Compressing Sports

[bball2]

Well I am very very new to this whole video editing, encoding, and compressing business but I wan't to try and compress a large sports video file.

Its ripped from a tv tuner, it's about one hour long and 3.8gb. I recorded it at the highest quality and its in an mpeg format. I am just wondering if some of you experts might be able to point me to some tutorials or give me some advice on what is the best method of compressing this file to less than 1 gb without a huge loss of quality.

It's basketball highlights for the year so lots of colours, and a high frame rate would be nice. I used autogk before, and I compressed it to around 700mb with an xvid codec and the quality was simply terrible. What was once crystal clear at full screen was pixelated and choppy at a resolution of 352x240 :(

[Shinigami-Sama]

well
de-interlacing would probly be a good idea, seeing as how most sports that I know of are interlaced

bit of denoiseing and a slight smoothing?

maybe AVC?

theres lots of guides on the main page, also try looking the avisynth section for ideas

thats about all the help that I can give you

[bball2]

Kool thanks for the tip, just a quick question, what's AVC?

[Shinigami-Sama]

mpeg-4 AVC: Advanced Video coding
it's the next gen of video encoding
xvid is one gen old, but it's still good to use

[zambelli]

Bobbing to 59.94fps (search for LeakKernelBob in the Avisynth forum) and then encoding as 352x240 (or 320x240) might be worth a try. It'll provide much smoother motion then just deinterlacing.

Expect to encode at a higher bitrate than you would for a regular movie because of:
1) higher framerate - either 59.94 fps or 29.97 fps, therefore 150% or 25% more information than in 23.976 fps.
2) more high motion scenes. It's like encoding one very long action scene. :)

[jozza]

yukky dimensions, 320x240 isnt fun to watch

[Mug Funky]

given a conservative estimate (60 mins with 256kbit audio) you can encode it at an average rate of 2100 kbps and fit it into 1 gig. if you're doing mpeg-4, then that's a pretty high bitrate.

so, i recommend xvid with interlace turned on and a high bitrate matrix (i hear good things about didee's 6of9 matrices, but haven't done much xvidding recently).

is this captured from digital TV or analog? if it's from digital TV then don't do any denoising unless your xvid is showing some strange swimminess on flattish areas. if it's from analog TV you'll have to look around the avisynth usage forum here for some ideas - there's lots of ways to tackle the noise.

either way you'll have to do some de-blocking on the source first.