Any opinions on filters to clean up LD capure a bit????

[therick]

Hey everybody....I am beginning the transfer of my Star Wars LDs and I was wondering if you guys knew of any filters to help? Thanks in advance.....

[dphirschler]

You haven't told us anything about the nature of the video signal. But I will guess on this one...

Use AVIsynth and the 'decomb' filter. It's amazing. Also, try VirtualDub with the 'Frame Tweaker' filter. And if you need it, try a temporal cleaner. Coming from LD though, I doubt you'll even need it. But you never know.


Darryl

[therick]

You are right, you are right....I am getting 704x480 with VDub and Huffy from my Pinnacle PCTV and I am planning to go to a 352x480 M-PEG 2 stream to xSVCD (and later to DVD)...I am currently doing Perfect World (lots of whites, blues, greens) and later I plan on doing Star Wars (blacks, greys, etc...)

So, anyone else want to chime in????

[MITSUI_1]

Assuming your capturing from anthing other than S-Video (did LD players even have that?), you'll probably have some "dot crawl" noise to clean up. This is where surfaces that have solid colors end up shimmering. This is a "bad thing" (TM) for compression, because when MPEG compression does its interframe comparison, it thinks there's a lot more changing than really should be and it impacts your quality.

So, to get rid of dot crawl and other capture noise, use the following Virtual Dub filter chain. Put the filters in exactly this order.

1. Transfer over analog cables always goofs up the contrast of your film. Use the "Levels" filter first, and on the top group of settings, cut of 15 to twenty on the "black" side, and 5 to 15 on the "white" side. You want black to be black on your final VCD/SVCD and not some sort of shimmering grey with MPEG artificats!

2. Load up the "2d Clean" filter. I really like the Athlon and P4 optimized versions that are out there. Anyway, set the radius to 1 or 2, and the other setting to somewhere between 7 and 11. The higher that threshold gets set, the more crisp detail might get scrubbed, so keep that in mind. (I usually use 9 or less, if its a good source). This filter is usually a good thing to use to get rid of MJPEG artifacts, so since you're using HUFFY it might not be necessary. Try first without it, and only use it if you need more "cleaning" done to the footage.

3. Finally, use "smoother" (not smart smoother, which is better for animation), and set the noise prefiltering to on, and the strength to 1 or 2.

4. Use the Virdtual Dub resize filter to get letterbox and resize to what you're going to want TMPGenc to encode. Since you're resizing downward (at least so far as your horizontal resolution is concerned), use "bilinear" filtering.

Finally, a comment. Why go with 352x480 xVCD when you can just encode 480x480 SVCD? With that resolution on xVCD, each frame will have 168960 pixels. But even going up to 480x480 sVCD only bumps you up to 230400 pixels per frame, which is only twenty three percent or so more data to encode (but which gives you significantly better picture quality). The other reason I say this is that if you use SVCD, you can simply encode it as MPEG2 interlaced and you won't have to worry about deinterlacing or inverse telecining your AVI captured source. If you go with xVCD, you're talking about a progressive encode, and so you're going to have to deinterlace somewhere in the process (unless you've got a PAL source and are encoding to PAL, of course).

Good luck!

[dphirschler]

I suggested inverse tecine so that he could burn a film SVCD (~24 fps) and save an additional 20% or so of bandwidth.


Darryl

[kinneera]

Finally, a comment. Why go with 352x480 xVCD when you can just encode 480x480 SVCD? With that resolution on xVCD, each frame will have 168960 pixels. But even going up to 480x480 sVCD only bumps you up to 230400 pixels per frame, which is only twenty three percent or so more data to encode (but which gives you significantly better picture quality). The other reason I say this is that if you use SVCD, you can simply encode it as MPEG2 interlaced and you won't have to worry about deinterlacing or inverse telecining your AVI captured source.

Read his post a little more closely. He said he's creating an xSVCD, so he is using MPEG2. Thus, the resolution 352x480 in MPEG2 is technically legal for DVD (half-D1, or D2), and thus much more likely to be portable. And as someone else mentioned, there is a very tangible benefit to inverse telecining if your source is film. You should look into it yourself if you don't understand why.

[MITSUI_1]

Whoops [smacks head]... I misread his post. Thought he was converting to regular xVCD.

I agree that IVTC is "da bomb", but I have seen a lot of people goof it up very badly. It takes time to do correctly, as most of the "automatic" approaches (in my opinion) do not deal properly with situations where the telecining changes (such as places where splices exist and telecining order is altered).

If done improperly, IVTC looks like shit. But it does reduce the number of frames to encode by 20 percent and gives you better quality.

Frankly, however, if he's going to save himself 20% of the bandwidth by going with the 352 horiz. resolution, he will already have similar quality per frame as if he were encoding 20 percent less frames.

Then again, if he goes with 352 horiz. res. AND properly does IVTC, he'll have generated an extra 40% bandwidth to dedicate to higher quality.

Hmmmm... That musta been what you guys were talking about already.
[Smacks head].

A very humbled,

MITSUI_1

[baker]

Just one word...... temporal cleaner.
It is an excellent filter. I always use it when converting dvd2svcd.

Baker

[therick]

@MITSU_1 - I AM capturing from S-Video...will that change any of the filter advice you have given me? I had found the smoother and was planning on using that. Thanks for your help.

The video DOES look a little grainy, so I am gonna use a smoother...and I will have to look in to doing IVTC...I have never done it before, but the people on this board talk about it a lot. I like the idea of the %20 increase...but instead of IVTCing the video could I just capture at 24 fps? I am still kind of new to this, but any help would be appreciated.

@kinneera - once again, thanks for your help

[kinneera]

An interesting question...I've mostly only seen the discussion of IVTC applied to DVDs, not LDs. In terms of capturing at 24fps, though, I think the answer is no. There's a fairly good explanation as to why in the Avisynth documentation if you're curious, but the short of it is that capture cards recombine the fields incorrectly if you capture telecined film at 24fps. Your best bet is to use TMPGEnc's IVTC (for ease of use), or potentially even more robust combinations of AVISynth filters that will do the same (more involved, but easier to use with encoders other than TMPGEnc).

[mijman]

Heh, heh, I am doing that very same thing right now with MY star wars LDs!
I turn up the colors a little bit (10-15), lower the gamma (10-30), and sharpen the picture (40-50 each).
Try to record Greedo and Jabba segments, more or less, by themselves to better crop the widescreen bars in other sections. When encoding to DVD quality, it makes a big difference in time.

[therick]

@mijman - good luck with your conversion...

@kineera - ok, so I can't just capture at 24 fps (damn!). Right now I am using vdub->cce for encoding...I know vdub has a framerate control with an inverse telecine section...could I use that? And if so, what do I use, there are 3 options....or is going to AVIsyth gonna be my best bet? Thanks again.

[dphirschler]

Capture at ~30 fps, inverse telecine using the awesome 'decomb' filter with AVIsynth. It seems scarey, but it's a snap... very easy to use, and beautiful results.


Darryl

[kinneera]

The advice above is good. If you want a really simple AVISynth solution, find the InverseTelecine.dll plugin (may be called IVTC.dll these days).

As for VirtualDub, yes, the inverse telecine filter there should do the job. I'm not familiar with the details of how each type works, unfortunately. There might be some information in VirtualDub's filter reference.

[therick]

@kinneera & dphirschler - well, I will have to fiddle with AVISynth then...thanks for all you help...