Transcoding advice: Does anyone have a good recipe for a Canon SD700 MJPEG?

[colecovizion]

I have a Canon SD700 which makes 640x480 video, 30 fps, mono, in the MJPEG AVI format. Unfortunately, while these files are pretty good quality, they are not compressed really well. I'd like to archive them in a more compressed form while retaining about 90% of the quality. I've tried a number of codecs (Divx, Xvid, Quicktime H264, 3ivx, Sorenson 3, etc), but haven't found a good combination of settings to balance the file size and the quality. I've been hoping to use a bit rate in between 2000-3000, however so far the video tends to lose its texture. Maybe I'm being unrealistic.

Here are the best "recipes" I've found so far:

1. XVid - Original size, original framerate, 2 pass, 3000kbs, MP3 mono 128k, 41000hz.

2. Quicktime - appleTV default settings (H264, aac). I'm not very sure of the original settings, they seem VBR.

Notes:

* I have a Intel Mac Pro, so I can use a program on either "side."
* As long as the codec isn't too far off the beaten path, I'll use it
* If required, I don't care if the program/codec costs money. I'm more focused on results right now
* I'm not concerned about speed, just quality

Any recommendations, tweaks that I'm not using? I know these settings are subjective, but I'm hoping someone has some insight or experience with this particular source movie.

[Dark Shikari]

MeGUI is a nice GUI for x264 that will do the trick for H.264 encoding.

Also if the video is noisy, some denoising, like fft3dfilter, might be useful.

[scharfis_brain]

you should use avisynth to preprocess the video.
you can:
denoise the video
and as well adjust the colors and recover under/over exposured areas, because the video form such cameras illegally make usage of the full luma range of 0...255. But for video the luma has to be squeezed into 16...235 levels.

all that can be done using AVIsynth as preprocessing application and Virtualdub as compressing application.

[colecovizion]

Thanks for the info guys! I'll check it out.

[Die Kuh macht Muh]

I also have a Canon camera. The audio is 88 kb/s for mine, so if your camera stores the audio in the same way, then reencoding to MP3 at 128 kb/s makes no sense because you are degrading quality and increasing file size at the same time. In that case I would just leave the audio the way it is.

As for the video, I haven't been able to get Avisynth 2.5 to read MJPEG encoded videos. I tried both ffdshow and another codec whose name I can't remember, but I always get an error message telling me that there is no MJPEG codec installed (even though there is).

Has anyone gotten Avisynth to decode MJPEG video? If so, do you use DirectshowSource, or AviSource, or something completely different?

[Dark Shikari]

I also have a Canon camera. The audio is 88 kb/s for mine, so if your camera stores the audio in the same way, then reencoding to MP3 at 128 kb/s makes no sense because you are degrading quality and increasing file size at the same time. In that case I would just leave the audio the way it is.

As for the video, I haven't been able to get Avisynth 2.5 to read MJPEG encoded videos. I tried both ffdshow and another codec whose name I can't remember, but I always get an error message telling me that there is no MJPEG codec installed (even though there is).

Has anyone gotten Avisynth to decode MJPEG video? If so, do you use DirectshowSource, or AviSource, or something completely different?If the MJPEG video is in an AVI container, just use DirectShowSource() with MJPEG decoding activated in FFDShow. Should work fine.

[Die Kuh macht Muh]

BTW to denoise the (pretty noisy) video clips from my camera, I use:

ConvertToYV12()
DegrainMedian(limitY=4,limitUV=4,mode=1)
Temporalsoften(2,5,5,mode=2,scenechange=6)

If you're wondering how I'm using Avisynth on those videos even though I just wrote that Avisynth won't read them, well, I first save them in VDub as an uncompressed RGB and then feed that to Avisynth. I'm hoping somebody can tell me how to use MJPEG videos in Avisynth directly.

[Dark Shikari]

BTW to denoise the (pretty noisy) video clips from my camera, I use:

ConvertToYV12()
DegrainMedian(limitY=4,limitUV=4,mode=1)
Temporalsoften(2,5,5,mode=2,scenechange=6)

If you're wondering how I'm using Avisynth on those videos even though I just wrote that Avisynth won't read them, well, I first save them in VDub as an uncompressed RGB and then feed that to Avisynth. I'm hoping somebody can tell me how to use MJPEG videos in Avisynth directly.
At least use HuffYUV or Lagarith, uncompressed is ridiculous.

I'd personally use FFT3DGPU(sigma=3,sharpen=0.6,bt=3, precision=1). The absolute ideal would be to use MVTools-mocomped FFT3DGPU, but that's a good bit slower.

[Die Kuh macht Muh]

If the MJPEG video is in an AVI container, just use DirectShowSource() with MJPEG decoding activated in FFDShow. Should work fine.
Awesome, that worked. I guess my mistake was that I was using AviSource instead of DirectShosSource.
:thanks:

[Die Kuh macht Muh]

At least use HuffYUV or Lagarith, uncompressed is ridiculous.
Yeah, the files get pretty big that way. I'm glad I don't need that intermediate step now, that I can go directly from MJPEG to Avisynth to Xvid.

[Die Kuh macht Muh]

Here are the best "recipes" I've found so far:

1. XVid - Original size, original framerate, 2 pass, 3000kbs, MP3 mono 128k, 41000hz.

2. Quicktime - appleTV default settings (H264, aac). I'm not very sure of the original settings, they seem VBR.
I use Xvid at constant quantizer q=4 which results in bitrates between 1500 and 2500 kb/s.