whats the best plugin to use to lighten an avi

[homerjay]

i have got a hdtv avi from the US which i think is a bit dark and would like to lighten it up.

i had a look here http://www.avisynth.org/~warpenterprises/ but cant figure out which is the best plugin for the job

cheers

hj

[Nick]

In all honesty you can't beat the internal filters.

Levels(0,Gamma,255,0,255)
Tweak(0,1,Bright,Cont)

Start with a gamma correction between 1(no effect) and 2(marked difference). Unless it's really dark, try about 1.3 for starters and preview.

When you've found a good gamma value, use the "new frame" button in the preview pane until you get a frame of almost pure black, eg during the credits. Then set the brightness (-5 to -20 is usually about right) to make sure "black means black". Click thru a few more preview frames and up the contrast a touch if necessary.

The only problem I've found with this is that many of the black areas are not uniform and contain block noise that was simply too dark to see on the original AVI. If this happens a bit of spatial smoothing might help but few of the denoisers work in the YUY2 colourspace environment. You could experiment with 2DCleanYUY2 parameters but I've not got an ideal result so far with my tests.

A source smooth of 2DCleanYUY2(0,7,2,2,0,4,4) before the tweak and levels filters does some good. If you wish to try this, get the dll from your linked page above and copy and paste the following into your AVISYNTH.INI file.

[AVISYNTH_GammaCorrect]
0=LoadPlugin("C:\Program Files\DVD2SVCD\Avisynth2.5 Plugins\_2DCleanYUY2_for_25.dll")
1=_2DCleanYUY2(0,7,2,2,0,4,4)
2=Levels(0,^Gamma,255,0,255)
3=Tweak(0,1,^bright,^cont)
4=BicubicResize(^TargetWidth,^TargetHeight,^b_value,^c_value)
5=AddBorders(0,^BorderTop,0,^BorderBottom)
^Gamma=2
^bright=0
^cont=1
^b_value=0.6
^c_value=0.2

That way you can alter the values from the frameserver tab by selecting "GammaCorrect" in the Avisynth Setup box and using the "..." buttons to alter the parameters for levels and tweak. Try without the 2dclean line and again with it, see if it helps. If not omittting it will make things much quicker.

Otherwise try the Avisynth Script database in the Advanced forum - see if you can get a good (relatively quick) denoiser script. I'm still on an Athlon XP1600 so I try not to get to complex with the filters or I get a 2-day encode!

Anyway, good luck!

[homerjay]

thankyou for the very comprehensive answer nick :D

i will incorporate some of that script into Telemikes [AVISYNTH_STM_BicubicResize] script and have a play.

on a side note you might want to try the D2SROBA plugin with your encodes as it only requires 1 pass after initial calculation, i was on a 1.2 athlon and my average full film encode was around 5-6 hours
now ive got an xp2600+ a 1.45 source from dvd takes under 2 hours;)

[Nick]

I have. My machine always freezes as soon as it opens CCE if I use the DSRoba plugin. Since I leave my machine to encode overnight as a rule I've never bothered to experiment to find out why it crashes.

[homerjay]

hmmm shame :rolleyes: im sure you have already checked this but what v of cce do you have 67 ? and are you calling using the eccle file ?

[Nick]

You got me experimenting again and I reckon I've got it!

The only time I tried it was about a month when an old DVD I had wouldn't play (pesky kids!). I had backed up ages ago to Xvid and so, now owning a DVD writer I decided to try to restore to DVD-R. Since I kept the DVD-compliant AC3 stream in my backup I demuxed the avi in VDubMod to an audio.ac3 file and a video.avi with no audio.

I encoded the video with D2S then remuxed the 5.1 track with TMPGDA then authored and burned. However when I tried with D2SRoba that's when all the crashes occured. Having done a few tests I think it is demuxing that causes the problem. If you demux in VDubMod but only save the audio stream, you can convert the video from the original avi. But if you save separate audio-only and video-only files, the video only file will not convert, just crash.

I thought I'd write it up in case anyone else has had the same issue.