How will logo removal take?

[zworg2]

simply;
friend has tried to convert an avi to DVD format for me to burn onto DVD for him.
unfortunately he has now deleted the original file and the processed one has a significant nag in the middle of the screen for the entire length.
this nag is quite annoying (as you would expect) but the resultant DVD is watcheable.

what i want to know is whether it is worth the investment of time to remove this 'logo' with virtualdub filter.

the original is approximately 100minutes long (quality i am not sure of, but will find out when i get home)

Has anyone any idea how long such a process may take?
is it likely to be 4-5 hours or 20+ hours.
I am only after a ball park figure.

thx in advance

[jimmalenko]

In all honesty, I think the logo removal filters make thigs worse. A pixelated, blurred section right in the middle is worse than the logo more often than not IMO.

Get the original file back and convert it properly, I say

[zworg2]

In all honesty, I think the logo removal filters make thigs worse. A pixelated, blurred section right in the middle is worse than the logo more often than not IMO.

I searched thru this forum and found a few examples of logo removal, and although some werent brillinat, i think with the example i want to work on, the results, however blurred, will be better than the original

Get the original file back and convert it properly, I say

wish i could. thats the problem, and hence the reason i am taking this route!!!

you know how friends want to help, try and help and then just bollox it up, making more work for you, made all the worse by the fact that i am doing for him in the first place

8) 8)

[theDruid]

Also, if your friend has converted the avi to DVD format for you, that would mean it's MPEG2 yes?

In which case, you'll have to re-encode to be able to use one of VirtualDub's logo removal filters.

You'd have to use VirtualDubMod or VirtualDubMPEG2 to open the MPEG2 file, apply the filter and then frameserve back into your favourite MPEG2 encoder (I think TMPGEnc Plus is the easiest to frameserve to from VirtualDub) - so the time it would take would depend on how quickly your machine can do that.

As I'm sure you know re-encoding the file is likely to lead to some drop in quality too.

Best thing to do would be to give it a try with a few minutes worth of the video and see if you think it's worth the time & effort. It may not be.

cheers,
theDruid.

[zworg2]

Also, if your friend has converted the avi to DVD format for you, that would mean it's MPEG2 yes?

In which case, you'll have to re-encode to be able to use one of VirtualDub's logo removal filters.

You'd have to use VirtualDubMod or VirtualDubMPEG2 to open the MPEG2 file, apply the filter and then frameserve back into your favourite MPEG2 encoder (I think TMPGEnc Plus is the easiest to frameserve to from VirtualDub) - so the time it would take would depend on how quickly your machine can do that

please correct me if i am wrong, but my understanding is that I need an AVI, in order to run the filter? (and therefore would need to un encode the DVD compliant files to AVI's, filter then re-encode back to DVD compliant)

I had already thought about trying it i=on a snippet of the whole thign to look at quality, but the overall timescale is also important in my decision making process as to whether it is worth doing or not.

thx in advance

[theDruid]

Although that would be one way of doing it, you don't actually need to convert your source into an AVI file to use the filter on it.

As long as VirtualDub can open the file, you can use the filter (and the flavours of VirtualDub I mentioned above can open MPEG2 files).

You cannot, however, save the output as MPEG2 directly with VirtualDub, which is why I suggested frameserving into an encoder.

Effectively you are decoding the MPEG2, filtering, then re-encoding but you don't need to create two intermediary AVI files (pre- and post-filter) if you use frameserving. VirtualDub will do the decoding as it opens your mpg file, and frameserving into the encoder at the other end of the process takes you back to an MPEG2 file.

Filtering & frameserving with VirtualDub slows down the MPEG encoding a bit, but using a logo removal filter without doing anything else shouldn't slow things down too drastically.

If you know how long it would take you to encode a 100min AVI file to MPEG2 normally, that should give you an idea of how long the process would take. Add a little bit for the frameserving, and a bit for fiddling around and getting the logo removal filter set up the way you want it.

cheers,
theDruid.