spudthedestroyer wrote: |
It looks like a dodgily mastered source DVD (damn you HBO!) too, why do horror fines get the screwjob? Any, this makes encoding difficult but i've picked up some tips from the many re-re-re-encodings i've had to do. To combat this, I'd have *personally* dropped the horizontal and vertical resolution to under 600, which would in turn reduce pixelation, and give you a clear image, and maybe drop the audio to 128 kb/s VBR. Convolution3d filter would also clear up some of the grain for ya. gknot makes this all extremely easy. You click a button, auto crop, then select smart autocrop all. This ensures all the black boarders are cropped fully and the video maintains its AR. You can also apply filters by clicking a box rather than having to load them in other programs. Thanks |
Hi! Clyde speaking here...
(And no, I'm not just Bonnie's imaginary friend, alter ego, ripping-slave or whatever appearances might hint at
So Spud, I read your comments and thought a bit about what I could do to improve the quality of these babies.
I agree with you that the image of these episodes is not completely satisfying, but as I only have so much time to spare and as until now I'd been reasonably happy with the results I got, I'm a bit reluctant to change completely the encoding methods I use. So maybe I'll expose the parts that could influence this quality and maybe you can give me a bit of advice about them.
Here's how I proceed:
-First I make a pseudo-avi via DVD2AVI & VFAPIConvert. This is only to be able to open the VOB in VirtualDub via the VFAPI codec acting as a frameserver. (I took this from this website:
http://www.afterdawn.com)
-Then I encode with XviD in 2 passes, using 3 filters:
1. Deinterlacing with SmartDeinterlace (a VirtualDub external filter)
2. Resizing with VirtualDub integrated filter
3. Cropping.
Concerning the image quality, it starts with the DVD image itself being not as good as it could have been (but hey, the DVDs come from an editor which doesn't look so rich either). I don't know if the deinterlacing affects the quality very much, but I have had very good results with this filter on Haute Tension. So my guess is that the greatest loss is with the resizing. I've never been too sure about which method to use: I use "precise bicubic", but I don't really know if a Lanczos method would be better or not. I don't know much about this so maybe you can help me on this.
Anyway, I could do without the resizing but getting to 640x480 has an advantage which is that you can put your screen resolution to this while playing! I tried it and, as there is no on-the-fly resizing by the player in that case, the image is reallly improved (despite the lower screen resolution...).
As for the black sidebars, I cropped 16 pixels out of the 640. The optimal cropping would be 23 to 26 pixels (depending on the episode), so I decided to leave 3-5 pixels on each side rather than cutting 3-5 pixels into the frame to get a total of 32. And they don't get really noticed when displayed in full screen, do they?
So all in all, for the 3 new episodes I just released (I added them by editing the first post above), I have lowered the audio bitrate (I set lame on 60-128 instead of 60-160 VBR). The video stream is then about 213MB for 27-28 minutes, which in my opinion should be really enough to attain a good quality (I've seen really good quality videos of 45 minutes for this size, so...). Bumping up to 350MB would obviously allow better results but I'm not really sure it would be really significant. There are 39 episodes to be released in this series of DVDs and as size _does_ indeed matter (yup! :-o ),
I prefer to stick to 3eps/CD than 2.
Well, sorry to have been that long (but hey it's my first time here, ain't it?) but there you have the whole picture. I'm really interested if you have some advice about resizing methods (or deinterlacing maybe), and if you can tell me a bit more about Convolutions3D, I'd like to give it a try (can it be pluged in Virtual Dub?
). I heard about Gknot a couple of times, and always in good, but as I said, I'm not sure I want to spend the time necessary to get familiar with a whole other ripping procedure (still, good argumentation is never really wasted, you know
Yours til the next 3 episodes...
Clyde Barrow