Deinterlacing DV NTSC for Film Look-Advice Needed

[bboris77]

Hi guys.

I am relatively new to the AviSynth world, and I still cannot believe the kind of quality that I am getting from some of its deinterlacing filters - comparable to commercial products such as DVFilm Maker. Anyway, I wanted to give my DV project a film look by going from 60i to 30p. I am not necessarily interested in going to 24p, as I find that 30p gives the project sufficiently "choppy" film look. As I mentioned, my source footage is 60interlaced, bottom field first, 720x480 NTSC DV footage. This is my procedure:

1. I transfer DV files onto my computer, use Ulead Media Studio Pro to edit my project. I then output the final project in Huffyuv or Lagarith lossless AVI, 720x480, 60i, 29.97FPS, RGB24, Video/Audio.

2. I then deinterlace the created file using TDeint filter. I use the following script, called "tdeintstandard.avs":

Loadplugin("C:\Program Files\AviSynth 2.5\plugins\Tdeint.dll")
AVISource("C:\temp.avi")
AssumeBFF()
ConvertToYUY2()
TDeint(mode=0,order=0,field=0)
ConvertToRGB24()

3. Then I run VirtualDub, select the Fast Recompress option, change the Compression setting to either Lagarith or Huffyuv. I set the audio options to Direct Stream Copy/Source Audio. I then go to Save As AVI, and that's it.

4. Finally, I load the created file into Ulead Media Studio Pro, and create a DVD-compliant MPEG2 file from there.

Is this procedure correct? I would really appreciate if you can either confirm that I am doing this correctly, or offer any suggestions to optimize/improve this procedure.

Thanks in advance,

Boris

[Pookie]

No need to ConverttoRGB24() at the end of your script. Since you are doing a Fast Recompress in VirtualDub, the color space doesn't get converted to RGB like it would if you used "Full Processing" mode.

Whoops. Does Ulead require RGB input ? If so, disregard my suggestion.

[MOmonster]

I would recommed to use Hcenc for encoding to dvd compliant material. It´s free, not too slow and its quality seems to be better. Also the conversion to rgb or yuv2 wouldn´t be necessary in this case.

[Mug Funky]

you might want to look into Reinterpolate411 to improve the colour interpolation (that is if Video studio didn't do it's own thing there). NTSC DV has a fair amount of horizontal bleed because of the way it stores colours - i'm sure you've noticed it on bright colours.

also, i'm not sure if the Debugmode Frameserver is available for Ulead Video Studio, but if it is you'll be able to save bucketloads of disk space by frameserving directly into avisynth, and then to your encoder with less than a K of script, and a couple of megs for the "fake" avi, rather than a ginormous intermediate huffy file.

[bboris77]

Thanks for your comments guys.

Mug Funky, I have tried using Debugmode Frameserver, and it does work with Media Studio Pro 7. However, if I try using it to frameserve any more complex projects (45minutes+), with lots of audio and video cuts, it crashes if I select the "Write audio as PCM samples in signpost AVI" option. Do you know what this option actually does, since I seem to get the audio in the final render even if I don't select it?

Also, would you recommend serving RGB24, RGB32 or YUY2 out of Ulead MSP Pro? According to the Debugmode Frameserver documentation, if Debugmode receives RGB format from the video editing software, then it has to convert from RGB to YUY2, if you select the YUY2 output option. I assume that MSP outputs RGB. Is there any advantage outputting RGB32 rather than RGB24?

Thanks.

[Mug Funky]

RGB32 is faster to process, but RGB24 takes less space. so if the bottleneck is your hard disk, then choose RGB24, and if the bottleneck is your CPU, try RGB32.

i'm not sure if Ulead has an all-yuv pipeline, but if it's anything like premiere pro, it'll claim it's all-yuv, but lie and do everything in RGB anyway.

try set it to output yuy2. that's what i usually use as it's the fastest and smallest of the three.

also, don't bother with storing PCM in the signpost file. i think that's just a compatibility thing for some of the stupider programs. virtualdub/avisynth certainly doesn't need it.

another thing - expect the export process to be slow. it takes ages to get the thing actually serving when i use it, especially for long exports. that might just be a netwoek thing though (my sources are AVS files that refer to stuff all over the network here, and the output is the same, so it's no surprise the machine ties itself in knots trying to export). once it gets going it'll be fast enough though (just a lil slower than doing all your editing in avisynth).

[bboris77]

One thing that I forgot to mention is that my final project is going to be in black and white. What I usually do is apply the monochrome filter in Ulead MSP before exporting to uncompressed or frameserving to Virtualdub/Avisynth. Do you know if TDeint and LeakKernelDeint have any issues working with monochrome video as opposed to colour? I could apply the monochrome filter when creating Mpeg2 DVD. Maybe there is a good Avisynth based filter to achieve this?

Another quick question for Mug Funky: do you have a preferred deinterlacer for pure interlaced DV footage? I compared the results I got from TDeint and LeakKernelDeint and felt that TDeint preserves detail better on still portions of the frame, while LeakKernelDeint (using threshold=6 sharp=true)tends to produce less deinterlacing artifacts if there is a lot of movement going on in the frame.

For me, rendering speed is not a concern, as I am looking for best quality possible.

Thanks for your input,

Boris