Any suggestions to increase SVCD quality? (less blocks)

[puar]

I haven't posted for a while, but I've been fairy successful in my newbie attempts in making my svcds. However, I do still experience some blockiness in super fast motion scenes. Here is some info on what I'm doing.

1) I'm archiving episodes of DragonballZ. The source is TV cable.
2) I capture using a Rainbow Runner and AVI_IO at 704x480 using the PicVideo compression set at 19 (AVI_IO tends to crash at 20) I might drop a frame every minute or so, but overall my capture is good.
3) I convert it to SVCD mpg2 using TMPGEnc using the following general settings:
- I load the SVCD Template
- I use CBR at 2520
- I change to highest quality (slowest) for motion search
- Change the DC Component precision to 10 bits

I have tried to mess around with some of the other settings, for example, some people have suggested changing the GOP structure to 1,1,1 instead of 1,5,2. I also have tried the 2pass VBR, but that actually looked a little worse overall than the CBR (to me). I know it's supposed to save some filespace though.

Some other similar posts I've read talked about setting an option in TMPGEnc to bring the fps to 24 (I forget the details exactly). Can anyone shed light on this subject?

Especially for those familiar with some of the action scenes of dragonballZ, do you have any suggestions for increasing my quality? I'm fairly happy with what I have right now, the final picture looks sharp, and I fixed any 'stuttering'. The only thing really left to tweak is maybe the color and the blockiness.

Thanks in advance,
Bobby

[adam]

Yes the absolute most effective thing you can do to increase video quality is to do an inverse telecine which brings your 29.97fps movie back down to ~24fps. Less frames per sec means that your bitrate goes much further, and after all 24fps was the framerate that the film was shot at in the first place. If your source is tv capture then you have a couple of options for IVTC'ing. Probably the best is to do it in TMPGenc. It has an auto IVTC function which can work perfectly but it really depends on the particular movie. You could also use avisynth to frameserve to your encoder and use the IVTC command in that, which also works well.

But here's the bad news. First off, your source might not even be telecined, in which your stuck with what you got. Secondly, different broadcasting companies use different methods of telecining, which means that figuring out the pattern might be difficult. Futhermore, anime is known for having extremely abnormal telecining patterns, and usually requires that you do the IVTC manually. Some anime is simply impossible to IVTC because the motion gets extremely choppy.

If you want to give this a try look at the IVTC guide at http://www.doom9.net. Its got a very good manual IVTC walkthrough, which unfortunately is probably what your going to be forced to do.

As far as your encoding process, vbr won't help. Like you said it will save space but your already maxing out your bitrate so it can't help there.

Also, if you do decide to perform an IVTC then in TMPGenc load the ntscfilm svcd template, not the regular one.

[puar]

Adam,

Thanks for your input. I'll have to do some further reading on this. When you talked about my source possibly not being telecined, what exactly does this mean? What exactly is telecining? *please feel free to paste an appropriate link*

With what we've discussed in the past couple posts, am I to assume that other settings I've tried to play with probably won't help me that much with the specific problems I've been having?
For example, some of the other settings people have talked about tweaking on this board are:
- GOP Structure
- Detect Scene Change
- Noise Reduction (and other filters)
- Quantize Matrix and the no mothion search checkbox
- Soften block noise

Any input on these? I'll try to encode a small portion using the automatic IVTC in a high motion scene to see what happens for now (at least a scene i usually experience choppiness in.

Thanks again for all your help,
Bobby