Capturing Star Trek

[Snike42]

I'm having problems capturing Star Trek Voyager from TV-PAL.
The problem is that the result is jerky. Every second or so, the movie jumps a little bit.

Here's how I captured it:
First I capture in full-screen 704x576 with Avi-IO in ASUS-V2 format. Afterwards I use Vdub with these filters:
- smart deinterlace: frame-only difference, motion map denoise, treshhold 5
- smart smoother
- resize (512x384)

Normally I don't have problems with TV or VHS captures other then Star Trek.

Anyone having experienced this problem?

Snike

[Krajensky]

Can you try something?

Remove all those filters, and step through one frame at a time. Are there noticable lines in the picture, horizontally alternating?

Add a resize filter, with Discard Field 2. Step through it and see if it is now steady.


If it looks combed (lots of lines) try the filter PAL Deinterlace, and see if that helps.

If it's still jerky after you try discarding the second field, then you have a problem with your capture card/resolution or the tv station in your area is transmitting it wrong.

If you only see lines on about half the frames you have something totally weird, a hybrid NTSC-over-PAL stream (never personally seen it, but it's possible).

What is the runtime of an episode after you cut the commercials? For Voyager it should be within 10 seconds of 43:45, or Enterprise 45:45 (NTSC...PAL is about a minute shorter).

Email me if you need more realtime help...

Krajensky

[Snike42]

Thanks for helping out!

I used a clip which pans steadely in a horizontal direction to do some tests:

- whithout any filters
most frames look interlaced but a few frames aren't

- discard second field (or first)
clip look choppy in playback. looking closely at every individual frame, some of them look like there's two frames blended together. the blended frames occur in bursts like a few (4 or 5) every other frame after each other, followed by 15 frames which look ok.

- pal deinterlace
instead of the choppy parts there are now interlaced parts

- blend fields
this gives the best result so far, but looks quite blury on movement

Maybee I'll give the new Decomb filter a try, but this looks complicated and stuff...


Snike

[Mental]

If you're capturing "Voyager" I can only say, Good luck!
That show has the most f**ked-up telecining process that I've ever seen.

[Krajensky]

There's no problem with it, except they telecine before they splice the scenes. It just was filmed as FILM and in the transition to TV they didn't care.

Krajensky

[TheGenesis]

I stream (MPEG2 480x576 = 4:3 SVCD) direct from a DVB-Receiver (Nokia Mediamaster via SCSI).
Using the following Filter-Chain in VirtualDUB is currently a usable compromise:

1. deinterlace - area based v1.2 (threshold 15, edge 25, blend)
2. resize (Precise bicubic) to 728x546
3. smart smoother (1.0 beta 4) (diameter 5, strength 10)
4. Null Transform (crop: x1=11 x2=13 y1=6 y2=4)

remarks:

1: blend instead of interpolation (Jitter due to dropped fields)
2: equal to 704x528 + Overscan
3: removes compression artefacts (Low Bitrate) and slightly the Ghost-Effects (due to Field-Blends)
4: crops Overscan

A short manual (in german) for a complete transcode can be found here http://pub6.ezboard.com/fultimatefilmparameter.showMessage?topicID=513.topic

We are working on a suitable soloution ... if you speak german, you are invited to meet our discussion here http://pub6.ezboard.com/fultimatecapture.showMessageRange?topicID=1821.topic&start=1&stop=20

finally an outdated discussion can be found here http://pub6.ezboard.com/fultimatefrm42.showMessage?topicID=19.topic

Good luck
Thom

[Nihilistic]

Nokia Media Master? That thing work on US systems?
What kinda use have you gotten from it?

[Olleman]

Hey!

I tested those filter combinations...and a lot of the interlacing disapears...however...the most annnoying thing is still there...those duplicate frames that makes the picture look very bad when something moves very fast in the picture..or when one se voyager go through the picture in the intro...it's like one image is some milliseconds in front of the other...making 2 "voyagers" on top of each other slightly (can't find the right english word) "on different places in the image....I guess all of you who have tried to capture voyager with a DVB source knows what I'm talking about...

Since I don't read german I can't join your other discussions....but isn't there any way of doing this better? I have troied the different filters that I know of in Virtual Dub and that didn't help at all against these "duplicate frames"...

Best Regards, Olle

[Snike42]

I did some testing with the Decomb filter, but there's no way to combine the frames making full frames.

So I finaly settled for the Fielddeinterlace filter-blend mode, which is part of the Decomb dll. I made a little avisynth script which does all the work so VDub can do the compression in 'fast recompress' mode.

LoadPlugin("d:\PROGRA~1\GORDIA~1\mpeg2dec.dll")
LoadPlugin("d:\PROGRA~1\GORDIA~1\Avisynth_Spatial.dll")
LoadPlugin("d:\PROGRA~1\GORDIA~1\decomb.dll")
SegmentedAVISource("S:\capture_2.avi")
ConvertToYUY2()
FieldDeinterlace(true,5,true)
crop(7,5,692,566)
BilinearResize(512,384)
TemporalSmoother(1)

ps: The Decomb telecide filter does wonders with PAL captures which shifts fields every other scene (Buffy).

Snike

[Olleman]

Thankyou snike42!

I have some question about the script though.

1. Why are you loadthe the mpeg2dec dll when you have a avi as the source?

2. Why do you convert the the video to YUV2 ?

Regards, Olle

[Krajensky]

Mpeg2dec contains the TemporalSmoother used in the last line.

If the codec does not return YUY2 data (i.e. YUV or RGB as in the case of raw 24bit RGB) you need that for the filters to work fastest (and depending on what extra filters, possibly required for it to work at all).

Krajensky

[TheGenesis]

Hi,

>I tested those filter combinations...and a lot of the interlacing disapears...

Yepp ... it´s still a compromise of using available filters ...

>however...the most annnoying thing is still there...those duplicate frames that makes the picture look very bad ...

Your "duplicate frame" results from a combination of a "blend Field" with another Field from the NEXT Frame ... this comes with the 30 to 25 Telecining Process

>...it's like one image is some milliseconds in front of the other...

Yes ... this is the "blend field" ... if you switch from blend to interpolate (deinterlace-Filter), you will notice, that frames will become sharpen, but motion ends up in jitter because the blend field was combined with a field from a different frame (time-shift)

>....but isn't there any way of doing this better?

The correct way is to reconstruct the original Framerate. You must extapolate the dropped-fields using their corresponding blend-fields or drop the field an extrapolate a complete new frame using MotionPerfect or similar software.

Our problem is, that there is no filter, who groups the "complete frames" and identifies the frames with "one blended and one dropped field" ... but maybe a coder will do ... anyone out there ?

Thom

[Olleman]

Ok, thankyou TheGenesis for that extended information on how it works, I think I can understand a little better now what really is the problem...I really hope that some coder can come up with a filter solution for this problem...

Regards, Olle

[Olleman]

oh yeah, one mopre thing, where can I find this decomb.dll ? it isn't in my gordianknot installation dir...

,Olle

[Roginator]

http://sauron.mordor.net/dgraft/

[Guest]

Once the *fields* become blended it seems there is nothing that can be done to recover all the original progressive pictures.

[Olleman]

Hello!

This is quite an old thread but I was hoping that someone would have found a better solution for deinterlacing Star Trek Voyager (PAL).
"Deinterlace Area Based 1.2" is the best deinterlace filter I have found. the decomb filter with the settings posted by Snike42 works but not as good as Area Based 1.2, however this gives be crap speed. Framserving with virtualdub to cce gives med 0.360 but with Avisynth and FieldDeinterlace I get over 0.8. So have there been any progresse, I'm not that good at deinterlacing so I was hoping that some hardcore deinterlacer would have came up with some good settings for the decomb filter or so, or even a better a new filter that can really filter all those duplicate frames away :)

Best Regards, Olle

[dilbert]

When i capture Star Trek Voyager, i using avi_io resolution 352x288, mjpg=19,under advanced settings i mark 2 fild with more than 288 lines.

Then i load dvd2svcd, using simple resizer and go to bed.

Next morning i have an find episode ready to burn.

dilbert