DGDecodeNV - How good is the deinterlacing? Exemples?

[Gargalash]

Hello people,
In my work flow, I have to deinterlace DVDs. I was using MvBob for a while, then I switched to Yadif. Yadif was not satisfying me and I recently tried out TGMCmod. I have found the results to be amazing, but then I have found it to be really slow as well, as you all know... Quality comes at a time price!

I have to go through a pile of DVD (over 200). I need a fast workflow. I can't slack on deinterlacing quality as the clips created will be offered over streaming full DVD size.

I have looked around and re-discovered DGDecodeNV, searched and found it was available since the last time I heard it was in creation. I know it uses nvidia PureVideo deinterlacer. I know it's supposed to be really fast for the quality it provides. I currently have an old ATI Radeon x700.

Questions:
- I read in the manual that DGDecodeNV can be used with MPEG2 files, I am assuming that this includes DVD vobs. Am I right?

- The last time I read about DGDecodeNV it was in development and someone told me that it would be even better then MVBob. How good is the PureVideo deinterlacing?

- Can you post examples of this deinterlacer at work?

- There are a lot of GPUs with CUDA and PureVideo capabilities. I have an old Athlon X2 4400+ with 3.25gig of RAM on Win XP. Can you suggest some GPUs that will be consistently speeding things up at about 200-250$ ?

Thank you very much for your time and answers!

[manono]

- I read in the manual that DGDecodeNV can be used with MPEG2 files, I am assuming that this includes DVD vobs. Am I right?

Yes, AVC, MPEG2 (which includes VOB files), and VC1.

- The last time I read about DGDecodeNV it was in development and someone told me that it would be even better then MVBob. How good is the PureVideo deinterlacing?

I don't have it so I can't comment. However, you don't just blindly deinterlace DVDs. If movies are encoded as progressive you use Forced Film. If movies are hard telecined you use Honor Pulldown Flags and IVTC in the script. Neither involves using a deinterlacer. The only time you might deinterlace is when the video was shot using interlaced 30fps video cameras.

- Can you post examples of this deinterlacer at work?

Not I, but maybe the link further below has links to examples.

- There are a lot of GPUs with CUDA and PureVideo capabilities. I have an old Athlon X2 4400+ with 3.25gig of RAM on Win XP. Can you suggest some GPUs that will be consistently speeding things up at about 200-250$ ?

Near the bottom of this page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PureVideo#Table_of_PureVideo_.28HD.29_GPUs

For specific questions you might want to talk to the developer of DGDecNV, neuron2 (Donald Graft):

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=147945

And, in case you haven't discovered it yet, here's his web page on it:

http://neuron2.net/dgmpgdecnv/dgmpgdecnv.html

[Gargalash]

manono,
thanks for your reply! I don't why, but it didn't occurred to me to check wikipedia to learn about PureVideo. It cleared things up a bit and I know what to look for. As for neuron2, I know about his website and I also started a thread at doom9.

Concerning the need for deinterlacing, I must admit I am a bit lost here.

Due to the nature of the DVDs (porn dvds, nothing old school), I guess the material does not originate from film (24fps). I have NTSC DVDs at 29,97fps and PAL at 25fps. I assume no telecining was done.

Does this means that I do have to deinterlace all the time? And my guess is that I should select "Ignore pull down flags", although there shouldn't be any pulldown flags, but again I might be all lost!

Thanks for helping

[manono]

Hehe, you said you had 200 of these things to do so, naturally, I figured were movies in the bunch. Yes, it's very possible that all yours are interlaced and have to be deinterlaced. If, during movement, every frame is interlaced (and not in the telecined 3 progressive-2 interlaced pattern), it's interlaced and not either hard or soft telecined. Unless some, particularly the Euro ones, are victims of field-blended standards conversions. Even if the deinterlacing isn't quite up to the standards of TGMCmod, I'd say your money would still be well spent in investing in a good NVidea card and DGMPGDecNV.

[Gargalash]

Thanks for the information manono!
Let me specify that this is work related (yes, I prepare video for an adult website), just to make sure you don't think I'm a crazy porn addict!

Another question: when you say "isn't quite up to the standards of TGMCmod", how close does it get to it? I'm still craving for subjective and visual opinion, I'm actually going to dig in the DGMGDecNV threads to try to find some... But's it's difficult to judge with stills, it's better with video...

[manono]

Another question: when you say "isn't quite up to the standards of TGMCmod", how close does it get to it?

As I said earlier, I have no idea how good it is. I don't even have an NVidea video card. I'm fairly sure neuron2 can either tell you or, more likely, point you to a comparison. And there are quite a few people at Doom9 that use it and can maybe tell you how it compares to one of the AviSynth deinterlacers. The reason I said that buying the card and the program would be good for you is because you have a lot of work to do, and the good AviSynth deinterlacers are just too slow to be practical.

[Gargalash]

The reason I said that buying the card and the program would be good for you is because you have a lot of work to do, and the good AviSynth deinterlacers are just too slow to be practical.

Yeah, I understand, and actually, I am just hoping that the PureVideo deinterlacing is very good because I won't have much choice, GPU is the way to go, first for deinterlacing, second for x264 encoding... and that's a whole other thing to deal with!

I'm starting to get some feedback back at doom9's forum, so far someone mentionned said it's getting very close to TGMCmod. So that's good news! Thanks!

[D_Knife]

I'm currently working on similar content. I have a total of 243 sessions to encode. I have a Nvidia GTX 260 so I spent the $15 on DGDecodeNV. I figured that even if it doesn't work to my satisfaction then at least I'm giving back for getting so much use out of DGDecode.

I'm getting between 65 -75 fps on my second pass encode, previously I was getting between 45-55fps for similar encodes. Most of my encodes are 16:9 anamorphic @ 720x480 29.97fps.

I'm using MeGui encoding to 2 channel AAC and H.264 2.2Mbps VBR 2-pass in a MKV container. My machine is a Core i7 920 with 3Gb RAM.

[Gargalash]

D_Knife, Thanks for your input!
How would you qualify the deinterlacing you get with PureVideo?

[D_Knife]

Pretty good. With the qualifier that I was using yadif quite happily before I started using DGDecodeNV.
I don't need really high deinterlacing quality if it only chugs along at a couple of fps.

Ok - I just re-read your original post and realised you had an older ATI card.

I got my GTX 260 specifically for CUDA acceleration. It's a Gigabyte GTX260 OC - it uses the refresh chip with 216 CUDA cores instead of the original 192. To my mind this gives the best bang for buck.

I'm not really sure if I can provide any de-interlacing examples either. But as I said if you have a compatible card then $15 is not a lot of money for an extra 20fps

[Gargalash]

Thanks again for your impressions, interesting.

I think money won't be an issue anymore as I discussed this with my boss and we might get a new machine just for this purpose.

While we're at it, I'm also aiming at hardware h264 encoding, don't know how yet. I would need to confirm that stuff like Elemental Accelerator produces good quality h264 video at first. If it does, and that the deinterlacing with DGDecodeNC is around very good, that would give me a very fast work flow. The pile of DVDs needing encoding might actually be around 800...