Help overlaying an 8 pixel bar on my captured mpeg2

[felix]

Hi,
I have an Adstech DVDxpress USB2 capture box.
I capture mostly PAL at 720x756, using a signal tuned in from my VCR.
I capture composite video at 6Mb/s VBR.
Some tv channels give a perfectly framed mpeg signal.

On other channels , at the top of the image I see the horizontal retrace lines flickering constantly, which is very annoying.

I had a look with Virtualdub, and I would need to overlay a black bar that is exactly 8 lines high. This way my captured video would be quite acceptable.

I dont really want to crop because then my picture would not be 720x576 anymore and may not play on my dvd player!

can anyone help?

[AngusMacGyver]

Try using VirtualDub's fill filter.

[vhelp]

hi felix,

inside virtualdub do the following:

NTSC, PAL
* Video/Filters..
* Add
* now scroll down till you see fill, and Db-click it
* now enter inside the Y1 offset [472/568 ] followed by (OK) button
* Add
* now scroll down till you see fill, and Db-click it
* now enter inside the Y2 offset [472/568 ] followed by (OK) button
* now press (OK) button (at top of Filters box) to accept your filters

You should see the filtered effect(s) inside the other window. To bring it
inside your left hand pane, Options/Swap input/output pane, and press
the cursor rt/lft keys to view. Now, you can framerserve this into TMPG
File/Start frame server... and save as filename.vdr file. Then, open
in TMPG, your filename.vdr (for video and audio) If you have no audio,
then leave the audio [ ... ] text box empty, else you'll get an error.

-vhelp

[felix]

thanks vhelp,
But I guess I'm too dumb to understand your instructions (or vdub) correctly!
I only want to black out 8 pixel lines at the top.
I tried to follow your instructions that looked pretty clear to me, but ended up with a right pane that is all black except for my 8lines of crap at the top!
I have vdub 1.5.3 with mpeg2, should I be using another version?

thanks again for you help!

[vhelp]

Here is what are the specs for the fill filter.

X1=left, X2=right

Y1=top,
Y2=bottom

You only need to change one value per fill and no more.
That's why you have to have 2 fill filters.

The first fill filter, you only input Y1 [568 ] (or NTSC, 472)
The 2nd fill filter, you only input Y2 [568 ] (or NTSC, 472)

So, you should have two fill filters in vdub.
Just enter values for Y1 and Y2 boxes only, and do only one each.
-vhelp

[MrMungus]

Hi,
I have an Adstech DVDxpress USB2 capture box.
I capture mostly PAL at 720x756, using a signal tuned in from my VCR.
I capture composite video at 6Mb/s VBR.
Some tv channels give a perfectly framed mpeg signal.

On other channels , at the top of the image I see the horizontal retrace lines flickering constantly, which is very annoying.

I had a look with Virtualdub, and I would need to overlay a black bar that is exactly 8 lines high. This way my captured video would be quite acceptable.

I dont really want to crop because then my picture would not be 720x576 anymore and may not play on my dvd player!

can anyone help?

Have you tried outputting it to DVD and playing it on your TV? I'd guess that if you did, you wouldn't see the lines (I think they're closed caption signals, by the way).

[FulciLives]

I agree with mrmungus here ... you should never see the very top 8 pixels on your TV due to TV OVERSCAN.

You can "fix" it by masking the top with black but that can only be done by re-encoding which is pretty silly here ... otherwise why capture direct to MPEG-2 if you need to re-encode?

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

[vhelp]

hay felix,

After reading Fulci's respones to you, ..my fault. I thought you were trying
to encode w/out this 8 pixel distortion Sorry.

-vhelp

[MrMungus]

hay felix,

After reading Fulci's respones to you, ..my fault. I thought you were trying
to encode w/out this 8 pixel distortion Sorry.

-vhelp

Well, I think he was, too, but the thing is that it'd be a waste of time for him to block it out if he's going to be outputting to DVD. If he was going to be outputting to something else, say, a video file or a streaming media file, then yeah, he'd want to get rid of that (I'd do a crop and resize, myself).