Seeking general advice about filters

[boombastic]

I'm starting using avisynth wand i already had some successfull encodes.
I read the documentation at avisynth.org and some analoug capture guide which use avisynth to postprocess the source.
After reading this forum and the doc of some plugins i'm a bit confused:there are a lot of plugins for each function:
1)deinterlacer
2)spatial smoothers
3)temporal smoothers
4)sharpener
5)to adjust the chroma

I got some questions:

1)are these the main cateogories of filter?I know that some plugin are both spatial and temporal smoothers,for instance, but leave them apart for now.I need to know this to make some order in my mind
so i will not use two spatial smoothers in my scripts or something like this....!

2)has avisynth at least one built-in plugin for every of these "categories"?

3)I'm not asking "which is the best" for all the categories but which are the plugin to start with for almost a newbie?
For example which are the differences in quality and speed between TomsMoComp,TDeint and FielDeinterlace in deinterlacing a source?

4)Why you should use complex function like limitedsharpen,removedirt/grain and others
instead of using the built-in temporal/spatial soften?

I hope someone will answers because i'm very confused

[HyperSpad]

I'm still relatively new at this stuff myself. But here's what I can share:

The major functions of filters (at least that I've come across) are:
1. Removing Chroma artifacts (dot crawl, rainbows, etc)
2. Removing clicks and scratches (usually random spots that appear in captures)
3. Deinterlacing/Telecining (read up on the differences between these 2 things. for the longest time, i thought i had interlaced material, but it turned out that it was just telecined.)
4. General Smoothing

In reality, there's a lot more areas to cover, but that usually depends on what kind of sources you'll be dealing with, real life vs cartoons, tv capture vs DVD. I think this is a good basic list of areas to cover, especially if you're indicating that you're going to be capturing analog tv.

Here's some of the filters I've found to be good for the above areas:
1. Guavacomb, Dedot
2. Undot
3. TDeint (for actual deinterlacing), Telecide (for telecined content)
4. PixieDust, PeachSmoother, Convolution3D


2)spatial smoothers
3)temporal smoothers
5)to adjust the chroma

These usually all get covered by either dot crawl filters or smoothers


3)I'm not asking "which is the best" for all the categories but which are the plugin to start with for almost a newbie?
For example which are the differences in quality and speed between TomsMoComp,TDeint and FielDeinterlace in deinterlacing a source?

I never really worry about speed. As long as you have a modern processor you shouldn't have to either. Experiment on small clips (maybe 1-2 minutes each), and processing time won't be a big deal. For larger clips, just let it go overnight, but I wouldn't attempt to post-process larger clips if I were you until you get a feel for how some of these filters work.


Hope you can find at least some of this information useful. I'm sure some of the points in my post are going to be argued by the more experienced people here.

[mg262]

1. Those are probably the most frequent kinds of filter that appear, but the list is very far from exhaustive. Open up the AVISynth documentation and scroll down the left-hand pane until you see the list of kinds of external filter.

I don't think your category 5 is terribly well-defined, by the way. There are filters that will deal with specific chroma problems, but different filters will deal with different issues and I think it is best to categorise them separately.

2. Yes, with the exception of 5 above as noted and the fact that there is a Bob-deinterlacer, which doubles the frame rate, but I can't remember whether there is a built in deinterclacer.

3. You haven't told us what kind of material you're dealing with... it makes a big difference. It doesn't make that much sense to answer the questions without that information, but what it's worth, I'm currently using the slow but *extremely* effective PixieDust from the Dust filters by Steady. You will need to look up how to load plug-ins from AVISynth version 2.0 if you want to use those. For deinterlacing TomsMoComp is a perfectly good starting place. For sharpening, I'm not qualified to comment unless you're dealing with animated material...

Incidentally, @mug funky recently wrote an excellent summary of deinterlacers which search should find.

4. Because they typically perform much more effectively than the built-in functions. (That last sentence was carefully worded... so please don't misread anything into it.) Often particular filters are good at dealing with particular types of content. The more closely you model the nature of a specific source, the better you (or rather your filter) can deal with it -- but the worse you become at dealing with general content. Incidentally, grain and dirt are not the same as noise.

That last wasn't a terribly helpful reply... but I'm afraid there really aren't any shortcuts, at least as far as I have found. In my experience, the only way to start climbing this particular hill is to find one very concrete target, for example making a single source look as good as you can manage, and heading towards it single-mindedly. Once you understand a small area (and it doesn't really matter what) very well, it becomes easier to expand outwards and keep understanding more.

[neuron2]

@boombastic

With 127 posts, you should know about forum rule 9. As I'm in a good mood, I will edit your title instead of striking you. Please observe forum rules. Thank you.
:readrule:

[boombastic]

First of all thanks for yuor replies,i'm glad to know that there's someone who likes help you!
I'm in pal region-Italy-and i deal with two situation:
1)dvd conversion to avi for my standalone player which is also a dvd recorder
2)vhs recorded to dvd with that standalone and ripped to avi again

for the 1) i think there's almost non need to use special filters apart of crop and resize( dvd i deal with aren't interlaced).Maybe one can use unfilter to clean at all the dvd?

2)this is more complicated i think:dvds i get are interlaced according to what dgindex tells me and i use TomsMoComp(1,5,1) to deinterlace them.
Then, after crop and resize, i think i should
a) denoise: spatial and/or temporal smoother then filters that will deal with specific chroma problems;i'm using cnr2 and guavacomb

b)sharpen to keep some details:i'm dealing with Msharpen and limitedsharpen but the second is sooooo slow(!)

c) tweak levels:hue,saturation,contrast,... i use the internal tweak for this

Is this correct as a general guide-line?

[boombastic]

@boombastic

With 127 posts, you should know about forum rule 9. As I'm in a good mood, I will edit your title instead of striking you. Please observe forum rules. Thank you.
:readrule:


sorry again...it seemed to me not so unsuited! ;)

[mg262]

2)this is more complicated i think:dvds i get are interlaced according to what dgindex tells me and i use

that will tell you whether it is encoded as interlaced or not; that is separate from whether the source is interlaced or not. I would recommend stepping through the video frame by frame and figuring out whether it is interlaced by eye.

I haven't played with DVD recorders at all, but I strongly suspect that using even a baseline capture card may produce better results, because you (can) avoid compressing to MPEG2 before you filter... this is something to ask on the capturing forum. (The cheapest capture cards are around the cost of a typical DVD.) If you do use your DVD recorder just for converting VHS tapes, I would recommend pushing it to the highest quality settings.

Edit:

It's not something I believed when I came here, but it is certainly possible to filter DVDs to produce an output that looks better than the source. While some of the people doing the original conversion to DVD both have the appropriate technical expertise and take real pride in their work (and there are some such on this forum), there are many more conversions out there which are substandard in various ways.

What kind of material are you working with by the way? Animated or not? (There should be a word for non animated but I can't think of it...)

In order to say whether a particular script is appropriate or not, I think people will really need to see a sample of the source. I should add that I don't have the expertise to comment on this kind of thing except perhaps for very particular kinds of sources, so that's not a promise ofa reply!

[boombastic]

I'm using the dvdrecorder for vhs and tv movies and io cannot use a capture card for some reasons that it's too long to explain...
Anyway in this tread

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=97973

i posted two images and a script i used. I read the analoug capture guide, it suggests to open a script like this

AviSource("d:\capture.avi") # really i have a mpeg2 source
Trim(begin, end)
SeparateFields()

into VirtualDubMod and look for some horizontal line, if you can see them you've got an interlaced source, if you cannot see them you've got phase shift.I base myself to this to guess if my source is really interlace or not and i think my source is interlaced but i'm not very sure...There's another method?

[Wilbert]

See http://www.doom9.org/index.html?/capture/postprocessing_avisynth.html
i posted two images and a script i used. I read the analoug capture guide, it suggests to open a script like this
I see the description could be a bit better :) First try

AviSource("d:\capture.avi") # really i have a mpeg2 source
Telecide(order=0) # or order=1

If you still see horizontal lines you should use a deinterlacer (for pal at least; for ntsc you should also check whether it is telecined or not).

[boombastic]

I have an mpeg2 source (a movie recorded with my standalone dvd recorder from the TV) so i use this script to check if it's interlaced:

LoadPlugin("F:\PROGRA~1\ARCALC~1\dgmpgdec\DGDecode.dll")
LoadPlugin("F:\Programmi\AviSynth 2.5\plugins\Decomb521.dll")
Mpeg2Source("D:\VideoTemp\Pesce\pesce.d2v")
Telecide(order=0)

and i can't see any horizontal line so i'm dealing with " progressive with phase shifts and or swapped fields (fields in a reversed order)" according to the capturing guide so i don't need any deinterlacer like TomsMoComp, TDeint or KernelDeint but Telecide is just what i need,right?

If we now know what tipe of source it is which advices can you give me?What about my script posted in the other tread and the questions in this ones?
Many thanks!

[boombastic]

can someone help me with my script?

[neuron2]

so i don't need any deinterlacer like TomsMoComp, TDeint or KernelDeint but Telecide is just what i need,right? For the specific video you analysed, yes.

If we now know what type of source it is which advices can you give me? What about my script posted in the other thread and the questions in this one? You are now restoring the progressive frames using Telecide. Anything you do beyond that will depend on your aesthetic tastes. My policy is to use a minimum of filtering and use only that filtering which is demanded by a serious problem in the video. So, after you apply Telecide, do you see any problems in the video that you'd like to correct? If so, post a new screenshot showing the problem. Then we can suggest remedies.

As far as I can see, all your questions in this thread have been answered.

The method of doing separatefields and then looking for combing is WRONG! I don't know where you got it, but that's an egregious error. Perhaps you misquoted or misunderstood something?

[boombastic]

The method of doing separatefields and then looking for combing is WRONG! I don't know where you got it, but that's an egregious error. Perhaps you misquoted or misunderstood something?

I saw it in video capture guide, maybe i misunderstood

[Wilbert]

Are you referring to this:
To find out whether you have blended fields (thus when dealing with case 3), adjust your script:

AviSource("d:\capture.avi") # assuming source is YUY2
Trim(begin, end)
SeparateFields()

such that the fields can be seen separately. Enlarge the clip and scroll through the fields. If you see blended fields (also called ghosting) it means you are dealing with case 3.
or something else?

[boombastic]

Yes i was referring to that.
These are two screenshots of the last movie i recorded;i'm going to encode with the script:

LoadPlugin("F:\PROGRA~1\ARCALC~1\dgmpgdec\DGDecode.dll")
LoadPlugin("F:\Programmi\AviSynth 2.5\plugins\ChromaShift.dll")
LoadPlugin("F:\Programmi\AviSynth 2.5\plugins\GuavaComb")
LoadPlugin("F:\Programmi\AviSynth 2.5\plugins\PeachSmoother.dll")
Mpeg2Source("D:\temp\Virus\virus.d2v")

Crop(8,8,-8,-8)
telecide(order=0)
ConvertToYUY2(interlaced=false)
PeachSmoother()
GuavaComb(Mode = "PAL", Recall = 75, MaxVariation = 25, Activation = 40)
BicubicResize(640,464,0,0.75)

i'd like to remove the noise which makes the helm of D.Hoffman confuse with the background for example,or to define better the window of the other image.I don't know if i'm asking too much,actually this is good quality in respect to the some other movies i recorded.

[Wilbert]

Yes i was referring to that.
These are two screenshots of the last movie i recorded;i'm going to encode with the script:
That's about blended fields (= ghosting), not about combing.