows desktop as "reserved space" for the MPEG hardware to overlay on top of.