Frame rate & interlacing on imported DV .avi files

[jagabo]

Hmm, I wonder if some of that hardware actually uses yadif?

I think most do something very similar to yadif. Weave where there's no motion, bob where there is.

[2Bdecided]

Without wishing to derail a highly useful and on topic thread (where did the DV guy go? I think he was happy with his H.264 BFF transcodes and has probably burnt all his DV tapes and deleted his DV-AVIs by now - shudder - ) can I point out that, while H.265/HEVC supports interlaced video, it doesn't include any tools for efficiently encoding interlaced video. MPEG-2 had some. H.264 had some more. HEVC has none. It encodes fields as half height frames, and has flags that say "this was a top field, this was a bottom field". That's it.

1080p50/1080p60 will be typical minimum receiver specs for HEVC. There will be STBs that will re-interlace it if you really need to, certainly for older 1080i-only HDTVs.


Anyway, back on topic: Natively interlaced video should be archived interlaced. End of.

Video should be delivered as interlaced or progressive depending on what works best for the chosen delivery medium, and to a large extent that choice is independent from the source. Smooth motion requires interlacing on DVD. Interlacing is unusable on YouTube. Hence I deinterlace 50i sources for YouTube, and I re-interlace 50p sources for DVD. I try to avoid changing things unless I have to.

Some of you guys could start an argument with a mirror

Cheers,
David.

[LMotlow]

2Bdecided, thank you for summarizing the case (even if you did get up earlier than I did and beat me to it). You're probably correct about the o.p.. wherever he may be, whose wife will have to learn to work with something other than discs. Or perhaps the mrs will prevail? (mine usually does, lol!).

[newpball]

...can I point out that, while H.265/HEVC supports interlaced video, it doesn't include any tools for efficiently encoding interlaced video. MPEG-2 had some. H.264 had some more. HEVC has none. It encodes fields as half height frames, and has flags that say "this was a top field, this was a bottom field". That's it.

Mildly encouraging, but I fear that with this open door the interlace bug will continue.

Anyway, back on topic: Natively interlaced video should be archived interlaced. End of.

Totally agree!

But also:

Natively progressive sources should be archived progressive.

And also, MPEG-2 and H.264 are NOT archive formats.

Video should be delivered as interlaced or progressive depending on what works best for the chosen delivery medium, and to a large extent that choice is independent from the source. Smooth motion requires interlacing on DVD. Interlacing is unusable on YouTube. Hence I deinterlace 50i sources for YouTube, and I re-interlace 50p sources for DVD. I try to avoid changing things unless I have to.

Exactly!

More or less anything delivered over the internet is/will be/shall be delivered progressive.

[jagabo]

And also, MPEG-2 and H.264 are NOT archive formats.

They are if that's all you have to start with.

[newpball]

And also, MPEG-2 and H.264 are NOT archive formats.

They are if that's all you have to start with.

Of course if you start with that you preserve it in that format.

But MPEG-2 and H.264 should not be the choice when capturing video or film.

[poisondeathray]

And also, MPEG-2 and H.264 are NOT archive formats.

They are if that's all you have to start with.

Of course if you start with that you preserve it in that format.

But MPEG-2 and H.264 should not be the choice when capturing video or film.

You refer specifically to low quality "h.264", 8bit , 4:2:0 subsampled, long GOP, low bitrates.

But h.264 is a very broad category.

For example there is a lossless h.264 variant used for screen capturing (x264 has this ability), and archival purposes (mathematically lossless). It even offers the option of long GOP lossless (for temporal compression)

There are professional h.264 I-frame acquisition formats that include Panasonic AVC-Intra 100/200 10-bit 422, AVC-Ultra 12-bit 444 variants ~440Mb/s . The 200 variant yields even slightly higher quality than prores HQ (which is the standard intermediate for many professional production workflows). The 444 variant is comparable to Prores444 . These are fully professional P2 workflows, end to end support in equipment and software

[newpball]

There are professional h.264 I-frame acquisition formats that include Panasonic AVC-Intra 100/200 10-bit 422, AVC-Ultra 12-bit 444 variants ~440Mb/s . The 200 variant yields even slightly higher quality than prores HQ (which is the standard intermediate for many professional production workflows). The 444 variant is comparable to Prores444 . These are fully professional P2 workflows, end to end support in equipment and software

Yes, you are right!

[MiniDV_newb]

Hey guys
Sorry I disappeared
I came back after 24 hours to find that this had become quite an active thread
Composed a detailed response
Accidentally clicked the "back" button on my mouse and the entire response was lost
By that point it was midnight and I was comatose . . . am just getting back to this now

This whole discussion started because I was noticing what I will call "lots of jagged lines" during movement when I'm playing back the .avi files which are created when I import video from my Mini DV video camera (we all know this is caused by interlacing)

Windows Media Player did not seem to have these lines, but VLC did
Which seemed really weird to me, because I tend to look down on stock apps like WMP, and think that more community-backed, open-source programs are more likely to get it right
So my concern was: If VLC, which plays everything I've ever thrown at it, isn't able to play these videos correctly, then there's something different about these files and I want to modify them to make them more "normal" (meaning, more like the other videos I play which DON'T have this happen)
I also want to do some moderate compression while minimizing the loss of quality and also using a compression format which is fairly universal (in my current opinion, H264 meets both criteria)

Sorry if I'm being overly wordy, or overly vague, in some of my language. I've learned the hard way that in a discussion forum when a newb is dealing with subject matter experts, the newb can be ripped apart for using even minorly incorrect terminology, thus derailing the conversation and taking it WAAAY off topic

So to summarize, my plan now is to use Handbrake to re-code the .avi transfers from my MiniDV videocamera into .mp4 and using the "bff" parameter
I was quite happy with the results, from both an interlacing aspect and from a "quality loss" aspect as I could really not tell any substantial difference and when comparing identical frames from the .avi vs the .mp4 I could not see any appreciable difference (e.g. compression artifacts in the .mp4 which were worse than what was already there in the .avi)

So on the plan to do Handbrake + the bff setting to achieve the goal of reducing the chances of jagged lines during playback / compress the files with H264, does anyone have any final thoughts or specific suggestions?


And I can't help but weigh in on the issue of physical media vs mass storage device...

When I'm watching a movie I care about, in which I want to be transported into another world, I'll wait until I can watch it on Bluray, because it will give a better quality than a digital download / streaming service. There are many reasons why I like physical media, and not all of them are even technical. They're nice to give as gifts. And when there were stores like Blockbuster, it got you out of the house and interacting with other movie geeks.

But for my home movies, I still maintain that I just don't know anyone who frequently (or even occasionally) sits down on the couch for a "lean back" experience to watch home movies. Rather, they're sitting at their PC for a "lean forward" experience. Nearly all of my friends and family are NOT techies. They're watching home movies in short bursts on Facebook either on their PC or their tablet or their phone. This, sadly, is the future, although I don't even think it's inappropriate for this type of content. Like I said at the beginning, when I want to be transported into another world, I want an immersive experience, I want quality. I want 5.1 or 7.1 surround sound. I simply don't regard home movies that way.

Also, when I think about what media is most suitable for long-term archival of my home movies, I think it's simply insane to consider DVD or even Bluray. I have two large hard drives on which I keep all my stuff locally (one backing up to the other) plus a backup in the cloud. As I take new photos and video, I'm incrementally adding to this archive. About once a month I'll dump new stuff into it. Over time, as the decades progress, I'll be occasionally upgrading it as I switch to larger / more sophisticated forms of storage. And because I'm accessing it on a fairly regular basis, I'm always keeping it current. It doesn't get neglected. This strikes me as the most logical approach. When SATA hard drives are yesterday's technology, I'll be replacing them with something else and using THAT as my new archive. As long as on-premises storage technology is readily available, I'll be using whatever is relatively current to keep my archive. In the amazing year 2050, when I'm handing this over to my kids, it'll already be in a format which is usable to them, as opposed to the old film and boxes of slides which I inherited from my own father.

Sorry for the monster-sized post (I'm making up for the lengthy absence)

[newpball]

Also, when I think about what media is most suitable for long-term archival of my home movies, I think it's simply insane to consider DVD or even Bluray. I have two large hard drives on which I keep all my stuff locally (one backing up to the other) plus a backup in the cloud. As I take new photos and video, I'm incrementally adding to this archive. About once a month I'll dump new stuff into it. Over time, as the decades progress, I'll be occasionally upgrading it as I switch to larger / more sophisticated forms of storage. And because I'm accessing it on a fairly regular basis, I'm always keeping it current. It doesn't get neglected. This strikes me as the most logical approach. When SATA hard drives are yesterday's technology, I'll be replacing them with something else and using THAT as my new archive. As long as on-premises storage technology is readily available, I'll be using whatever is relatively current to keep my archive. In the amazing year 2050, when I'm handing this over to my kids, it'll already be in a format which is usable to them, as opposed to the old film and boxes of slides which I inherited from my own father.

Great strategy!

However, how that can possibly rhyme with saving a couple of bytes by compressing your valuable sources with H264 is way beyond me. I fear that your ancestors in 2050 are up for a riddle!

[MiniDV_newb]

Okay

So then what would be a more "future-proof" compression method?
I'm not exactly sure what the specs are on MiniDV files imported via WinDV (they're .avi, but I think that's just the container, not the compression method).

I want to compress them more.
I know this is considered a sin by many due to the lossy nature of compression.
I'm simply being a pragmatist. And I've looked at the loss imposed by H264 and in my layman's perspective, it's fine (ignorance is truly bliss)

Is there another compression scheme which you think will have greater compatibility in the future? If so, I'm all ears.

[poisondeathray]

Okay

So then what would be a more "future-proof" compression method?
I'm not exactly sure what the specs are on MiniDV files imported via WinDV (they're .avi, but I think that's just the container, not the compression method).

I want to compress them more.
I know this is considered a sin by many due to the lossy nature of compression.
I'm simply being a pragmatist. And I've looked at the loss imposed by H264 and in my layman's perspective, it's fine (ignorance is truly bliss)

Is there another compression scheme which you think will have greater compatibility in the future? If so, I'm all ears.

The compression for minidv is "dv" . AVI is the container, but it can also be stored in a MOV or MXF container, or "raw" DV

h264 is very compatible on a wide range of devices and will be for many years. Maybe a dozen years from now, it will be "archaic" compared to new compression schemes. (Maybe like mpeg2, but it will still be used like mpeg2. DVD's are still around, there is no reason to think blu-rays will go "poof" in a few years)

It's been mentioned, but you should archive the originals, especially if it's something important. HDD storage is cheap. Lost memories are irrecoverable

Windows Media Player did not seem to have these lines, but VLC did
Which seemed really weird to me, because I tend to look down on stock apps like WMP, and think that more community-backed, open-source programs are more likely to get it right
So my concern was: If VLC, which plays everything I've ever thrown at it, isn't able to play these videos correctly, then there's something different about these files and I want to modify them to make them more "normal" (meaning, more like the other videos I play which DON'T have this happen)

VLC should play it properly, if you activate the deinterlacer (bob or yadif 2x) . WMP will auto deinterlace DV by default