Problem with Canopus ADVC-100 & Animation

[Bondiablo]

I've been using a Canopus ADVC-100 for several months now, capturing from all sorts of different sources and it's worked great. Unfortunately, I think I may have finally found something it's not good at. When capturing animated footage and there's movement equivalent to a camera slowly panning across the scene the captured video seems to sort of flicker or stutter slightly. This only happens with animation and only during that specific type of movement on screen. Has anyone else encountered this with animation, any ideas why this would be and if there's a way to fix it?

If you want to see what I mean, view this file. It's already been converted to MPEG1 but it appears the same in the original AVI. On the original VHS it's just a smooth pan across an animated cityscape, no flicker/stutter.

home.att.net/~bonfiles/gargtest.mpg

The clip is only about 9 seconds and 1.54MB.

[monoxide77]

i definitely see what you're talking about, but perhaps it's the compression technique or the codec.

[bbb]

I think it has to due with the use of Double Deinterlacing in Tmpgenc.

Try SmartDeinterlace in VirtualDub on your capture file. SmartDeinterlace works wonders for animation.

[Bondiablo]

I didn't think it was TMPGEnc but I tried VirtualDub and the smart deinterlace filter anyway and it looks a little different but still sort of the same problem. Now instead of the image appearing to flicker slightly it's more like a slight pause where the flicker used to be.

I'm pretty sure the problem is in the capture not the encoding, I just put the mpg file up as an example because it's a much smaller file. Unfortunately it appears about the same in the captured AVI just not quite as obvious, only on the original VHS does it appear to be a smooth pan.

[bbb]

If it's present in the captured AVI, then it's probably a hardware or codecs issue. Try downloading the latest codecs, drivers, and bios for you ADVC-100 to see if that fixes things.

I burned your clip to a VCD and it does flicker noticeably--it seems to flicker like a field order issue. On my DC10+ I used to have a similar jumpy problem due to the card improperly decoding the AVI on playback and in encoding. It was fixed by two different methods: (1) downloading updated drivers and capture software and (2) installing a 3rd party codec.

Try using a compatible DV codec or updated drivers, etc.

[Bondiablo]

Yeah, there's the rub, the ADVC-100 is an external box connected by firewire and recognized by the system as a DV cam so it doesn't have it's own drivers and the codec used for the analog-digital conversion is part of the boxes hardware.

Looking at the AVI frame by frame it does seem like it could be an interlace problem but I've been working with it for a while now and can't find any way to encode it that doesn't give either a flicker or a pause effect. If anyone's feeling particularly ambitious or just bored and wants to try playing around with it here's a 2 second clip (8.01MB) of the AVI file where the problem is most obvious.

http://home.att.net/~bonfiles/gargtest.avi

[petec]

I downloaded file. Want me to try VCD, SVCD and DVD formats?
Can you post a full DV capture and let me convert it? There was some issue on the Canopus related BBS regarding a video timing issue doing captures from VHS video if I recall right. Something regarding sync signal, not sure you will have to do a search on their BBS.

[bbb]

Ok, I encoded your AVI file with and without SmartDeinterlace. And then burned it to a VCD.

SmartDeinterlace took out the blurry flickering which makes it much clearer. SmartDeinterlace doesn't seem to have harmed the motion but the clip is too short to judge motion smoothness on my dvdplayer. Also, it's difficult to really say if the motion matches your VHS tape since we don't have the tape to compare.

If I keep playing my SmartDeinterlaced mpg file on my computer it seems smooth after a while.

Maybe if you suggest a particular scene in a common animated dvd with similar panning motion, we can all encode that scene with our capture cards and compare our panning motions to see if your ADVC is the problem.

[Bondiablo]

10 MB is my webspace limit so I can't post much more than 2 seconds of a DV capture. Are there any free hosting sites left that allow more? Right now I'm only trying to go to standard VCD but eventually I will try converting to DVD, when I get a writer. I did try converting to MPEG2 and leaving it interlaced just to see but it still looked about the same even when burned to miniDVD and played on my DVD player, though it's much less obvious there. I guess the interlacing is at least partially to blame.

BBB, what settings did you use with SmartDeinterlace? I did have a capture of Alice in Wonderland taken from network TV but it was for a friend of mine and I didn't save a copy for myself, don't really have any other common animated stuff. I did watch the first few minutes of that and I do remember seeing the same flicker effect in the very beginning but at the time that was my first animated capture and I thought it might have just been in the broadcast signal. I think it was panning across a countryside just before it comes to Alice sitting in a tree with a woman reading to her.

[bbb]

SmartDeinterlace settings (check the following):
Frame-only differencing
Compare color channels
Use cubic for interpolation

[Bondiablo]

Yep, that's about the same as what I got when I said the flicker had been replaced with a slight pause (or hesitation). The movement on the original VHS is much smoother. Thanks for trying.

[bbb]

Hold on. I burned two clips, one with smart smoother and one without. Both showed a slight stuttery motion. But the one without smartsmoother had flicker that covered some of the stuttery motion. Smartsmoother did not produce the stutter or"hesitation" ... it was already there on the AVI file as you stated. Smartsmoother simply removed the annoying flicker. Regarding the remaining stutter on the original AVI, see if you can try a different capture device and see if the stutter remains.

[Bondiablo]

I didn't mean it produced the stutter, I was saying after using it the clip no longer appeared to flicker it just appeared to hesitate where it used to appear to flicker. It seems the problem really isn't with the interlacing, it's with the capture, and it's just making it harder to deinterlace properly which only amplifies the problem.

[Bondiablo]

Woo Hoo!!!

I finally found something that worked. Since animators don't draw 30 frames for every second of animation, I decided to try using NTSC Film which has an even lower frame rate than PAL. That seems to have totally solved the problem. Here's a clip that was converted using only TMPGEnc and the NTSC Film VCD template. It's a HUGE improvement over the first mpg I posted and even better than using the smart deinterlacer in VirtualDub.

home.att.net/~bonfiles/gargtestF.mpg

11 second clip about 2MBs.

[vhelp]

bondiablo,
I'm glad you figured it out.. that the clip was shot at 23.976
I saw you post elswhere on the net, but I couldn't respond. You had it
here too, and I bumped into it by mistake, so I decided to "finally" give
my two cents worth he, he... I would have given you the answer, but
you found it out anyway.

So, anyways..
Yes, cartoons are done at 24 also, or a mixture. This applies to every
clip I capture w/ my ADVC-100, or any other capture card, that it could be
a telecined (your clip) or pure Interlaced, or mixture (cartoons w/ 24 and
29 frames) or computer animation mixed w/ regular film, etc.

You're staring to figure it out finallly, he, he...

-vhelp
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