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

[menace]

DJRumpy: sorry to belabor the issue, but when you say you leave it telecined, does this mean you leave it so you get the comb lines or are you using another filter scheme to get rid of them? I have just completed Star wars and ESB using IVTC and I get random lines that although aren't that bad, aren't that great either. Any thoughts?

Also, for anyone else--every now and again the synch goes off and then by the end of the clip its back?? any way to fix this? I've read all the gradual synch solutions but it would seem that i would have to do that several times throughout the course of the movies--too much effort in my opinion--just wondering if someone new a better way is all...

[flaninacupboard]

yes when he says he keeps it teleclined he means he keeps it at 29.97 fps, which will have "comb lines" on a progressive display device such as a pc monitor, but these are invisble on an interlaced display, like a TV.
again, random lines left over won't appear on a normal TV, only a progressive display device like a progressive tv with component connections, or a plasma display, or again a pc monitor.
loss of synch in star wars is more to do with redubbing and the vintage of the movie than your capture procedure i daresay

[vhelp]

hi menace,

The only way to be sure about those left-over lines (LL) (Interlace) is to go into
the captured AVI file using vdub, and inside the time-line video window,
got to that scene that you recall seeing those LL's and see if the 3,2 pattern
breaks up.. ie, you may see something like this:

3,2 3,2 3,2 2,2 3,2 3,2 3,2 3,2 3,2 3,2 3,2 3,2 2,2

or something similar. If you notice during a scene change that an Interlace
shows up in the middle of the 3,2 then you've found your problems, and
can't do any thing to fix it, since it's already in the movie itself. But, you
can "try" and fix it w/ different threshold values (not recommended) cause
it will effect the whole movie. Just live w/ those minor LL's.

Now, if it turns out that it's NOT the source ie, the AVI you just captured,
then it's the IVTC's fault. No IVTC is 100% accurate. I suspect it is a bug,
or something, and has to be worked on in a later version. Donald Graft
is the creater of "decomb.dll" and last I heared, (on kvcd) he (and sh0dan)
are working on it now, though most of the core is Donald's.

There is really not that much you can do w/ your final encode. Leave it as
it is, and hope for a better update to "decomb.dll" !!

I DO know how you feel. Yesterday, I captured some of the new Sci-Fi's
movie, "River runs..." and though in WS, and nice (fair) quality, I would
get those blastid LL's - Rats!! They only occured during a scene change.
Right after the scene changes, you can see the LL.

-vhelp

[flaninacupboard]

i just finished converting clerks from laserdisc which was teleclined, and i used TMPGencs' built in IVTC function, and i see no problems at all. the thing is though TMPGencs' pattern is user adjustable (don't know how to operate it, just know it's possible!) so you could track down the errors and fix them yourself.

[menace]

hmmm I wonder if this is an indicator that tmpgenc's IVTC is more adaptive than Vdub's adaptive IVTC? In the posts i've read previously it always seemed to be the opposite, of course if you had a clean source maybe the IVTC process worked like it wa ssupposed to and didn't have any flip flops in the 3,3,3,2,2 sequence.

So far I have star wars and empire ready to author onto dvd's and feel confident that I have done all that I can in preserving quality in the transfer (30 hours a piece to encode ) Thanks for all the input guys!

maybe in 2020 when lucas releases his digitally-remastered-director-enhanced-producer-changed-cameraman's-doctor's nieces best friend's-favourite-special-edition, we'll see it how it was meant to be seen

[DJRumpy]

DJRumpy: sorry to belabor the issue, but when you say you leave it telecined, does this mean you leave it so you get the comb lines or are you using another filter scheme to get rid of them? I have just completed Star wars and ESB using IVTC and I get random lines that although aren't that bad, aren't that great either. Any thoughts?

Leaving a source telecined doesn't necessarily mean you'll get these lines, unless you had to resize at some point. This seems to make it more likely. If you capture at the resolution your going to burn in, the problem doesn't seem to be as likely. This may be capture related. Your mileage may vary. It might be worth your time to verify whether your capture device is top or bottom field first. AVISynth has a handy script for this, or your device may actually have decent documentation (mine didn't).

I use AVISynth when I do IVTC, as VirtualDub seemed to miss more. I get no legacy comb artifacts, but it does get an occasional jump. I think this is related more to my source material then anything else. It happens during captures of Farscape. I swear the telecine pattern on this show is just wrong. It looks like this:

3,3,3,3,3,3,3

With each 3 switching between interlaced and progressive. It doesn't have a normal telecine 3:2 pattern. VirtualDub just leaves a duplicate frame in, causing combing. AVISynth catches the duplicate fields, but chops one of the non-dupilcates, causing a jerk. Both look bad. I ran quite a few different configs this past week to try and get around this. The best solution was with AVISynth, and the legacy Decomb for AVISynth V2.0 (I didn't try the version for beta 2.5 AVISynth). The minor jerk on high motion scenes looked much beter than the combing affects.

Has anyone else encountered a wierd telecine pattern like this? I guess the point us mute, since the series has been cancelled...

[menace]

Have you noticed any synchronization issues after you IVTC or decomb? All three of my movies look very nice using the IVTC with the occasional comb effect but I'm experiencing synch issues after I run the IVTC in virtualdub. It starts okay then progresses out of synch and then back in, then out etc--my guess is that as its running the IVTC process the audio is getting confused as to where to be???

My thinking is that if decomb gives close to the same results but has no synch issues, this would be preferable to me.

[flaninacupboard]

DJrumpy, bad news about Farscape! you'l never get the IVTC pattern right, it's not teleclined! it's actually progressive 25FPS PAL video transcoded to 29.97FPS NTSC. it's shot on PAL because it's largely shot in australia, who are PAL. there must be a filter around to reconstruct PAL video from NTSC (and it should be perfect, as some frames are just duplicated, nothing is chucked away) but i've never seen it.

menace,
if your IVTC pattern is being detected wrong (and if you're seeing combing, it is) then obviously in some places there are too many frames so the audio will be ahead, and sometimes there aren't enough frames so the audio will be behind. not sure what to suggest really, all i know is that my IVTC'ed copy of clerks i did in TMPGenc is perfect, no combing and no synch problems. give it a go and see if it can do a better job of detecting the IVTC pattern.

[DJRumpy]

Ugh..no wonder the pattern looked all wrong. At first, I though I was seeing things. I started manually scrolling through. I swear the pattern was 3 progressive, 3 interlaced. It seems like I recall seeing an NTSC (29.97) to PAL filter for AVISynth somewhere. I can't recall where though. I guess it's a mute point now.

[vhelp]

hi DJRumpy,

I don't know where in your process that you LOOK/VERIFY your IVTC
pattern. But, IMO, your process (or anyone elses) should be first/prior
to IVTC filter. In other words, during the un-filtered steps.

Example, when I first check out my 3:2 (aka Telecined) pattern, I import
my AVI source into vdub, and verify the pattern (w/out any IVTC or any
other filters) If you do it during (or after for that matter) you are
incorrectly stating your IVTC issue.

You first need to first verify your source for Interlace or IVTC
(for correct 3:2 pattern or inconsistancies) in order to best judge the
appropriate de-Interlace / IVTC process for your video project.

By doing this, you can see first hand, that you are going to have issues w/
a compliant IVTC encoding. Example, if you source is showing signes of
inconsistant 3:2 pattern, you can make a decision to either run your source
through an IVTC process (which includes reducing your fps) OR go with the
source's 29.970 fps and utilize either a de-Interlace or something else to
handle those Interlaces in your source, even if the source is of Film origin
but Telecined. Its up to the owner of that captured AVI to do what's best
at that given time. But, for the most part, a staight IVTC (for FILM) is fine
for the majority of encoding projects, else a de-Interlace instead.

It's becoming more and more aparent that we first verify our source's
for Interlace (be it, IVTC or Interlace) and make a MENTAL note (or keep
a log/list) every source's output (IVTC or Interlace)

Also wanted to say, you can't be 100% certain that your source (when a
known IVTC process is used) is IVTC'ed w/ 100% accuracy. One would
actually have to go through the whole final encode (frame by frame) to
determine if your assume 100% IVTC was such (or not) I guarentee that
you WILL find a hickup or to. I know, cause I have not seen a single pefect
IVTC process in any of my encodes. But, I don't comlain about mine, rather
I just say that my IVTC (genericlally speaking) came out pretty good, or
this IVTC process is the best so far (baring in mind that it is not 100%
accurate) Then, it's fair to say that one's IVTC is the best (give or take a
few hickups in pattern, and also baring in mind that the IVTC process was
probably hickuped due to the source (after capturing) was that way to begin
with during capturing)

As for FILM, I would always recommend an IVTC process during encoding.
This is THE way to go. Forget about a few hickups in your final encode.
In all honesty, when viewed on TV via your DVD player, you won't notice
this, and as such, one would consider the IVTC process flowed, which isn't
actually too far from the truth anyways.

DJRumpy,
As far as Farscape goes, first, I didn't know that they were cancelling
the show alltogether. I though that the word Finaly ment that it
was for the season, but to retun in the next. Can you verify that this show
is being cancelled/finished ??

Also, I would recommned you step through your Farscape captures
again, but this time, through all of it, and jot down the pattern. You may
be surprised at what you see. In short, the last two captures that I made,
"just when Kryton drew the bomb down the long shaft" that was my capture..
it was 29.970 fps PROGRESSIVE
I think they changed mide-air somewheres.

-vhelp

[DJRumpy]

I always verify that it is telecined before using the filter. I did not, however, actually examine the pattern. Just noted that a progressive/interlaced telecine pattern was present, and went from there. It wasn't until I noticed more jumping than usual for IVTC that I manually scanned a fair number of frames, noticing that the pattern wasn't a standard telecined pattern. It never occured to me that they would take a PAL film, and perform some sort of 25fps to 29fps telecine, without first slowing it down to FILM, and then doing a proper telecine job on it. IS ther ea standard for this that I'm not aware of? Afterall, all FILM, to PAL conversions are done by speeding up..it never occured to me that it would be done any differently going from pal to ntsc.

The clip that I examined was not progressive, and it was not true interlaced. It was IVTC, but with an odd pattern of 3,3,3,3, etc...
They were like this up to the end. It's not uncommon for some CG portions to have wierd makeup, but this was on a simple scene, with nothing unusual (special affects, backgrounds, etc) going on.

Just to verify, the show is indeed cancelled, with the series finale airing this past Friday in the states. You can get more info here:
http://www.savefarscape.com

[pbhalerao]

mythos,
I've seen the 3 set on VHS at Walmart/K-Mart, and BJs and they all sell for
$27 or $29 dollars, but I'm not sure if they are WideScreen or FullScreen.
The box say THX, but there are plenty of Movies w/ THX and no WideScreen.
So, I believe that all these stores are selling the FullScreen version on
VHS. I don't have proof, but then again, the box WOULD have said WideScreen
on them for sure! Usually, when a tipicle movie is a special version or
regular version, the wont say anything, or will say something like this
usuall statement:
"This Film... ...it has been formatted to fit your TV"
But, in rare cases, you'll see something like "WideScreen" version at the
top or bottom. In any case, these VHS 3 volume sets at the above store
are all the same box, and all, I believe are FullScreen versions.

This VHS box set ($29) is a fullscreen version. There is also a VHS Widescreen version box set available at $39. But the Widescreen is not always in stock. You have to keep watching. It may be availble on-line on WalMart.com or other such stores.

[flaninacupboard]

there are some truly evil things that happen within Pal/Ntsc conversion. one of the worst examples was a hideous transfer of (i think) Aliens, where it was teleclined to 29.97, then transcoded to 25fps! doh! try doing anything with that!
i know they changed to shooting in 16X9 for series 4 of farscape, but i don't think they started shooting on NTSC.

Don't forget that not all Pal sources are progressive like film, how could you transfer an interlaced source with ivtc, you couldn't. i've never seen Pal transcoded to NTSC myself, but i imagine it looks pretty funky, being lower resolution but higher refresh rate.

[DJRumpy]

The captures I'm talking about were near the end, and all in widescreen. This made me very happy, as I could simply crop off the letterboxing, and resize for a perfect 1.85:1 aspect ratio (fullscreen on my 16x9 tv). I wish I had kept a sample of my last capture. I deleted it after I burned it to DVD-RW to watch it.

I also wasn't aware of the Alien mishap. I wonder who did the conversion, and why they did it that way?

[flaninacupboard]

sorry, should have pointed out i was on about Laserdisc. the culprits were Encore Entertainment back in 1996. as to why they did it.... who knows? probably has something to do with it being the directors cut, and the fact an NTSC THX master had just been created.

[vhelp]

Hi everyone

>> This VHS box set ($29) is a fullscreen version. There is also a VHS
>> Widescreen version box set available at $39. But the Widescreen is not
>> always in stock. You have to keep watching. It may be availble on-line on
>> WalMart.com or other such stores.

I've never noticed this in Wal/Kmart/BJ's etc. when I brows around. I'm
alway forever keeping any watchful eye out for a Widescreen VHS version of
Star Wars. It's become an obsession of mine to find the WS version,
but I'm not that crazy about it, or even willing to shop on-line. This
particular obssession was just for my Store buying habbit, and I don't want
to break my Friday TGIF wine-down - - case you don't know, ..Fridays' I
brows wal/karmt for VHS movies to encode, but I also pick up 1 or 2 DVD's
if they're cheap enough or less than ~$12 dollars. Sort of a Friday richual
(spelling)
But, I'll continue keeping an watchful eye out at these stores


Hi flaninacupboard..

there are some truly evil things that happen within Pal/Ntsc conversion. one of the worst examples was a hideous transfer of (i think) Aliens, where it was teleclined to 29.97, then transcoded to 25fps! doh! try doing anything with that!
i know they changed to shooting in 16X9 for series 4 of farscape, but i don't think they started shooting on NTSC.

Yes, but in this case, I would just go with the full 29.970 fps encode instead.
No sense on killing yourself w/ issues that follow prior to madness.

-vhelp

[Mythos2002]

Hello Again,
I forgot to ask earlier. Are you guys splitting each movie up on 2 DVDR's or just putting each one on one? I was thinking about putting 1 hour and 20min on one and 1 hour on a second for quality sake. Would I really need to do that or will the whole film look fine on one disc?

Mythos

[vhelp]

hi mythos2002..

should look good on 1 dvdr, ..is all you would need.
Now, if you're a louzy encoder person, then you have problems

One dvdr is all you would need per movie (minimum'ly speaking)
-vhelp

[flaninacupboard]

I've found 90 minute captured movies on one DVDR using CCE to be excellent quality, to the point any problems in the image are -definitely- the source. this is an average bitrate of about 6.7mbits. I'm encoding Empire first (no lousy subtitles to replace!) which is going through my rig with NR as we speak. i'll post one or two shots from the completed MPEG at 4.5mbits average, and if i get time i'll do a two disc version, at 9mbits average, and post the same shots.
I'm in two minds about Jedi, as it's 2hrs 20. again, i'll try both and see, although splitting it up is going to be a bitch, my LD copy is across three sides, a 60 minute or so CLV, a 30 CAV then a 60 CLV with documentary crap. well, it's last on my list, so i'll see when i get there....

[Mythos2002]

Thanks for the information. That's awesome that you are almost finished. I'm just getting started.

I had a couple of small questions. I have a decent amount of harddrive space (about 50gig open). However, I know I'm going to fill up quick since I'm doing AVI. Is it possible to capture 30 minutes of AVI, convert to MPEG-2 in TmpEng, and then do another 30 minutes of capturing and join the MPEG-2 files? or Can you only join AVI. I'm just starting to mess with TmpEng and wasn't sure if it had file joining capability.

Also, could you sometime list your chapter stops? My LD set came with a book, but the LD Player doesn't list exact times when you skip chapters. When you made your chapter breaks, did you follow the LD book, or did you base them on scene changes?

Thanks.

Mythos

[MJPollard]

Also, could you sometime list your chapter stops? My LD set came with a book, but the LD Player doesn't list exact times when you skip chapters. When you made your chapter breaks, did you follow the LD book, or did you base them on scene changes?

I'm doing mine right now (capturing from VHS, alas), and believe or not, I'm basing my chapter stops on the soundtrack CDs. The Star Wars Trilogy box set or the Special Edition CDs work best, IMHO, since they're arranged in chronological order (and the Empire and Jedi CDs are more complete than their stand-alone versions, particularly Jedi). Of course, I've added a few more stops to the movies, particularly the Death Star battle sequence in A New Hope (which goes on for a good 15 minutes or so).

[menace]

Well I have all three captured from laserdisk and compressed down to a 4.3 GB file each . I IVTC'd all three using virtualdub for the first 2 and Tmpgenc for jedi. Tmpgenc did a better job finding the telecining and removing it than virtual dub but all three are out of sync since I performed the IVTC .

The sad thing is that since there were three "sides" originally they go progressively out of sync for each of the 3 clips. The effect is that they go out of sync then back in then back out. How did you guys get around this? I'm tempted to redo them using avisynth but the video quality is excellent, its just the audio that sucks--any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.!!

Mythos: I had the same question and the answer i got (somewhere on this board) is that your video will hiccup as it goes from one clip to the next as the bitrate at the end of one clip may be significantly different than the bitrate of the start of the next one. I don't know if this is true or not as I haven't tried it personally. post back with your discoveries!

As far as chapter stops I usually do based on time--I think how much of a movie am I willing to re-watch if I have to stop for some reason (like you could make me stop in the middle of empire--pfft) I usually set it at 10 to 15 minutes since I dislike having tons of chapters.

[flaninacupboard]

Mythos,
i had to use the process you describe for my tv captures for quite while, i only fad fat32, and TMPGenc wouldn't read linked files at the time, so i had to encode about 4 minutes at a time and then join them. i experienced no problems with video "hiccuping". to join them, open up tmpgenc, and click file - mpeg tools and click the cut and merge tab. plonk all your mpeg files in there, and it will make them one single mpeg.
something i tried doing was encoding all my segments at 15mbits a second cbr (the most MP:ML MPEG 2 will allow) then joining the segments, and re-encoding with 2 pass VBR to whatever average bitrate i needed to fit things on a disc. seemed to work ok, but glad i don't have to mess around like that anymore! with 50 gigs you can just about do things with DV. a two and a half hour movie would weigh in at 31.5 gigs, your output mpeg is 4.2 gigs with .1 gigs of sound and then an authored disc at 4.3 gigs, giving a total of 40.1 gigs. the problem arises if you can't or don't want to frameserve, when you need to make a copy of the video, then you need a bigger HDD.
chapter points? what are they?
we never use them, and don't really like them. the DVD player has a pause button, and a resume button. what more do you need? if i was going to use them, i would copy the ones from the laserdiscs, i'll type them up tomorrow.
menace, i can't remember what capture device you're using, does it support locked audio? you may want to try recording the sound seperately if you still have problems, cooledit or goldwave are good for recording things and editing them.

[Mythos2002]

Thanks for the information flanina. I actually have an 80 gig drive split into two 40 gig partitions. I'm just going to have to stop being lazy and convert to NTFS and empty some more space. I don't want to have the hicup problems. I just hope I can avoid them if I join the AVI's in VDUB. Thanks.
I should be getting my Cendyne DVR-105 pretty soon if there is another rebate. I may just forget about it and go with the DVR-104 since it is going for $170 at Staples.
Mythos

[vhelp]

hi mythos..

I can't remember what capture card you are using at the moment, but
if your main issue is w/ sync'ing, one of the main causes of sync is the
frame drops. It's said that when ie, vdub drops a frame, it's to reset
or keep the audio in sync. However, I do not believe this to be 100%
certain.

If you drop frames, say, in a Film (Telecined) source that you capture, and
you perform an IVTC on it, you will more than likely have audio sync
issues - even if it's somewheres deep into the movie. It all depends.

-vhelp

[DJRumpy]

My two cents. With VDub, and the Sync Audio setting, I've never lost audio sync. It just doesn't happen.

VHelp, you are correct about virtualdub. With the Sync Audio setting turned on, if a frame of video would cause enough slowdown to cause audio sync to be lost, it will simply drop the frame.

In regards to the HD drive space, you can always use DivX in a pinch. It requires very little bitrate to produce DVD quality. It's cpu intensive though. My PIV 2.4Ghz will start dropping frames with a frame size greater than 640x480. The bitrate can be cranked WAY up to keep quality (like 5000+ Kbps, which is high for DivX). You can capture hours and hours and hours on 50 GB of space. I haven't noticed any difference in my final output, but you have to take into account, my capture source is a noisy broadcast quality...

[menace]

next phase of the operation--Authoring

What prog did you guys use? Any tips/ tricks? I tried both star wars and jedi in ulead movie factory2, dazzle and dvdit--all programs rejected the movies for one reason or another except ulead which finished it with no complaints but lost the audio about 5 minutes in???

I really wish i could get the dazzle prog to author them but according to the forums it is VERY sensitive to bad frames etc. and I'm sure I have a couple of them somewhere.

erros reported:
dazzle: build /mux failure??
dvdit: improper header sequence?? (I unclicked the close GOP in tmpgenc so i wonder if this might be the problem)

Thoughts?

[DJRumpy]

I've tried multiple different capture programs. I always ended backwith VirtualDub. It's just more flexible with both codecs, frame size, audio, etc. I capture using Huffman. I crop off the letterboxing, temporalsmooth, IVTC, and resize with AVISynth script, and encode with CCE. The resulting output doesn't look too bad, but my VHS is ancient. I just can't consider spending a hundred bucks on a newer S-VHS, just to convert things FROM that format.

[flaninacupboard]

menace,
i had a whole load of trouble getting DVDit to accept files encoded with TMPGenc, and upon viewing my TMPGenc logs, i discovered why. it seemed to have trouble with bitrate allocation, meaning some GOPS were really high, i.e. a GOPS ABR was 15mbps, which is 50% over DVD spec, so DVDit rejects it. as it turned out, i tried authoring the same files with no capthers etc in ifoedit, and it authored and played fine. i think the error DVDit gave was "video size exceededs multiplexable bitrate"
what solution did i find? use CCE with the "dvd compliant" option checked.
the other to watch is the maximum GOP length, i know for PAL the DVD max is a length of 15, NTSC -may- be 18, i really don't remember

But as i say, with CCE it ensures compliance, so i will be using DVDit. I'll let you know how that goes.

[Mythos2002]

I finally got my burner today (Cendyne DVR-105), but I still need to get the media. Hopefully Ritek will work ok.

Flanina,
Did you ever find out if there was significant quality loss by putting the whole film on one DVDR? Also, was there any problems when you joined your captures since you had to stop capturing to flip or switch LD's? I just hope I can edit well enough so that it won't be obvious where I had to stop to switch LD's.

I think I'm just going to convert to NTFS before I do my captures. I really have a long way to go on this project, but I hope the results will be satisfying in the end.

Mythos