Deinterlacing MiniDV AVI file and saving as lossless AVI

[Dave2ic]

I have interlaced AVI files captured from my old MiniDV camcorder, and was considering deinterlacing it, saving as a lossless AVI, and discarding the orginal captured AVI files.

The reason for this is I find it a nuisance having to deinterlace all the time (e.g. when editing the video with other progressive video, uploading to file sharing, or e-mailing short video clips to friends). It also makes it much better for playback on a PC without having to worry about your media player of choice deinterlacing.

The deinterlacing part I am happy with - I've have great results with TempGaussMC. But I do recognise that however you do it, you do lose some information from the original video when you deinterlace.

To me the deinterlaced video TempGaussMC looks great, and I don't want to fill my hard drive up with all these massive AVI files by keeping the originals too. But I am wondering if I delete the originals will I wish I had kept them at some stage in the future?

The other part of this question is what video codec to use to save the deinterlaced AVI files. Obviously I would want a lossless codec - I tried MSU and HUFFYUV and left them at the default configuration, and these are the results:

1. Cedocida DV: 210 MB/min (my understanding is this is not lossless)
2. MSU: 290 MB/min
3. HUFFYUV: 770 MB/min
4. Uncompressed AVI: 1.8 GB/min

MSU files sizes certainly are acceptable if it is indeed lossless - but why is HUFFYUV 2.5x the size? I have no idea if I should change any of the default settings for these codecs too - any advice here? Are there other lossless codecs I should use instead?

Just keeping the deinterlaced video seems like a good idea, but I would really appreciate some feedback before I do anything I might regret later.

Thanks.

[edDV]

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To me the deinterlaced video TempGaussMC looks great, and I don't want to fill my hard drive up with all these massive AVI files by keeping the originals too. But I am wondering if I delete the originals will I wish I had kept them at some stage in the future?

Your best archive is the original interlace DV @ ~13GB/hr. Future deinterlarers, filters and codecs will be far superior to anything you can use today. For file sharing and media player instant playback do a temporary deinterlace distribution at needed bit rates. I use either DVD MPeg2 (~ 8Mb/s) or H.264 (various rates) for this temporary distribution.

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Just keeping the deinterlaced video seems like a good idea, but I would really appreciate some feedback before I do anything I might regret later.

A "lossless" codec like Huffyuv just makes the saved file larger and if you deinterlace now, you are frozen in today's deinterlace technology. You can't recover the losses from deinterlace.

[jagabo]

HuffYUV was intended as a very fast lossless codec for things like video capture. So it doesn't spend a lot of time looking for ways to compress the data (no delta frames, no motion search, etc.). That's mostly why it doesn't compress as much as MSU. It's also older technology -- simple Huffman compression.

Beware that MSU's lossless codec does have settings that make it non-lossless.

You might also look at Lagarith which is between the two in speed and compression. There's also a multithreaded variation of HuffYUV that's faster on multicore computers.

[Dave2ic]

Future deinterlarers, filters and codecs will be far superior to anything you can use today.

A "lossless" codec like Huffyuv just makes the saved file larger and if you deinterlace now, you are frozen in today's deinterlace technology. You can't recover the losses from deinterlace.

Good point - I hadn't considered that. Makes me think I'm better off just keeping the original DV AVI's after all.