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Old 18th January 2003, 15:25   #1  |  Link
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Star Trek Hybrid Challenge!

The Star Trek series is notoriously difficult to encode due to its hybrid content (mixed progressive 30fps/progressive 24fps/video). With a view to stimulating creative thinking about how to deal with hybrid material I have posted this challenge, which will remain sticky until the conclusion.

Here is the source VOB contributed by MrBunny (right click and Save As):

http://shelob.mordor.net/dgraft/misc/TNGsample.vob

My humble attempt at encoding is here (right click and Save As):

http://shelob.mordor.net/dgraft/misc/trekdivx3.avi
or
http://shelob.mordor.net/dgraft/misc/trekdivx5.avi
or
http://shelob.mordor.net/dgraft/misc/trek.mpg

The challenge of course is to make the best encode at 23.976. The chief criterion is the smoothness of the film and video segments. Please post your entries here.

At the end we will all reveal our methods. Have fun!

Last edited by Guest; 18th January 2003 at 19:12.
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Old 18th January 2003, 18:31   #2  |  Link
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What flavour of divx have you used Donald - your avi just crashes my player (MS MP6.4)

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Old 18th January 2003, 18:35   #3  |  Link
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DivX 5.02.

Have you tried VirtualDub, BSPlayer, or anything else?

Bad download?

Do you want a different format? If so, please specify it.

Last edited by Guest; 18th January 2003 at 18:37.
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Old 18th January 2003, 18:49   #4  |  Link
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I don't have DivX5.

MS MPEG-4 V2 would work for me but I wonder now what a good standard format for doing compressed samples would be - I stopped using DivX when it moved to 4 (could never get the early versions to work )

Maybe re mpeging it to MPEG-2 (or even -1) would ensure maximum compatibility?

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Old 18th January 2003, 18:52   #5  |  Link
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I just upped a DivX 3 before reading this.

Give me 20 minutes to up an MPEG1.

EDIT: OK. See the link above for the MPEG1 file.

Last edited by Guest; 18th January 2003 at 19:07.
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Old 18th January 2003, 23:13   #6  |  Link
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A very nice, unchoppy sample. Have you tried this on other parts of a Star Trek ep? Or even a full ep?
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Old 19th January 2003, 01:18   #7  |  Link
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Ta Donald
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Old 19th January 2003, 03:00   #8  |  Link
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Hey,
Not trying to be contrary or anything (I appreciate all of Donald's work), maybe more of a devil's advocate. If you check the first few seconds, the outer edge of the Enterprise-D's saucer seems to fluctuate a bit during the pan. I don't really know how to describe it, but it's probably something to do with the interpolation. I think it's even more noticeable (than it'd normally be) due to the contrast of very light grey with the black of space.

Otherwise it looks great, nice and smooth. Any secrets you want to share with us perhaps? It might help people think of ways to improve on it.

Mr. B

P.S. I know it's not possible for it to be "perfect", but I'm just giving feedback
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Old 19th January 2003, 04:02   #9  |  Link
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It's a nice thing to play with these sources, btw. Babylon 5 is the same beast, but I guess it doesn't make any sense to invest this amount of time to get it done on >160 eps of Trek. Or did you figure out a way to do this automatically?

Why not simply use decomb to get 29.97 progressive frames per second and live with it?
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Old 19th January 2003, 04:57   #10  |  Link
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Quote:
Originally posted by MrBunny
Hey,
Not trying to be contrary or anything (I appreciate all of Donald's work), maybe more of a devil's advocate. If you check the first few seconds, the outer edge of the Enterprise-D's saucer seems to fluctuate a bit during the pan. I don't really know how to describe it, but it's probably something to do with the interpolation. I think it's even more noticeable (than it'd normally be) due to the contrast of very light grey with the black of space.

Otherwise it looks great, nice and smooth. Any secrets you want to share with us perhaps? It might help people think of ways to improve on it.

Mr. B

P.S. I know it's not possible for it to be "perfect", but I'm just giving feedback
Which version did you look at? Didn't seem to notice anything like that in the divx5
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Old 19th January 2003, 05:32   #11  |  Link
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Quote:
Originally posted by Suzahara
A very nice, unchoppy sample. Have you tried this on other parts of a Star Trek ep? Or even a full ep?
No, Sir, as I have only the VOB provided to me. But I have no reason to think it would be any different.
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Old 19th January 2003, 05:34   #12  |  Link
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Quote:
Originally posted by resonator
but I guess it doesn't make any sense to invest this amount of time to get it done on >160 eps of Trek. Or did you figure out a way to do this automatically? Why not simply use decomb to get 29.97 progressive frames per second and live with it?
How do you know how much time was invested? Your point is well taken, Sir. But I am trying to make a point here. It will become clear soon enough.
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Old 19th January 2003, 05:36   #13  |  Link
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Quote:
Originally posted by MrBunny
Not trying to be contrary or anything (I appreciate all of Donald's work), maybe more of a devil's advocate. If you check the first few seconds, the outer edge of the Enterprise-D's saucer seems to fluctuate a bit during the pan. I don't really know how to describe it, but it's probably something to do with the interpolation. I think it's even more noticeable (than it'd normally be) due to the contrast of very light grey with the black of space.
Perhaps slightly, yes. But compare it to mode=3, which seriously exhibits the effect you mention. It's like night and day.

Last edited by Guest; 19th January 2003 at 05:38.
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Old 19th January 2003, 06:04   #14  |  Link
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Quote:
Originally posted by neuron2
Perhaps slightly, yes. But compare it to mode=3, which seriously exhibits the effect you mention. It's like night and day.
Yes, I agree completely. My own attempts at that scene were definately worse than your result. I just wanted to point that out in case it hadn't been noticed.

@Suzahara

I watched the divx3 one initially, but the same effect can be seen in all of them. Just watch the tip of the Enterprise-D's saucer section. I know it's very picky, but again, just trying to point out the aspects that can be improved.

@neuron2

If you want a longer sample to experiment with, just holler

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Old 21st January 2003, 15:51   #15  |  Link
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I'm going to try this out since I have a better handle on Telecide and Decimate than I did when I originally tried to encode my Season 3 TNG DVDs. Should be fun...
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Old 21st January 2003, 17:26   #16  |  Link
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well that seemed pretty smooth to me Neuron. There were no obvious jerks in the movement, of course, apart from picard moving across the bridge there are no big movements that would glaringly stand out.

the wibble everyone mentions on the saucer of the enterprise seems to be more to do with the original VOB than the encode to me.
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Old 22nd January 2003, 04:17   #17  |  Link
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Quote:
Originally posted by lancer
the wibble everyone mentions on the saucer of the enterprise seems to be more to do with the original VOB than the encode to me.
If you were watching the VOB on the computer with a software DVD player, then most likely that the wibble would appear. However, I would assume that on TV it wouldn't be so, though the poor guy that I am, I can't afford a DVD writer to test that theory.
The wibble is consistant with the type of manipulation I think Donald is playing with.

I guess using xvid's interlaced setting with TV-out might work to test for the wibble.

@neuron2
So what is your secret?

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Old 23rd January 2003, 03:42   #18  |  Link
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@MrBunny

I rendered the clip once using MotionPerfect to convert to 23.976 and once using Decomb. Then I used Trim() to combine the appropriately rendered video and film portions.

The point I am making has actually already been made by resonator. The amount of time and effort you want to invest will have the biggest effect on the outcome.

I do agree that mode=3 looks poor with smooth video pans. But mode=1 looks poor with smooth film pans.

If these things bother you and you have the time and energy, buy MotionPerfect and do it as described above. For a single movie, OK. For 160 episodes, well, you'll need a lot of energy.
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Old 23rd January 2003, 11:09   #19  |  Link
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I was disappointed in that your means of dealing with this problem included MotionPerfect. I was very pleased with your results when I watched the sample, and was anxious to see the solution. I thought, finally Star Trek can be done properly. Now even though it was not implicitly stated, I thought this was an avisynth challenge (or a decomb challenge to be more precise), and not by any means necessary.

Your solution is very creative but as you said, it would take a great amount of time to tackle a project such as this. Heck, even just capping a few favourites and using this method would be very time consuming.

So, I'm a little disappointed that, short of this method, there isn't really an idea way of dealing with this using decomb.

Now, I realize this isn't the fault of your great work on decomb, I guess ideally, we would need a method of controling frame rate within a video file, but as far as I know that's not supported by any compression method.

Now, just to get a better understanding of hybrid. Are there two types of hybrid video? My original understanding of hybrid clips is simply separate video and telecined film sources in one clip. But I believe I read on another post that with star trek, sometimes effects that are interlaced are laid on top of an already telecined source, which makes it very difficult if not impossible to ivtc correctly. Is this accurate?

I wonder this because I have captured other shows that are hybrids such as Oz, and granted the results are not perfect but I was very pleased with the results and using the hybrid method in decomb leaving the frame rate in tact. Yes there would be that 5th ghosting image on the the telecined parts, but overall everything was smooth. But with Star Trek, I seem to have nothing but problems. Pans seem jerky, sometimes even people just talking or a turn of a head looks choppy. I even tried encoding one scene of voyager with 2 people talking in a shuttle. I went through it and could tell the scene was just telecined video. I enocoding using the default deomb method bringing the frame rate to 23.976 for testing purposes just to see if that scene could look right, but even it looked choppy. Now, I'm capturing from tv, so they are not dvd sources, but I capture using avi_io (picvideo 19), just about never have frame drops, and use my vcr as the tuner to get the best reception.

So, what is your current decomb setting recommendation for hybrid clips (keeping 29.97 frame rate) capped from slightly noisy analog source?


Also, is there a list of hybrid shows? It annoys me when I think something is pure telecined only to realize that its actually hybrid. Family Guy, for example. I thought it was just a telecined cartoon, but for some quick pans its not. Btw I kept one of these clips with the pans, I have no where to host it right now but here is an unaltered pic. Just to test it, I just deinterlaced the scene but it still looked wrong, so I don't think using decomb's Hybrid method would help here. I was low on disk space, so this particular cap of family guy was picvideo on 17 I think, so maybe that accounts for the difficulty with it.

But back to your solution, maybe what we need is a motion perfect like plugin for avisynth coupled with decomb?
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Old 23rd January 2003, 16:00   #20  |  Link
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I thought it was a AVISynth/Decomb challenge, too. Oh well. I did get clean 24fps for the initial pans of the Enterprises, but the solution for that caused Decimate to want to blend frames in the bridge sequence. It wasn't as clean as what Donald produced.

I was going to post a particularly challenging clip from the episode "The Ensigns of Command". There's a part where the Sheliak ship is seen leaving on the main bridge viewer and it's a 30fps interlaced effect, I believe. I remember that scene being particularly ornery when I was trying my hand at encoding it at 24fps.
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