DV to X(S)VCD

[daggad]

I am converting my Premiere-edited DV material to XSVCD in TMPGEnc. I am using CBR2520, PAL 720x576, HQ - the rest is default. These play without problems on my Pioneer DVD-444. However, the quality is kind of ok I guess but still the results are better when I record to VHS on a good player. Should I expect more from my VCD's ?
I am starting to wonder if DV-avi's are not a good source for mpeg encoding. Any input on this ?

[vidiot]

Your DV Video is field shifted and you neeed a phase shift after field shift filter setting.

Look at the side http://people.freenet.de/codecpage/

DV Field order problem

Own observations and problem reports by several users have revealed that there must be compatibility issues in the way interlaced video fields are ordered (or decoded, as DV stores fields into 1 frame) against other video formats available.

Obviously, the captured DV shows inverted field order compared to TV captures as well as industrial DVDs, and not only that, it has inverted even and odd TV lines AND inverted sequence of field playback, so the effects compensate for still images but become apparent if something moves. It is not yet clear to me what really causes the problem. It survives encoding to different compression formats but I also had the case that an SVCD directly encoded from DV (with TMPGenc) and burned with NERO worked correctly on a desktop DVD player.

The Field order switches available in most softwares can not compensate for this problem. They can only switch spatial or temporal. Smart Deinterlacer for VirtualDub so far is the only one that can do both (see below).

The effect always shows up, when DV is converted to another video format interlaced, or when another interlaced source is converted to DV and then sent to tape. I tested MJPEG, MPEG2, DVDs, MediaPlayer, Matrox TVout, and people reported the problem with self made DVDs also. Even MPEG2 directly made in StudioDV, from original DV capture, may be inverted, as are typically all Pinnacle DC10 MJPEG captures when imported to StudioDV. I also tested capturing with DVIO and MPEG2 encoding with TMPGenc and the problem was also there. So it can't be a problem of StudioDV but is a problem of DV in general. The inversion compensates for mere editing and recording back to tape, so I first suspected that the Camcorders use inverse field order, but the real problem may as well be the soft DV codecs, because they interface the DV stream not only to other formats but also to MediaPlayer for playback. So far I've tested Microsoft's and MainConcept's codec because these are the best and most frequently used ones. Even if the Camcorder codecs would be the real course of the inversion, they can't be changed any more with tens of millions already in use, so a change in the soft codecs could be the only cure for the problem.

So far I could determine that this weird behavior very often occurs, but there are cases where it does not, so the only way to determine if a certain conversion process is affected is just to try it out very carefully.

Several software DVD players can deinterlace, and also my TV-out (Matrox) has a help file that misleads users to switch to one field with interlaced material. No wonder only a few people stumbled over the problem and even less could identify it.


hope this helps

Harald

[daggad]

Thanks Harald !
You are on a level above me, but I've read trough your post carefully and surfed around on Codecpage. I've found a lot of new tips !
For the fun of it I tried to encode a 720x576 XSVCD at 3000 CBR and this one looked a whole lot better, but it jerked a bit on my standalone DVD so it doesent help me much. I guess the bitrate is the most important factor in this.
I can not get VBR to work on my computer, it will not start encoding. Maybe I should make a new post on this.

[JumboTech]

daggad

What does it look like as a standard SVCD at 480 x 576?

Al

[daggad]

Not to good. There is a lot of disturbance around moving objects. And bright scenes are the worst ones.
However, I downloaded Shizzzons template and instructions and these helped me tremendously ! I now get brilliant xsvcd's with cbr 2600kbs, 720x576. Read carefully what he says about the filtersetting and tweak to taste. This removed approx 80% of the mpeg noise. I am impressed !

[daggad]

I forgot to say that Shizzzons template and instructions are in the Tools section on this site....