Weird conversion results

[jagabo]

The 4:3 to 16:9 conversion (http://www.mediafire.com/?z5wjujjyimm) had a lot of interlacing and blending artifacts. 2x nearest neighbor crop/enlargement:

[manono]

Yeah, it was IVTC'd when it should have been unblended with RePAL or SRestore.

[carlmart]

Yeah, it was IVTC'd when it should have been unblended with RePAL or SRestore.

This is partly my fault. This particular movie was converted from a PAL original, and I probably converted to NTSC with Procoder. Back then I didn't have a PAL DVD player or a monitor that would take PAL signals. Now I do, fortunately.

Is there a way to go back and correct some of the disaster?

Some time ago I think I had a similar case, only that time it was an original release, also Spanish, that had been authored like that from an original PAL onto NTSC, and had similar blending problems.

What was used quite effectively on that case to correct it was

Yadif(Mode=1,Order=1)
RePAL()

It worked marvels and things ended up quite well. Should I try these same filters?

This time I also looked into the ITVC examples page:

http://avisynth.org/mediawiki/TIVTC

Which case should be mine?

Besides that, on this case the original was quite grainy: that I do remember. So I wonder if we could correct some of that too.

[manono]

Is there a way to go back and correct some of the disaster?

If you have the original DVD, yes; without it, no.

Should I try these same filters?

It should work, yes, but to be sure, a sample of the source would be needed.

Which case should be mine?

For that source, none of them. IVTC is the wrong thing to do when the source is blended. Can't you tell how jerky it plays during movement? It's missing a frame every second, the result of IVTCing to 23.976fps, where the real framerate is 24.975fps. Although TIVTC can "IVTC" to 24.975, it can't do anything about the blending except to make it worse.

So I wonder if we could correct some of that too.

There are plenty of temporal cleaners. Me, I like grain and usually leave it alone, unless I have to lessen it to make a source more compressible. In such cases I use RemoveGrain, as it's very fast. In general though, the better the degraining, the slower the encoding.

Also, I question the cropping and resizing you did with that source while converting it to 16:9. Your way cropped 10 extra rows of pixels into both the top and bottom of the active video, and left the big bars on the left and right sides. Then it was resized strangely with a resulting bad aspect ratio. I'm not quite sure where you got that crop/resize, but it doesn't seem to have been from FitCD. I'd do it this way:

Crop(18,56,-14,-56)
Lanczos4Resize(688,480)
AddBorders(16,0,16,0)

That uses ITU resizing.

[carlmart]

It should work, yes, but to be sure, a sample of the source would be needed.

That might be rather unlikely.

For that source, none of them. IVTC is the wrong thing to do when the source is blended. Can't you tell how jerky it plays during movement? It's missing a frame every second, the result of IVTCing to 23.976fps, where the real framerate is 24.975fps. Although TIVTC can "IVTC" to 24.975, it can't do anything about the blending except to make it worse.

As I said, the original conversion was done with Procoder, to go from PAL to NTSC.

There are plenty of temporal cleaners. Me, I like grain and usually leave it alone, unless I have to lessen it to make a source more compressible. In such cases I use RemoveGrain, as it's very fast. In general though, the better the degraining, the slower the encoding.

I see. I am beginning to think some of the grain and what you call "jerky movement" might have been done on purpose. To make it look like old Spanish films of that time. This film was from the late '80s, so technology was developed enough to be completely smooth, and certainly grainless.

Also, I question the cropping and resizing you did with that source while converting it to 16:9. Your way cropped 10 extra rows of pixels into both the top and bottom of the active video, and left the big bars on the left and right sides. Then it was resized strangely with a resulting bad aspect ratio. I'm not quite sure where you got that crop/resize, but it doesn't seem to have been from FitCD.

You are wrong. I didn't do any cropping. I am a film producer and film director, and I abhor when TV or DVDs are re-framed to fit the screen or any other reason. What you see is the size that was on the film. That I wouldn't allow Procoder or any program to do. My main mistake in those days when that film was authored is that I didn't do it for 16:9 as I should have, and did a letterboxed 4:3. That was my fault, because until recently I viewed everything on a 32" CRT screen and I could only watch 4:3. The letterbox at least preserved the original ratio. But the ratio was not changed.

The sizing you see now, which can be changed, came like this. I use Media Info or Gspot to tell me the original size, but in this case they show me a 720:480 ratio, which I don't think it's the film's. Do you?

But I will try your suggestion, which is probably correct.

[manono]

What's this, then? Are we talking about 2 different movies:

MPEG2Source("d:\tmp\VTS_01_0.d2v")
TFM()
TDecimate()
spline36resize(720,480,0,66,0,-66)

I use Media Info or Gspot to tell me the original size, but in this case they show me a 720:480 ratio, which I don't think it's the film's.

I don't understand. All NTSC DVDs are 720x480.

[carlmart]

What's this, then? Are we talking about 2 different movies:

MPEG2Source("d:\tmp\VTS_01_0.d2v")
TFM()
TDecimate()
spline36resize(720,480,0,66,0,-66)

That had been the test I made for correcting the blend problems. Because I couldn't figure the right numbers for the resizing, in order to go from the letterbox 4:3 to 16:9, I loaded that file in AVStoDVD. Then I copied those numbers from the resultant avisynth script.

But it was a test only.

I don't understand. All NTSC DVDs are 720x480.

Or course. But won't the program tell me the ratio INSIDE the NTSC frame?

Though I do remember something on a French film I also brought here some time ago. That film was officially released in letterbox 4:3, and I wanted to resize it to 16:9. As I was using AVStoDVD, I looked at the original film and corrected the cropping until nothing was cropped away. Maybe I should do the same here, I didn't check that yet.

[manono]

But won't the program tell me the ratio INSIDE the NTSC frame?

No, although you should probably know how it's resized already. 4:3 NTSC DVDs get resized to 640x480 at playback; 16:9 DVDs to roughly 854x480. And only you can figure the real resolution with the letterboxes and pillarbars removed. That movie is roughly 1.70:1 with the black removed. I think you can tell it was cropped above and below, however it was done:

[jagabo]

DVD only supports two aspect ratios 4:3 and 16:9. Any source that is not one of those aspect ratios has black bars added to fill out the frame. GSpot reports the frame size and the display aspect ratio. It makes no attempt to account for black borders.

4:3 NTSC DVDs get resized to 640x480 at playback; 16:9 DVDs to roughly 854x480.

Note that this is only a logical resizing. The player doesn't actually resize the video from a 720x480 frame buffer to a 640x480 frame buffer then output the resized image. It just changes the timing of the video DAC to output the correct DAR. Upscaling players probably decode to a 720x480 frame then work with a few scan lines at a time for upscaled digital output.

[carlmart]

That movie is roughly 1.70:1 with the black removed.

That should be about right. European films were usually 1.66:1, and that is the ratio of Super 16 film, which was a Swedish invention. I wonder if that Spanish film was not shot in Super 16.

Right now I don't think European films follow that ratio rule anymore.

In any case, you are right. I will set the ratio "by eye".

Today I was searching the web, looking for some torrents for that film. I found one, an avi file.

It's downloading as we speak, but from the little I have seen the image quality is much worst than mine, even when resized. The cropping is even worst. The movement IS jerky on that one too. Now I quite believe it was done on purpose to imitate journals from the 30s and 40s from the Spanish Civil War. Probably they wanted to do it in black & white, but that would have kept spectators away, so they used color film.

[manono]

The movement IS jerky on that one too. Now I quite believe it was done on purpose to imitate journals from the 30s and 40s from the Spanish Civil War.

I don't believe that for a second. It's just another incompetent encoder not knowing how to handle a blended PAL2NTSC conversion DVD properly.

[carlmart]

OK. Now that the avi torrent is down, I am trying to trim the same piece I already uploaded from this version.

But I am getting the following error from AvsP:

avisource:could not decompress frame 0.

The script I am loading is very simple:

AVISource("D:\dir...\subdir...\name.avi")

Why isn't it loading?

[jagabo]

Try DirectShowSource() instead.

[carlmart]

Try DirectShowSource() instead.

Thanks. It did work. Just to learn about it: is it because the file is compressed that avisource does not work?

The trimmed avi piece is already uploaded.

http://www.mediafire.com/?2tjzmhmmngj

What do you think? Do you see the jerky movement is still there?

There are no blending artifacts, but the frame was trimmed away.

In general I think I should process my files, don't you agree?

[jagabo]

Try DirectShowSource() instead.

Thanks. It did work. Just to learn about it: is it because the file is compressed that avisource does not work?

AviSource() uses AviSynth's internal AVI file reader/splitter and VFW decoders. DirectShowSource() uses Windows' Avi reader/splitter, and DirectShow decoders. For some reason your VFW decoder for that particular codec/file wasn't working.

The new file is nearly free of blending artifacts (about as good as one can get currently) and showed no evidence of duplicate or dropped frames.

[manono]

Just to learn about it: is it because the file is compressed that avisource does not work?

Maybe it's because it's not an AVI. Or did you reencode it already?

Do you see the jerky movement is still there?

There's no jerky movement. It plays smooth as silk.

There are no blending artifacts

That's because it was made from the 25fps PAL DVD. The blending was only introduced during the conversion to NTSC.

In general I think I should process my files, don't you agree?

I have no idea what that means. Maybe jagabo does.

[carlmart]

Maybe it's because it's not an AVI. Or did you reencode it already?

What I uploaded it's not an avi. I don't know how to split a piece from the original file except the way I did, using HCenc and make it into an m2v file. No filter.

Now if you are asking if the original file is an avi...

That's because it was made from the 25fps PAL DVD. The blending was only introduced during the conversion to NTSC.

OK. That in fact is corrected using TFM + TCDecimate. Yadif and Repal don work on it.

I have no idea what that means. Maybe jagabo does.

What I mean is that I think the files I had on my DVD seem to have more resolution than the avi file, after you correct the blending. In any case that might arguable, as none of the files have much resolution anyway.

What might be done to improve on the resolution? Remove the grain, increase the sharpness?

[carlmart]

Perhaps in the future in can get to understand a bit better what are the problems on that video file I submitted above. For now I gave up.

On the last try I used nothing, no filter to process the video file and see what I got. Just resize it to full 16:9, as my DVD was letterboxed 4:3.

What I got was a jumpy movement that I can't understand why it does happen. The original DVD is not jumpy or anything. The original image, even if zoomed on my TV, looks better than the resized one, no jumpy movement. This has never happened before on other resizings: the converted image looked better than the zoomed one.

What can influence the converted movement if I am not doing anything to modify that?