Oily picture with Virtual Dub

[marcusaxavier]

I'm not sure if this should be in this directory, but it is during the process of cutting and convering an avi to mpg, so I posted it here.

Because I am unable to capture to mpg (a long story, it's actually another post), I have been capturing to avi. I am converting my anime into VCD's so that I can watch them without wearing the tapes down. When I capture the avi, I usually start capture a few seconds before the segment, and end a few after the segment, just to make sure that I get the complete segment, and my capture card will not cut it off by accident. I then open the avi in Virtual Dub and cut off the extra video before I convert to mpg. When I open it in Virtual Dub, the picture gets an "oily" look to it. I was thinking that it was just because it was the default view of the video, and not the actual product, but after converting to mpg, then to VCD, I realized that it was the product.

Does anyone have any suggestions? Is there a different way to convert anime then regular video?

[Dave B]

Which capturing codec are you using to capture to AVI?

MJPEG, HUFFYUV, Uncompressed?

Why do you think the oily picture is a result of cutting the video? Your post reads as though the picture looks oily when you open VirtualDub before cutting.

[sonoma]

If "oily" is the same as I am thinking about, I fixed mine by using huffy instead of uncompressed avi. I hesitated using huffy because I thought the capture quality would suffer, but it doesn't. and now my 200 gigs of storage goes alot longer now. I capture at 480x480 huffy, which works out to 16gb per/hour. That's alot better than 65 gig per hour.

Does your "oily" picture look like your viewing at 16 colors instead of normal? That's what mine looked like. How I spotted it was playing the avi in windows media player looked great. But when I brought it into vdub it looked terrible. Then I took a snapshot of a frame from the avi and it also looked terrible. Messing with color depths did nothing. Idon't know why I tried the huffy codec but I did, and have not had a problem since.

[marcusaxavier]

To answer Dave B's questions; I am capturing the avi uncompressed. The picture quality seems fine right after the capture, but "oily' when opened in VD and then saved after I cut the segments.

To answer sonoma's questions; It does look like the color resolution has changed. I guess the best way to decribe it is, it looks almost like the picture you get when to point a camera hooked into the tv at the tv.

I'm going to do some more searching, and even try the Huffy codec. I also remember seeing a guide of how to transfer anime (and other cartoons) to VCD, and I am going to see if I can find it.

[sonoma]

That is the exact same thing as mine. Don't waste time searching. Try the huffy.

[marcusaxavier]

Actually, I found the guide, it's Luke's video, but I am going to try Huffy first. Thanks for the advice.

[Dave B]

If you do have a problem with the colours then capturing using RGB may give you better results than YUY.

I remember wrestling with a bug a while back in YUY captures. Changing to RGB was the solution.

[sue denim]

Just following on from Dave B's point .........
You could also try using a short AVISynth script to convert the cap into the RGB colour space and load it into VDub.
This cleared up a similar problem that I was having.

Just add :
ConvertToRGB
in your .avs script file.

Hope this helps .......

Sue xxx

[marcusaxavier]

Thank you all for your help. I actually used the Huffy codec to capture the anime, and it came out perfect. I dropped a lot of frames for the first 30sec., but I think that was because of my computer. The color is great, the video and audio match, so there were no problems.

[sonoma]

I'm glad it's working. I know that problem frustrated me also.[/i]