How to get 10 hrs SD footage onto BD?

[_Al_]

I'm not sure if this will get you anywhere, avi has black bars around picture and mpg also. MKV doesn't.

[aedipuss]

there's something wrong with your DVavi to begin with. it shouldn't have hard coded black borders all around the video. cutting back the mistaken borders and encoding to mp4 with vegas gives you this.

oh and h264 is a progressive format so you want to de-interlace it. if you want to keep it interlaced stick with mpeg-2.

[ruffhouse]

I'm not sure if this will get you anywhere, avi has black bars around picture and mpg also. MKV doesn't.

_Al_, I'm not sure I understand...?

Isn't my resulting video going to be 720X480, same as my original, which would require black bars for any higher resolution displays regardless of the codec I use to encode it with?

[aedipuss]

DVavi should not have black bars at all.

[johns0]

The only way i could get the lines out was by using fast deinterlace in handbrake.

[ruffhouse]

The only way i could get the lines out was by using fast deinterlace in handbrake.

Did it look good?

[ruffhouse]

OK, figured out the black bars...

They're not there on the original DV AVI, Premiere Elements added them for some reason when I used it to cut out six seconds from the original (it took my AVI and encoded a new AVI).

Will that affect our quality/encoding test between MPEG 2 and h.264?

[ruffhouse]

there's something wrong with your DVavi to begin with. it shouldn't have hard coded black borders all around the video. cutting back the mistaken borders and encoding to mp4 with vegas gives you this.

oh and h264 is a progressive format so you want to de-interlace it. if you want to keep it interlaced stick with mpeg-2.

aedipuss, thank you!!! I just posted the answer about the black bars.

And I don't really care if it's interlaced or deinterlaced, I just want to fit about 18 hours of standard def soccer games onto 2 BDs with the highest quality that I can...

I'm just surprised that h.264 isn't delivering better results than MPEG2, which is why I was hoping/expecting that I was doing something wrong with the settings.

It's starting to sound like the issue is interlacing, and perhaps de-interlacing for h.264/MKV causes too much of a quality loss compared to MPEG2's ability to keep the footage interlaced. Sound about right?

[Cornucopia]

I'm at work right now so won't be able to get to this until late tonite at the earliest. Plus, I don't have a recent copy of WinDVD (just PowerDVD).

However, of course h264 can do interlaced also, it's just not as commonly used as with MPEG2. I believe both your session & output settings for P.E. as well as further on down the line might be the problem.

That AVI clip you sent - was that a straight clip of the original? or was it an outputted clip from P.E.? If the latter, use Virtualdub with [Direct Stream Copy] to truly give us an "original" clip. But I agree 6 seconds ought to be long enough to test with - no need for 1 minute...

I'm just using an educated guess, but I believe that interlacing mis-transformations and AR mal-adjustmments have a lot to do with your difficulties here.

Scott

[aedipuss]

OK, figured out the black bars...

They're not there on the original DV AVI, Premiere Elements added them for some reason when I used it to cut out six seconds from the original (it took my AVI and encoded a new AVI).

Will that affect our quality/encoding test between MPEG 2 and h.264?

yes the quality of the recode is lower than the original. try this to cut a piece of DVavi.

[johns0]

Send a clip of the original dv avi,the sample you sent had all the interlace and black bar issues others mentioned after encoding it plus the picture colors looked bloomed out.

[ruffhouse]

HOLY COW WHAT A DIFFERENCE!

Took Scott's advice and downloaded VirtualDub to get a clean, unprocessed DV AVI and the difference is NIGHT and DAY! Even crazier, it's a smaller file than the AVI that Premiere Elements was putting out.

To be clear, I'm not using P.E. to spit out an AVI and then importing that into Handbrake, meGUI, etc. I only used P.E. to create a 6-second AVI for purposes of uploading/testing with you guys. Won't do that again... VirtualDub's Direct Stream Copy is KILLER for cutting AVI files.

And... no black bars

[Cornucopia]

Yeah, that's more like it...

So I just ran this through Vdub with output as x264 codec (AVC v3.0, singlepass factor 23.0 - the default, with audio=mp3 @32kHz,160kpbs, stereo), just to see how it would look...

...and that's with no interlace processing, AR adjustment, etc.

Seems you still have a LOT to work with (and much to figure out and try).

Scott

[ruffhouse]

Scott, it looks like yours with Vdub came out looking about the same as mine with Handbrake! (equally crappy)

What would you try next if you were me?

[aedipuss]

here's one from vidcoder(handbrake gui) de-interlace -slower(yadif)

[Cornucopia]

No, my quick & dirty looks better than your "MKV", with the exception of interlace problems. But look at my filesize - 900k vs. your ~5MB. I've got room to expand if need be.

And aedipuss' deint looks good.

Scott

[_Al_]

And aedipuss' deint looks good.

In my opinion, it could be done very well, but video is ruined anyway, 30fps is not enough if it was recorded 60i. Temporal resolution is halved.

He has to shoot for 60i that is well done and to hope that TV deinterlacer is good. Blu-Ray problem.
And again 60p is optimal, I cannot stress enough, encoded files are even smaller than 60i (better say MBAFF, what MeGui produces) but unfortunately 60p is no go.
Just watch this 60p example, its smooth like a butter on the pan ....

[_Al_]

For interlace mp4 I could manage to get this from Megui, but it is mbaff is it all right for Blu-Ray ? Perhaps there are other BR compatibilty issues, never tried to author or burn BD with this and probably never will.

[aedipuss]

In my opinion, it could be done very well, but video is ruined anyway, 30fps is not enough if it was recorded 60i. Temporal resolution is halved.

you are really clueless aren't you? 60i is 60 fields per seconds in which each field is half a frame(alternating lines). when you put the 2 half frames back together(de-interlace) you get 30 whole frames per second.

[_Al_]

In my opinion, it could be done very well, but video is ruined anyway, 30fps is not enough if it was recorded 60i. Temporal resolution is halved.

you are really clueless aren't you? 60i is 60 fields per seconds in which each field is half a frame(alternating lines). when you put the 2 half frames back together(de-interlace) you get 30 whole frames per second.

You are. To put 2 half frames together what you get is ruins of a ones well build castle .... It is intended for web but not for BD.

[ruffhouse]

No, my quick & dirty looks better than your "MKV", with the exception of interlace problems. But look at my filesize - 900k vs. your ~5MB. I've got room to expand if need be.

So true!!! I didn't realize how small your file size was... so you encoded it with x264 but left it in an AVI container? Didn't know you could do that...

Sounds like the next best thing to experiment with is Vdub h.264... and see if I can duplicate aedipuss' excellent results.

Thanks, I'll let you know what happens.

[ruffhouse]

And aedipuss' deint looks good.

In my opinion, it could be done very well, but video is ruined anyway, 30fps is not enough if it was recorded 60i. Temporal resolution is halved.

He has to shoot for 60i that is well done and to hope that TV deinterlacer is good. Blu-Ray problem.
And again 60p is optimal, I cannot stress enough, encoded files are even smaller than 60i (better say MBAFF, what MeGui produces) but unfortunately 60p is no go.
Just watch this 60p example, its smooth like a butter on the pan ....

_Al_, I must say that your shot at this little clip is the best... it's quite close to the original AVI, at least in my eyes.

Can you please tell me how to replicate your results?

I'd rather really understand what you wrote above--it's pretty advanced stuff, but I'd like to learn it, and this thread should be quite helpful for other users of the world's most popular NLE (P.E.) who have a lot of SD material they have to do something with... a more detailed explanation would be great, but if you don't have the time/interest to explain the 'why' I'll just take the 'how' you did it for now...

[johns0]

Just did a handbrake using xvid/divx in a mkv container.