Honeyko
10th January 2008, 08:13
I'm presently working with an 80's cartoon given a really lousy treatment on DVD. The toon contains cel-drawn matte paintings with complex color gradients (i.e., they're "art"), and overlaid animated characters with simpler flat colors with little or no gradients. Quality: abysmal interlaced NTSC hybrid mess with lots of grain and dirt, aliasing along diagonal lines, and differing crop values needed for each episode (and some needing different crops values for different scenes within episodes). DVD VOBs are 720x480 with DAR of 720x540. Attempting to simultaneously keep the detail in the matte paintings, degrain the flat color-fills in the characters, and unblock the aliasing is proving annoying.
I've decided to be very generous with size, giving the episodes around 315mb on average, and I've also cropped the intros and exits on all of them save two with commentary tracks (the intro/exits are identical). I've run XviD pre-passes at 60% quality to generate a list of constant quality file-sizes, and will incorporate percentages of those values into the x264 encodes in order to get 14 episodes per DVD5. Clipping intros and exits was done with VideoReDoPlus, which losslessly direct-stream copied the edited MPEG2 stream out of the VOBs; since there was only one audio channel and no subtitles, this wasn't a problem.
I'm using AutoMKV for final assembly, and have the following selected:
Basic Settings:
MKV/x264
Advanced Settings
Deinterlacer: Decimating, [x] HQ Deint
Field Order AUTO, [x] Allow Hybrid Order/Pattern
(this is to crush redundant frames and drop 29.97 to 23.97 fps.)
Various crop values, and a Force Mux setting W:H of 720x540
(this produces, for a typical episode, a 704x478 1:1 PAR image with is then vertically anamorphed to a 4x3 DAR.)
= = = =
Now the tricky part: On the Basic Settings page again, what profile and what filters are best, given the above information? While encoding time isn't much of a factor, I get the feeling that Extreme Quality might be overkill. Is there a reason to stick with AutoMKV's pre-selected default filter of RemoveGrain#2, or would something else on the list be more appropriate?
= = = =
Stupid question: How do I encode the original AC3 to AAC without modifying the volume? I haven't found what to turn on or off which prevents the application of a decibel increase to the resultant audio file.
I've decided to be very generous with size, giving the episodes around 315mb on average, and I've also cropped the intros and exits on all of them save two with commentary tracks (the intro/exits are identical). I've run XviD pre-passes at 60% quality to generate a list of constant quality file-sizes, and will incorporate percentages of those values into the x264 encodes in order to get 14 episodes per DVD5. Clipping intros and exits was done with VideoReDoPlus, which losslessly direct-stream copied the edited MPEG2 stream out of the VOBs; since there was only one audio channel and no subtitles, this wasn't a problem.
I'm using AutoMKV for final assembly, and have the following selected:
Basic Settings:
MKV/x264
Advanced Settings
Deinterlacer: Decimating, [x] HQ Deint
Field Order AUTO, [x] Allow Hybrid Order/Pattern
(this is to crush redundant frames and drop 29.97 to 23.97 fps.)
Various crop values, and a Force Mux setting W:H of 720x540
(this produces, for a typical episode, a 704x478 1:1 PAR image with is then vertically anamorphed to a 4x3 DAR.)
= = = =
Now the tricky part: On the Basic Settings page again, what profile and what filters are best, given the above information? While encoding time isn't much of a factor, I get the feeling that Extreme Quality might be overkill. Is there a reason to stick with AutoMKV's pre-selected default filter of RemoveGrain#2, or would something else on the list be more appropriate?
= = = =
Stupid question: How do I encode the original AC3 to AAC without modifying the volume? I haven't found what to turn on or off which prevents the application of a decibel increase to the resultant audio file.