Star Wars Conversions-Hit me with your best shot...

[dphirschler]

Hey vhelp, how about posting some captures from your "Showgirls" LD... hehehe.. :P


Darryl

[Perro Grande]

@Vhelp --

Are the hatches you speak of a pattern that appears on the captured image similar to a crosshatching effect -- especially noticeably on brighter scenes?

Anything like this?

[Gary Lightfoot]

Yes - the Showgirls crosshatching issue must be remedied first, so please post all relevant images.

Do you find the crosshatching prevalent on flesh tones by any chance? Posting images of those must of course be a priority.. :P

Gary.

[Mythos2002]

I only notice the cross hatches on video files when I capture with S-Video. These are only visible on my PC Monitor and not on the TV. However, if I capture with composite, I don't see any cross hatching at any time.

Mythos

[vhelp]

hi guys

I didn't realize how important (and serious) tha "hatches" were to you all - G, I'm really sorry

I'll try and post some pics when I get the chance (and pay my bill for it ) ..so,
until then, you'll have to wait or unless I find something temporary host them.


@ Perro Grande,

wow.. that's not the same kind of "hatching" that I was refering to.. actually, that
looks even worse maybe !!
I definately have to U/L a pic soon, showing mine.
.
.
I didn't want to show my "show girls" pic, because I don't want to taint the
timeline w/ this Star Wars thread. I'll post a separate thread shortly, because
I think this "hatching" (and others) deserve one, with respect to LD project :P
so, please look out for a thread/post elsewhere's from me shortly.

I also want to rule out the RCA vs. S-Video (mythos's suggestions) too, before
I committ to anything definate on the "hatching" issues. Maybe there is more
than one form of "hatching" - - I don't know

I'll be doing some LD playing around as well as testing the rest of this evening/night.

Till then, take it easy all,
-vhelp 2454

[flaninacupboard]

feel free to post whatever images you wish! i think i already tainted it with lord of the rings screenshots...? been so long i can't really remember!

[grimby]

I'm glad you like the CLD-V2600 model. I can't beleive that its quality is
much better than my CLD-D701.

well the difference is the V2600 is an industrial model and the D701 is of course commercial. i read in several places that those industial models by pioneer are built even better than the "Elite" series. and that's a good thing for us since they were probably manufactured about 10 years ago.

as for the crosshatching issue, i have a couple of ideas. first of all, it's possible that the hatches are present on the LD source. it's also possible that using the s-video cable to capture is the reason. i read yesterday somewhere that in order to output the s-video signal from the player, it first has to go through a 2-D comb filter, which of course would be outdated technology than is present in our latest PC's. using the composite output might be better since the player isn't doing anything with the video signal before it sends it out.

just a thought.

[vhelp]

@ dphirschler,

Hey vhelp, how about posting some captures from your "Showgirls" LD... hehehe..

I've never seen so much nudity in a movie like that ..chesty things flying
(I mean, floppy) around like crazy and so on, and so forth anyways..


@ all,

I found that as it turns out, from all my testings, (ie, RCA vs. S-Video) I've
concluded that it is in fact, the LD movie disk itself, and NOT the player or the
video connections that is causing the "hatches". In fact, I'd like to refer to them
as "checkers" instead. anyways..
.
.
My conclusions are based on using another LD movie, "Top Gun". And, although
it was a fullscreen version, I made it 2.35 for test purposes, and I noticed
that there were no serious "checker" as "show girls". That test was based
on my ATI-TV Wonder card, and I used both RCA and S-Video.
.
.
My 2nd conclusion was that it is better to capture (whatever device) using
the S-Video (not the RCA) connection. That's my honest OP for the CLD-V2600
model. I'm sure that other models would fair as well too.

So, now that I know that it's the LD movie disk that has the "checkers"
imbeded in it, I'm left in confusion. When I see it on my TV set, it's perfect,
and even when I view it inside my vdub captrue window.. there is no "checkers"
to be found.
That leads me to believe that it's the capture device that is doing something
wrong. And, it makes me believe that the video source is being Interpolated
or something like that, either by the capture card or driver. I wonder if I
used various forms of Interpolating tricks or resizing filtering to fix this. But
I don't thing that will help, because it seems to be embeded inside the video
once captured. So, I'm stumped why "checkers" show up in some LD disks
and not others

-vhelp

[Mythos2002]

I wonder if it is the noise reduction of the LD Player causing the hatches. I remember someone saying a while back to turn off the noise reduction of the LD Player because something like its digital comb filter (I guess that relates to noise reduction) is going to be inferior compared to those on our TV's and other devices. Grimby also just mentioned the 2d comb filter being outdated. When I have time, I'll test with the LD Player's noise reduction filter on and then off.

Mythos

[vhelp]

@ mythos,

..Grimby also just mentioned the 2d comb filter being outdated. When I have time, I'll test with the LD Player's noise reduction filter on and then off.

If memory serves me, you have the CLD-D503 model. My D701 should be very similar
to yours, maybe higher, but I don't recall any buttons or options to turn off/on
any filtering, and mine did not come w/ a remote (though it was suppose to)
But, then, I only used it a couple of times. (still in my bedroom, since I didn't
have time to play w/ it after all)

w/ my CLD-V2600 model, (limited features, but a good strong unit) my conclusions
were, that if I poped in another LD disk, depending on THAT disk, there were
"checkers" in the captured source, or not. "top gun" had none, while "show girls"
had lots of them.

My guess is like this..

First, it depends on:
* the LD movie (and it's encoded method) and

Second, depends on either:
* the capture card and its circuitry; external SW filtering; or other device.

After testing the RCA vs. S-Video connections of the CLD-V2600 model, I
concluded that the S-Video was THE way to go. Even my final encodes were
smaller filesize compared to the RCA captures.

-vhelp

[Gary Lightfoot]

I seem to remember reading about the comb filter in tvs today being better than on most laserdisc players, so that's why the effect is minimised on the tv.

The dot crawl I get is hardly noticable on the tv, but pretty obvious on a pc monitor. There probably isn't a comb filter in the pc...

Gary.

[Perro Grande]

Checkerboard is a good description of the problem.

For me, this occurs ONLY using S-Video, never with composite. One time, I found a web page describing the cause of this stuff in svideo signals, but I've never been able to find it again... Something to do with Y and C overlap, I think.

I have noticed it both in VHS and LD players when connected to my computer (via capture) and to my HDTV. When I connect these devices to a crappy ol' 1990 TV, I see none of the checkerboard effect.

In fact, for LD and VHS, I just use composite for both capture and connection to my big TV (Of course, for HD and DVD signals, I use component video). The checkerboard effect is way too noticeable. It is even visible on the blue device setup screen from my VCR and LD player (and yes, I've tried several players and cables).

I'll dig in to this problem some more and post what I find. I'd love to be able to actually use SVideo for stuff!

[vhelp]

.
.

The dot crawl I get is hardly noticable on the tv, but pretty obvious on a pc monitor. There probably isn't a comb filter in the pc...

yea, but what about capture cards (and dv devices, i.e. ADVC) - - do these
devices all have a 3D-Comb filter ?? .. ..because I can't spot them on my
ATI-TV Wonder (ATW) when I capture it, or preview it.

Still, from my experience w/ my CLD-V2600, and capturing w/ my ATW card
through S-Video yielded the best quality.

I'm still doing more testing w/ these toys of mine, but I don't wont to commit
to final results w/out being sure.

[FulciLives]

yea, but what about capture cards (and dv devices, i.e. ADVC) - - do these
devices all have a 3D-Comb filter ?? .. ..because I can't spot them on my
ATI-TV Wonder (ATW) when I capture it, or preview it.

Still, from my experience w/ my CLD-V2600, and capturing w/ my ATW card
through S-Video yielded the best quality.

I'm still doing more testing w/ these toys of mine, but I don't wont to commit
to final results w/out being sure.

Very few capture devices have a good 3D-comb filter. Some of the Canopus products do like the ADVC-300 (but not the ADVC-100). The Panasonic line of stand alone DVD recorders have it as do some other models (I think SONY does).

In short I don't think the comb filters in most capture cards are all that great.

- John "FulciLives" Coleman

P.S.
LD is a composite video format. A composite video connection should give better quality (vs S-Video) unless the comb filter in the LD player is better than that in the capture card. If you are getting better quality from LD with the S-Video connection then that points to the capture card having a poor comb filter since LD is "old" technology so by default the comb filter in a LD player surely can't be considered high quality by today's standards.

[vhelp]

Hi Fulci,

If you are getting better quality from LD with the S-Video connection then that points to the capture card having a poor comb filter since LD is "old" technology so by default the comb filter in a LD player surely can't be considered high quality by today's standards.

You brought up an interesting point.. After all my ATW is pretty old too though.
4 years is pretty old to me, for a capture card. But, I have an idea. Since my
Osprey-210 is a fairly new card, I'm going to setup that one up on my other
pc and see what kind of result I get from it. That's a card that let me capture
w/ ZERO frame drops and good quality. I will be interesting to note how well
it performs w/ respect to my "checkers" issue among other thing.

Note, my "checkers" look is not the same as the "hatche" look. So, there are
more than 1 issue w/ strange quality outputs.

Also, I just finished some more tests w/ another LD disk "basic instinct" and
again, there are no "checkers" to be found (other than mynute bits, which
I'm not gonna mention) and aquality is good. But, as I said in another
post, they did a louzy job of transfering this movie onto LDs.

Also, again I stress the fact that VHS and LD's have no macroblocks in them.
It's great to see things like really fast panning and jets and cars etc etc zip
by and there is no macroblocks to be found :P

I wish they never stopped transfering movies onto LD's

-vhelp

[Perro Grande]

That is very true -- VHS and LD will have no macroblocks. None. They simply can't.

Personally, it always comes down to a tradeoff. The Component Video of a DVD player provides better crispness than the "soft" look of the composite LD player. The penalty, however, is blocking...

Personally, I find macroblocks to be more annoying than the softness. This is extremely noticeable when trying to watch sports via digital cable (which is repleat with macroblocks).

As for the checkboard issue, I'm just going to stick to composite until I have more information and a better understanding of the cause of the pattern.

[flaninacupboard]

One thing to consider, the S-video filter in your LD player is designed to deal with the video bandwidth found on LD - lower than in a normal video signal. For PAL the difference is LD at 5Mhz and broadcast at 5.5, i think NTSC is 3.58mhz against 4.43mhz. so it may be you have a comb filter that is bad at coping with lower bandwidth signals.

[vhelp]

I thought I would post this tid-bit here, FWIW because I found it very interesting
in my LD endavers.

I discovered that my analog captures from my ATI-TV Wonder (ATW) card
produces very little (if any) line noise in my captures, when my source medium
is a LD player hooked up to my TBC-100 card. But, put a DVD, satellite or
VHS in front, and thers line-noise madness. I posted this in another thread
topic earlier. But, I thougth it was very interesting on the discussions regarding:

* Comb Filters

I was thinking that the reason for my lack of line noise was due to the older
electronics in my LD plyr. I'm not expert in these things, but I thought that
it would make for a good theory and consiquentually, I thought it would
be worth mentioning here (maybe for discusion or not)

Also, on the topic of hatches (or "checkers", in my case) its definately the
LD movie disk, and how the data was produced onto it. I found other LD
movies to show very limited "checkers", and the only movie that seems to
have a lot of it is "show girls".

But, I think I'll be doing much more testing w/ my ATI and TBC-100 cards
and maybe throw in a SIMA SED-CM or SIMA SCC device

And, FWIW.. so far, my ATW card seems to produce more color levels than
my ADVC-100 does. But, nothing beets the advc for it's audio sync perfection
and ZERO noise levels. So, I'm not discounting this device by no means :P
I'm just simply testing other avenues of methods.

-vhelp

[LeedsStriker]

I am capping my Star Wars tapes to XVid, i will post a minute of the film. It is quite good quailty. 640 x 480.

[vhelp]

yes.. post your sample(s) here.

I was just thinking about making a post for people here to post a sample of
their work. It would be nice if others would do the same here too.

FWIW.. I'm still refining my LD captures, though I'm working mostly w/ my
ATI-TV Wonder card (ATW)
.
Today, I went out to compusa and purchased some monster cables. I read
on their package how one of their S-Video cords (#2 and #3) eliminates the
.DOT crawl, among other things. And, I'll do just about anything to test and
get the best captures froms my analog capture cards (ie, my ATW card)
.
So far, I've got the noise level almost down to zero, w/ the exception of noticing
those black wavy lines (you can spot them in the blue screen) but they are
almost gone now.

For those curious, here's my current setup at this time, using my new monster
cables #2 and #3 wires (these are 1meter long) - :

* --> LD(#2/#3) --> SIMA SCC --> TBC-100 --> ATW

-vhelp

[LeedsStriker]

http://jamieleedsunited.tripod.com/newhope.zip

(U need to right click and save as)

This is just a minute of the opening crawl. I can post any scene u want really. Just ask.

[Karyudo]

http://jamieleedsunited.tripod.com/newhope.zip

@LeedsStriker:

Couple of comments:

1. You've got the fullscreen (i.e. not the full picture, which would be widescreen) version there. For me that would be completely unacceptable; you may feel otherwise. But I think you'll find the general consensus around these parts is that widescreen is the only way to fly.

2. Your blacks aren't very black. Maybe that's your tape? But you should be able to adjust brightness or contrast or gamma to fix that a bit.

3. Have you worked on IVTC? I didn't check very carefully, but I'd say maybe not.

The current absolute state-of-the-art would be:

PAL-spec WS LDs --> Pioneer CLD-D925 or CLD-2950 or DVL-919 LD player --> 9- or 10-bit cap card --> HuffYUV codec --> Avisynth, for cropping, aspect ratio upsampling, and Decomb for IVTC --> CCE for MPEG-2 encoding.

OK, I haven't covered the audio, but throw pretty much any sound card at the problem, use S/PDIF, and you're good.

You get all those things going, and you're going to have about the very best conversion possible.

Karyudo

[Gorgoloch]

Hi,

Forgive the newbie/amateur question, but I was looking for some clarification on IVTC. I have been working on ANH and have a pretty good DVD of it right now (still looking to improve, haven't done 16:9 as my TV isn't that, but will probably do that and test on a friends).

So far I have not checked of the Inverse Telecine option on TMPGEnc as I don't know exactly what it does. I've done some reading up on it, but since most of my reasing (and typing) comes late at night things get jumbled. In short, I'm wondering if I want to check this off. But in long, I'm wondering why.

Do I want to take my AVI and make it 24 fps? I thought I wanted it at 29.9. What does this do? I'm in NTSC land if that's imporant.

Also, has anyone used the Subtitler filter for VDub? I used it for Greedo and liked the results (thanks for the font guys), but if there's a better way to do it I'd be happy to learn. So far I haven't used AviSynth as the filter seemed easier, but as always that makes me think that it isn't as good.

Sorry for potentially amateur question, but this forum seems to like to discuss and help

Thanks,
Gorgoloch

[Karyudo]

Do I want to take my AVI and make it 24 fps?

In a word, yes! The original source material is film -- which is 24 fps -- and with IVTC, it's possible to get back to 24 progressive frames from 29.97 telecined frames. With a pure progressive 24 fps AVI, your MPEG-2 encoder will be able to do a better job, alloting more bitrate per frame. Flags set in the playback stream will tell the DVD player how to display the frames correctly on a 29.97 interlaced TV.

Also, has anyone used the Subtitler filter for VDub?

I don't think there's anything inherently bad about using that filter, but writing an Avisynth script is a more elegant way of going about it. I don't think the end result will look much/any different.

Karyudo

[Gorgoloch]

@Karyudo

Thanks for the info. That makes sense to me. Next compile will use it. Just wish it didn't take a day to convert....

Another quick question, has anyones used Canopus Procoder? Been doing some reading on other MPEG encoders and was just curious if anyone here has used it for LD to DVD transfer.


Gorgoloch

[LeedsStriker]

Yeah, i only have the full screen ones but the widescreen oes are out in sep. What's itvc mean? The sound is perfect stereo. Used a very good sound card. It's ok for 11mb a minute though isn't it? I mean i only want them on PC not on DVD. And Iv'e worked it out 11MB a min allows me over 6 hours on DVD so i can put all 3 on 1 disc.

[flaninacupboard]

Couple of comments:


The current absolute state-of-the-art would be:

PAL-spec WS LDs --> Pioneer CLD-D925 or CLD-2950 or DVL-919 LD player --> 9- or 10-bit cap card --> HuffYUV codec --> Avisynth, for cropping, aspect ratio upsampling, and Decomb for IVTC --> CCE for MPEG-2 encoding.

Except if you're using PAL LD's, they're not IVTC'ed, the 24fps progressive is just sped up to 25fps

Striker, your clip doesn't seem to be available anymore?

[psklenar]

...
The current absolute state-of-the-art would be:

PAL-spec WS LDs --> Pioneer CLD-D925 or CLD-2950 or DVL-919 LD player --> 9- or 10-bit cap card --> HuffYUV codec --> Avisynth, for cropping, aspect ratio upsampling, and Decomb for IVTC --> CCE for MPEG-2 encoding.
...

I've been following these SW (and other LD) conversion threads for a year or more now ... a couple of questions if I may, but first a listing of what I have to work with ...

+ NTSC widescreen SW LD's.
+ Pioneer CLD-3080 (*not* the problematic 3090!) - works great, I'm the original owner.
+ I *just* bought a Canopus ADVC-50 specificaly for this effort (I have no need of D>A & the reported lack of dropped frames & excellent sync sold me on this one) - rebuilding my older PC; PIII/1.4GHz, 512MB, an 80GB HD and a 250GB HD (both ATA133, 7200RPM, 8MB buffer), ADVC-50, Adaptec Firewire, XP HE SP1 and *just* the bare minimum s/w necessary to capture and convert my LDs.

Now my questions:
+ If I understand correctly, the Canopus ADVC's have a built in Codec, thus eliminating the need for the HuffyUV in your list above?

+ By going the AviSynth/CCE route, do I need to seperately demux/remux the audio that I see so many other people talking about when they discuss converting from AVI to DVD?

Thanks,
pat----

[flaninacupboard]

The ADVC is a hardare DV encoder, which obviously you need a software DV decoder for.

The ADVC will record 48khz audio along with your video, all you need to do it open your .avi in Vdub, do whatever cutting/splicing you need to do (sidebreaks!) then set the audio to driect stream copy, and save .wav. you can now encode your .wav into whatever format you like, logical choice being .ac3 at ~256kbps. you then simply drop your .m2v from CCE and your .ac3 into your authoring app and it will create your .vobs.

[dphirschler]

To answer the question about audio. I have three reasons why I demux audio.

1) The audio on the LD is 44.1 kHz. I need to upsample it to 48 kHz for the DVD. So I demux it and upsample it.

2) The mpeg-2 video (for ntsc) is encoded without audio. I add the AC3 or PCM (wav) in the authoring stage.

3) The audio got out of sync by one frame when I IVTC'd, so I added an extra black frame to the beginning of the video. Keeping it seperate helped me to sync it.

On the subject of the Greedo subtitles. I used an AVIsynth script to add them in because I wanted a slight drop shadow. I don't remember the VirtualDub filter goiving that option.


Darryl