How to smoothe dark grainy footage of DV in CCE?

[rapjp2001]

Hi All,

Been playing with CCE for a few days and comparing the samples I have made against the footage I made using my Philips standalone DVD recorder using max bitrate of 9.8 Mbps...I am having issues with the footage being grainy due to the light where it was shot and I want to reduce it...

Here are the details:

This footage was shot in a night club where the band was playing and the minDV camera was on a tripod...since the footage is dark, there is a lot of grainy areas(mind you -- *not* posterization or blocks or any such compression artifacts!), but inherent grains in the original DV footage itself...I want to try and minimize it...CCE smoothes it out a bit as opposed to my Philips standalone DVD recorder capture, but only a little -- anything else I can do? I feel I can get better results with CCE as opposed to what I have captured using my standalone recorder...

Please help with any expert advice...I am not an expert at tweaking CCE 2.66 settings to know what to tweak and get better results...

Thanks

Rajiv

[auenf]

cce 2.66 has a couple of filtering sliders, and you should have a play with it and a snippet of your DV file and see what you come up with.

ProCoder aparently does some smoothing on DV by default if you want to check that out.

Enf...

[rapjp2001]

Thanks for the feedback...However, can you please give me some more specifics on which sliders are of interest to me...

I have played with a few and there are so many permutations that it gets overwhelming without having a focus on an area -- which I am not sure off!

Will try and check out Procoder...though I thought CCE was the mother of all encoders and hence would not have to waste my time with any others...

Thanks

Rajiv

[auenf]

Originally posted by rapjp2001
Thanks for the feedback...However, can you please give me some more specifics on which sliders are of interest to me...

I have played with a few and there are so many permutations that it gets overwhelming without having a focus on an area -- which I am not sure off!

under the quality button there is a series of sliders to the right, the bottom one is the bias adjustment like in the older versions, the next one up adds noise, and the top two are the horizontal and vertical filters.

Will try and check out Procoder...though I thought CCE was the mother of all encoders and hence would not have to waste my time with any others...


there is not one encoder that beats the rest, but CCE is the fastest out of the 'best 3'

Tmpgenc and ProCoder are really close to CCE quality as well, but not with as much bitrate adjustment.

Enf...

[dirk67]

Why don't you use VirtualDub or AVISynth to filter BEFORE encoding with CCE?

Dirk

[FredThompson]

I do a lot of work with DV camcorders in restricted light situations. What you are seeing is probably because you have a 1 CCD camera, right? Search on my name and you'll see some recent discussions about filtering. Try FluxSmooth first. what you describe is sort of a "swimming" effect of "almost blacks", right? Better to ask this kind fo thing in the DV forum.