Preserving "live action" look when encoding xvid? Is it possible

[Furiousflea]

Hi there, I'm currently backing up a load of DVDs to Xvid using "Fair Use Wizard 2.6". Everything is fine for most DVDs but for my DVDs that have a "live action" filming look (The look that makes video appear smooth and not like film)....

Instead of getting the smooth output, the encoded video looks all film like and horrible...

Is there a way to get "live action" look when encoding to xvid?

Hope that makes sense :)

Thanks

P.S; Would also appreciate a recommendation on a different Xvid front end to use as not too keen on Fair Use Wizard, any other suggestions, cheers. Rob

[Blue_MiSfit]

Get some popcorn and a soda / beer. This may take awhile ;)

Here's what you need to understand

1) Film and video (live) are fundamentally different.

Film is shot at 24 fps, and is stored on DVDs at (typically) ~23.976fps (24000/1001).

Video is shot (in NTSC land) at 29.97fps, but it's interlaced - which means there are actually two distinct images (fields) in each frame, stored as the odd and even lines, which are displayed one after the other. That means there are effectively 59.94 pictures per second. In PAL land, it's different - 25fps / 50 fields per second. I will assume NTSC.

This is nearly 3 times the temporal resolution than film. That's why it looks so much more "lively". Which looks better is an opinion thing. I personally hate the video look, and love the 24fps of film, but many others feel the opposite.

Bottom line, when backing up video - it's typically a good idea to preserve as much as possible, both spatially and temporally. Thus, you want to keep the picture quality, and the motion fluidity.

It sounds like the source you're working with originated on video, and has 59.94 pictures (29.97 full frames) per second, and you'd like to preserve that.

Okay.

Now, let's think about how you're going to view this content.

We can keep it interlaced, or we can deinterlace to progressive. If you are going to watch it on an interlaced display (your NTSC CRT TV), you want to keep the video interlaced. Deinterlacing will unnecessarily destroy information.

If you're planning on watching this on an LCD, or a computer CRT, then you need to deinterlace, as these displays are inherently progressive scanning. Watching interlaced video on a progressive display without any processing results in artifacts, since each frame has two temporal pictures.

There are several methods to deinterlace.

The simplest is bobbing, which literally takes each field (remember, there are two per frame) and scales it up to a full frame. Bobbing isn't really deinterlacing, as it returns full rate, which for NTSC is 59.94fps. The advantages are that it keeps all motion fluidity. The disadvantag is that it's sometimes difficult to do well, and 60fps is a lot of data to store and display. This means bigger output files, and more CPU power required to play them.

The simple bob() in avisynth is very soft, and can suffer from other problems. Advanced bobbers like MCBob() or TDeint(mode=1) can have spectacular results, but can also be VERY slow. Again keep in mind that 59.94fps means twice as much data to encode, so your file sizes will be larger than if you did interlaced encoding, or if you decimated down to 29.97fps.

There's a lot of options there. Try different bobbers, and see what you like.

Now, if you can live with reduced motion fluidity, then you can truly deinterlace (output 29.97 progressive fps).

You can use any of the bobbers, followed by SelectEven() or SelectOdd(), or use a true deinterlacer, like TDeint(), or YADIF(). There's lots of options here also.

As far as a front end goes, MeGUI is the platform of choice these days (for me anyway). AutoMKV is another option. There's others too...

Hope that clears things up!

~MiSfit

[henryho_hk]

Does Fair User Wizard turn on deinterlacing by default?