What are the best settings for black and white DVD to H264?

[Emanef]

Similar to my other post (anime).... I've got a load of black and white DVD's I want to convert. Is there anything in specific I should be doing different for B&W conversions?

Thanks

[edDV]

Similar to my other post (anime).... I've got a load of black and white DVD's I want to convert. Is there anything in specific I should be doing different for B&W conversions?

Thanks

DVD PAL format or other?

B&W should be Y component only with Cb Cr at null unless you want to add tint.

Test the gray scale carefully. Commercial DVD should be scaled 16-235 (maybe with 236-255 overshoots) so be careful with 0-255 conversion issues or you may get gray blacks and/or chopped whites.

If you are going for Blu-Ray H.264, avoid rescaling to 0-255.

[Emanef]

Mostly PAL, but a few are NTSC. All DVD.

I did It's a Wonderful Life, and that had a horrible zig-zaggy blur to a lot of the motion (I've seen that on a couple of Asian NTSC DVD's I have (Flying Daggers, Zatoichi, City of Lost Souls), and am not sure what caused that.

I use Staxrip. Wouldn't that detect PAL or NTSC and convert accoridngly, keeping that setting? My TV plays back both. It's plays back like that on both my TV and PC, btw, so it's not a problem with TV compatibility.

[edDV]

Mostly PAL, but a few are NTSC. All DVD.

I did It's a Wonderful Life, and that had a horrible zig-zaggy blur to a lot of the motion (I've seen that on a couple of Asian NTSC DVD's I have (Flying Daggers, Zatoichi), and am not sure what caused that.

Both PAL and NTSC DVD use 16 for black and 235 for nominal white (236-255 overshoots allowed).

Avoid size conversion. Keep 720x480 and 720x576 as is.

Frame rate issues are being discussed in your other post.

PS: No it is Ahmed28's thread.

[jman98]

I did It's a Wonderful Life, and that had a horrible zig-zaggy blur to a lot of the motion (I've seen that on a couple of Asian NTSC DVD's I have (Flying Daggers, Zatoichi, City of Lost Souls), and am not sure what caused that.

Most Asian NTSC DVDs are interlaced and I'm guessing with H.264 that you're producing progressive output. That can be part of the problem. Also if you resize interlaced footage it can often lead to motion blurs. I'm not an expert on resizing interlaced footage. I just leave it alone and don't resize just to avoid this problem, but I just wanted to point out that this could be what's causing it.

Although the specific Asian DVDs you listed should not have this, I do have to warn you that Shaw Brothers DVDs are infamous for all of the ones in Asia being PAL->NTSC conversions and this has some weird ghosting and motion artifacts.
Shaw Brothers DVDs sold outside of Asia may be straight encodes from the 24 fps sources and not have these problems. Nobody knows why the Asian Shaw Brothers DVDs are PAL->NTSC conversions, but they are.

[Emanef]

Ah, ok, that makes sense. Is it possible to have interlaced H264? I can't find an option for it in Staxrip.

[edDV]

Ah, ok, that makes sense. Is it possible to have interlaced H264? I can't find an option for it in Staxrip.

"Interlace h.264" is a work in progress. It is possible but not likely to be played easily or be standard stable. For interlace, VC-1 has been standardized by SMPTE but the current emphasis is on max quality for pros, not tight compression for distribution. The pros need stable standards before they will commit valuable content. That is the role of SMPTE.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VC-1
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/howto/articles/vc1techoverview.aspx
http://www.smpte.org/news/pr/view?item_key=a135f13b173a982bb71f1cd3ee4403671fcf2057

[manono]

I did It's a Wonderful Life, and that had a horrible zig-zaggy blur to a lot of the motion (I've seen that on a couple of Asian NTSC DVD's I have (Flying Daggers, Zatoichi, City of Lost Souls), and am not sure what caused that.

As jman98 said, depending whether your source DVD is PAL or NTSC you have field blending issues due to bad standards conversions. For some of the NTSC DVDs it may not be that and a simple IVTC can take care of it. I have the Chinese House Of Flying Daggers and it had a bad PAL2NTSC conversion that only unblending could fix. You'd better learn how to use the AviSynth unblenders (and IVTCs) as just deinterlacing is a lousy solution.

It's easy to check if the B&W DVDs have been properly greyscaled or not:

ColorYUV(Analyze=True)

is one way to check (when using an AviSynth script).

Nobody knows why the Asian Shaw Brothers DVDs are PAL->NTSC conversions, but they are.

That's easy. A PAL master was prepared first, perhaps for a mainland Chinese DVD, perhaps for a European DVD. Then, rather than pay for a fresh NTSC master they used that same 25fps master for the NTSC DVD.

[Emanef]

Thanks manono. That's exactly what the problem is for those few (as shown in the picture on this page http://www.doom9.org/ivtc-tut.htm)

Not used Avisynth before, other than via Staxrip. I'll see if I can work out how to apply a filter.

[manono]

You talking about that interlacing picture? It doesn't really help much with your problem as you get interlacing with both hard telecined movies (3 progressive and 2 interlaced in every 5 frame sequence) as well as with the field blended stuff (usually 5 in 6 frames interlaced if PAL2NTSC). That tutorial does have some pointers on how to spot the different kinds of sources. The bottom line is that if you're dealing with non-US movie studio DVDs, anything and everything can happen and you just have to learn some AviSynth to be able to handle them properly.