how can i get stable end product

[mrgain]

When playing back a sample of some hi8 analog footage captured through composite cables with a hardware mpeg2 encoder i am seeing vibration in the footage on the sides.can i elimanate this with a filter in my editor upon re-encode?

[daamon]

Where do you ultimately intend to view the captured footage? Given you're capturing to MPEG2, I'm guessing you want to put it to DVD for viewing on TV.

If that's the case, and if the "vibration" at the side isn't too wide, then this "vibration" won't be visible on a standard TV due to the overscan area.

"Overscan" is the seal that holds the TV screen in place and covers a small part of the picture.

[mrgain]

Yes thats correct dvd for tv viewing and i understand what your saying but what if its played on a widescreen tv and this footage is in 4x3 aspect ratio,that leaves the edges exposed correct?Also i want to give you a little more info....i was having trouble before with the thumbnails (stills) being slightly distorted at the bottom that i created with my editing program.I changed to a non compliant dvd bitrate and it has helped keep the sides striaght top to bottom,and i plan on re-encoding to a lower "compliant" bitrate after capture.

[daamon]

I'd say try a sample on your widescreen TV to see if you can see the "vibration". If not, no issue.

If you do, you could try capturing to DV AVI or AVI using the huffyuv codec (both excellent for editing and avoids uncompressed video = MASSIVE file sizes).

Once you've got AVI, you can crop the sides in VirtualDub or possibly overlay black borders to cover the "vibration", but keeping the correct resolution and aspect ratio. I'm not sure if VirtualDub allows you to overlay - you may nned to use something else.

From there, either save to AVI (same codec) and encode to MPEG2, or frameserve and encode to MPEG2.

Can you post an image of the problem you're having with the stills?

As for "a non-compliant DVD bitrate" - what bitrate did you go to, and what was it previously? DVD allows a range up to 9.8Mbps - I don't know if a lower limit is prescribed, but I've encoded using VBR with a minimum of 500.

[guns1inger]

If you don't do a vertical resize then you should be able to crop the sides in virtualdub, then use the resize filter's letterbox function to replace the missing pixels with black. Because you don't vertically resize you should be able to do this without screwing the interlacing.

[mrgain]

Sorry it took me so long to reply again.Anyway i worked on it some more and i found out why the sides appeared to vibrate so much when viewed in my editing program,I had the bitrate at 12,000 Kbps.When I lowered this down to 10,080 it looked much better,although there is still some very minor inward distortion on the one side.I recorded a sample at the 10,080 and then later re-encoded it at 9,500 this took forever but the the quality of the image is outstanding compared to what i have been seeing.The audio is in sync also and that was one of my worries.The only gripe i have is the one side seems to have that inward distorion that if its viewed at the 4x3 aspect ratio where the edges are visible on widescreen may cause the image to appear offset.It really sucks because Im doing this conversion for my brother (I have about 20 tapes to do) and his dvd player is too old to recognize DL disks or mp3 tracks if i want to lay my own music down.I think I will take my dvd player over to his house this weekend and see what they look like on his tv while I convince him to upgrade his player.The advice on croping the sides with virtualdub sounds like something that could help me and I will definately do some reading on that,THANKS FOR THE TIP GUYS.

[thecoalman]

Here's a sample, this is normal and will appear on just about any footage captured from a analog source. Note the left and right are fairly clean but noise appears at the bottom in this shot:




As far as why it became better with the lower bitrate is because the less bitrate you use the more detail that is lost especially where there is a lot of motion. End effect is the reencode smoothed these areas out a little. As Guncslinger suggested best to get rid of it is to crop and add borders or mask it depending on the software you are using.

[mrgain]

Very insightfull indeed,that actually makes sense to me and i'm a newb at this stuff.I dont know what the difference is between forced primary and allow overlay but changing to the forced setting seemed to help a lot.Just maybe if i can figure out how to "crop,mask or add borders" to this i may be seeing some light at the end of the tunnel.I am quickly finding out why they say it takes alot of computer power to edit video.By the way it sure is annoying how fragmented these files get in ntfs and how long it takes to defrag them.