Fast Moving Sports Games on MPEG, HOW?!??

[jowel13]

Hi,

I have been capturing my old basketball tapes on my computer using my Canopus ADVC-100 (to High Quality 720x480 NTSC). I then use TMPEG to convert it to high quality MPEG-2 including the feature of noise reduction from TMPEG. After I do burn it to DVD and when I play it on my TV there still is a lot of blockiness during fast motion. Has anybody ever captured Fast Paced sports videos and have been able to keep the video in good conversion to the original VHS itself? Or are sports games just to hard to capture and encode to MPEG? Any help on procedure and or programs would be greatly appreciated!

Thanks, and Happy New Year!

:P

-Joe

[Peka]

I have been making MPEG2 videos of Karate tournaments for the past year. In 2002 I recorded 6 tournaments, including the Oceania Karate Championships, which had some really fast action.

My camera is a PAL Sony Digital8 - I live in Australia. I have also made some low quality MPG1 videos for download from my website -

http://pekanet.org

Use the menu on the left to navigate to the videos section. The MPEG2 files I've been making have been great. I don't use the noise reducstion filter in TMPG. I've captured a few Karate tournaments from VHS tape using my Digi8 camera's pass through feature. I found these to be a little blocky in comparison to stuff that I've shot myself on the camera.

What's the quality of playback like from the VHS tapes? Are they a copy of a copy? This is likely to be the source of your problem, and I'm not sure how you would go about fixing it. As they say garbage in = garbage out, so if the source quality is not good......

Maybe you could try using CCE, or the MainConcept encoder. I believe demos are available that leave a watermark. You could do a short encode using the demos just to see if the quality's any better.

The other thing to remember is that any sport which has really fast movement is going to be blurred as the camera only records 25fps PAL/30fps NTSC. Blur may translate to blockiness in the final product. In my Karate videos, if I view it frame by frame to try and find the moment of impact, I sometimes can't and there's a bunch of motion which the camera has missed. I need probly more like 100fps to catch some techniques properly!

[Craig Tucker]

In TMPGENc's setting, select the video tab, and change the motion search precission to High Quality (slow). See if this helps.

[paulb]

Joe,

I had the same problem filming Marching Band. Just this weekend I finished the band DVD and am very happy with the quality.

From the AVI DV clips I converted with TMPG using 2-pass VBR, Max 8000, Highest Quality, 10 bits. GOP MPEG Standard, YUV on and Soften Block Nose default (which is 45 I think).

You can dramatically reduce the encoding time by setting the Cache in Environment. The first VBR pass is sent to cache and the encode pulls the data from cache instead of "on the fly" on the 2nd pass. 30 minutes of DVD video 720x480 NTSC with the above settings completed in 3.5 hours for me instead of 10 without the environment setting. The time will look the same, but when it reaches 50% after the first pass, the time will countdown dramatically.

Good Luck,
Paul