american chopper

[davefx]

i have about 30 different dvd's of tv shows i have made using DV capture. i got real good at doing cartoons to where its very hard to tell the difference between the broadcast and the DVD. sometimes i just cant tell. it took about 6 months of doing it before i got results i like, mostly setting tmpgenc to work well with the material.

lately i have taken interest in american chopper on the discovery channel. my dvd's of this show look like crap. the way in which i make the cartton dvd's doesnt work at all with this show and i am beginning to see why; the discovery channel looks like hell. its very noisy and i beleive this noise is where my problems are coming from. the color os off too, black is too gray and red is overbearing. but the noise is killing my bitrate and doing nasty things in the mpeg2 encoding.

i dont know if this problem is everywhere, but here all the channels look different on cable. some are good, some great, and some awful. the history channel is unwatchable lately, its like the IRE level is so far off a tv cant display it.

i'm about ready to give up on american chopper. it just looks bad. right now i am experimenting with the noise filter in tmpgenc but i dont think its going to help. even with the noise filter cranked the peoples clothes constantly move even when they are standing still due to the noise.

the best setting i can come up with for american chopper is:

2 pass vbr 3000/6000/8000
352/480 (so i can use more bitrate due to noise)

i even tried a CBR@8000 and it still looks poor.

the DV files dont look awful, but they do look bad. the color os off and its noisy. but that noise does such nasty things in tmpgenc.

grrrr. lousy cable.

[MrMoody]

You're right, noise eats bits and will multiply artifacts. Get & learn AVISynth; it has many noise filters available, which should improve your results.

[Bucky_Katt]

Try contacting your cable company, if the problem is on their end they should be able to fix it.