Post your favorite SVCD tips here!

[mojo]

I thought it would be helpful for people to post a trick or two they've learned while making SVCDs to help out the community. Have you stumbled upon something cool? Post it here in this thread!

(try putting the basic concept in caps at the top so people know what your post is about)

I'll go first...

FAST AND QUICK NOISE REDUCTION

- I had a TV show to encode with a lot of grain and other picture noise. Even at a high bitrate, the first encode looked terrible, since the picture was already bad and MPG has a tough time with grain and noise that changes from frame to frame. I did a test with NOISE REDUCTION in TMPGenc, and it looked much better, but as everyone knows it takes a very long time to encode with this feature.

A good way to get rid of grain and tiny noise in Photoshop is to give a picture a very slight blur, so I thought maybe I could do that in TMPGenc!

So, under the video feature SHARPEN EDGE, I gave negative values to both horizontal and vertical (between -50 and -100, depending on how bad the noise is). This gives the picture a very slight blur.

The results were excellent! This feature takes very little extra time to render and it cleared up the picture enough to produce a much better encode. The video was still very sharp and you can't even tell it was softened.

If you've got a noise picture (like from bad cable TV) give this a try first!


Mojo

[mojo]

Since no one has posted any of their own tips, I'll just write another one. Come on guys, share the knowledge!

MASK THE LETTERBOX FOR EXTRA BITRATE

This doesn't apply to DVD rips as much as it does letterboxed TV shows.

As we all know, a letterboxed show is a big help since the black bars don't take much encoding power. That leave extra bits for the important part of the picture!

Or does it?

If you've digitized a letterboxed show off the air, the black bars of the letterbox are part of the picture. Unless you have a super-clean broadcast signal. chances are the black bars also contain some signal noise and grain. This means the black bars are slightly changing from frame to frame, which means they ARE taking some of your bitrate!

The best thing to do is add a MASK in TMPGEnc and create a new letterbox that just blocks off the black bars. This way the encoder will allocate zero bits for the letterboxed area and insure that all the data goes to the actual picture.


Mojo

[energy80s]

Yes, I actually use that trick myself. However I am now trying to capture in 4:3 anamorphic and using TMPGenc to resize to 4:3 letterboxed as this gives even better quality as you aren't allocating any bits to the black borders on initial capture. Also stopped using standard SVCD as it rarely plays on DVD machines. Now encode to CVD standard (D2 resolution) with 48k sound, a damn sight more compatible with DVD machines! And better picture quality (for a given bitrate) to boot!!