Grainy and blocky "white" walls, what to do (samples)?

[masken]

The situation:

Gknot DivX 3.11 encode.
Movielength: 107 minutes.
Resolution: 640x352.
143mb audio.

In these samples the "Neutral bicubic" filter has been used, and as you can see, it doesn't look very good (grainy and blocky) :/ What should I do to make it look better (Screens from nandub)?

http://masken.netfirms.com/pics/other/grainy_00.png
http://masken.netfirms.com/pics/other/grainy_01.png
http://masken.netfirms.com/pics/other/grainy_02.png
http://masken.netfirms.com/pics/other/grainy_03.png

[manono]

Hi-

Don't you just love it when the DVD makers mess up a perfectly good movie by adding strong Edge Enhancement? You're going to need to add a Temporal Smoother or 2 to try and set those moving pixels in place. Rather than add a Temp Smoother-Cleaner once with a strong setting (which will probably lead to some nasty artifacts), I would put them in twice with lighter settings, and perhaps a Spatial Smoother at a very light setting in between. This will slow down the encoding considerably, so perhaps do just that scene in the pictures first to tweak the settings before doing the whole movie.

I might suggest TemporalSoften2-do a search for it in the AviSynth Forum, which has some threads on it and some suggested settings. Good Luck. It's not going to be easy to fix.

[diji1]

Matter : Don't you just love it when the DVD makers mess up a perfectly good movie by adding strong Edge Enhancement?

yes, I absolutely love it. Even better is the fact that it looks worse on large screens and that there's no way to get rid of it. :D

couldn't resist.

[manono]

Hi digi1, old buddy, old pal-

So you've got a TV good enough to see the stuff? Mine is junk, but if I watch the DVD on a monitor, it's like there are maggots crawling all over the walls. There's no excuse for that either. But I've worked with a number of DVDs recently that had the "Dancing Pixels", and they can be hard to get rid of without messing up the movie in other ways.

[diji1]

howdy manono, hope ur well ;),

manono : So you've got a TV good enough to see the stuff ?

:D :confused: :mad: :devil: ... oh yes, luv that halo around everything and the pixellated luridness is just superb, ... sometimes i wonder if it's worth the extra money. let's hope as ppl / manufacturer's keep getting larger and higher res screens in the lounge that the practice is stopped. unneeded in the majority of cases i think ... sometimes i actually think that people backing up dvd's pay more attention to final quality than the studio people. i'll have to try out ur suggestions for my next bad one - really hard as you say though to balance out the loss of detail with the ridding of the "Dancing Pixels" (tm).

[masken]

Dancing pixels... hehe.. well I guess that's a word as good as any ;)

Ok, will try those smootherfilters... but should I also try some other filter than the "Neutral Bicubic"?

I've also read here somewhere that one could "play around" with luminance settigns in nandub, but I don't know how I should set it or even "begin to play" with it...

[manono]

Hi Guys-

Yeah-I didn't even mention the halo or ringing around everything because I consider the pixelation side effect to be even worse. I'm with you digi1-they think they can get away with it now because it can't be noticed on regular TVs. But as more and more high end televisions get sold, I don't think the public will stand for seeing our favorite movies being absolutely ruined when being prepared for DVD. I see videophiles in places like the AV Science Forums screaming bloody murder about EE, and I don't blame them.

I used this to fix a moderate amount of pixelation in one recent movie:

TemporalSoften2(2,2,2)
SmoothHiQ(5,20,20,75,10)
TemporalSoften2(2,2,2)

For the really bad stuff (and I think masken has one), then maybe:

TemporalSoften2(3,5,7)
SmoothHiQ(5,20,20,75,10)
TemporalSoften2(2,4,6)

will work. But before encoding check the motion areas, particularly dark motion areas to see if TempSoften has damaged those places.

As I mentioned, you can find TemporalSoften2 down in the AviSynth Forum. I think you can get SSHiQ for AviSynth there as well, but if anyone needs it, you can e-mail me and I'll be happy to send it.

As for the resizing filter. As digi1 mentioned, if you're not careful, there may be a loss of detail (but SmartSmootherHiQ is pretty good about preserving detail), so I've been experimenting with starting off with a sharp resize (BicubicResize(640,304,0,0.8)), so it will be about as sharp as I want it after the filters do their work. But I'm still experimenting and am open to suggestions. I don't know anything about playing with luma settings either, so I don't.

[masken]

Ok thanks manono :)

I'm also probably gonna have to lower the resolution for this one... the 107 mins gives a bitrate of ~700... thinking of going either 624x336 or (perhaps even) 576x304 for this one (1.85:1)...