encoded an old black/white movie so far ?

[iluvatar]

hello,

in the last months i've made a bunch of fine looking 2cd-rips using dvd2avi/vfapi/virtualdub method with 2-pass divx4. now i want to backup "citizen kane". it's a 114 minutes black/white movie from 1941 with mono sound. so the quality is not the best: lot of noise, points and scratches.
so before i start i'd like to hear your suggestions.

should i aim 1cd-rip or 2cd-rip ?

which codec ? divx4 or divx3 sbc ?

should i use filters like smoothing or temporal smoothing in virtualdub ?

what lame options would you suggest for encoding mono sound ? can i save some space compared to stereo sound ?

many thanks ... christian

[ohliuv]

try applying noice reduction filters - will improve the quality a lot

[iluvatar]

holy shitt ... that was a fast reply :D

can you adivse a special one ? are there drawbacks ?

[sierrafoxtrot]

i'vw encoded quite a few old movies, seven samurai, casablanca, 12 angry men, and i'm still unable to decide between div3 and div4, div4 over-smooths the picture, but it's irrelevent with the amount of noise filtering you're going to be using (i recommend high noise filter in GKnot).

div3, on the other hand maintains more detail, and if you don't apply noise reduction, you get lots of dancing macroblocks when the codec tries to cope with the old grainy transfers.

if you want to do all this manually (why not use GKnot? :)), try smart smoother and temporal smoother and crank them up a bit. that normally works wonders ...

as for 1CD or 2 ... well, i normally try for 1 but a lot of the older movies have 4:3 aspect ratios so you'll have to decide how much quality loss you would tolerate, and go for 2. if you're not too fussy about crispness, use bilinear resizing (act like a weak noise filter). well ... the encodes i've done are far from perfect, if you compare them to any of the newer movies i've done, but they're as good as they're going to get, considering the source material ...

i'm not sure whether lame has switches to force mono (i'm sure it does) so you could do that ...

:D

[iluvatar]

in general i prefer a smoothed picture over a blocky one. so i think divx4 will be my choice :)

do you mean the smart smoother by donald graft ? can you explain the difference between smart smoother and temporal smoother ?

[sierrafoxtrot]

i think smart smoother blends together pixels if they are below a certain threshold in difference (whatever that means) but temporal smoother compares differences between frames before blending. i'm not too certain about them myself, but there are lots of posts that will help you out. use the search Fn.

a bit about temp cleaner (better version of temp smoother), available from : http://home.earthlink.net/~casaburi/download/

try nicky page's guide on virtualdub filters
http://nickyguides.digital-digest.com

... and yep, donald graft's smart smoother. his homepage has got some inpho on this too ...
http://sauron.mordor.net/dgraft/

[bb]

You can also try the Dynamic Noise Reduction (I recommend Donald Graft's scriptable version). This one won't blur that much.

bb

[iluvatar]

yesterday evening i've played around with gknot. i've tryed all these different noise filters ... they are so slow. if i'd encode the whole movie with heavy noise filter, it would take days on my p3 1ghz ... never thought it's that slow :eek:

finally i started encoding with little noise filter and bicubic resize ... so one pass will take approximately 6 hours. but when i woke up today morning the movie wasn't finished. apparently gknot or virtualdub aborted the encoding.

so i restarted the encoding ... :rolleyes:

[serbersan]

I'd advice you edit the little noise filter and use TempSmoother(x) with x between(1-3). These values are only a little slower than little noise but more useful than them

I think little noise isn't enough for the job you want.

[Acaila]

I think it'll be fairly easy to get that movie on one CD. Using TemporalSmoother on level 3 won't hurt you, and will clear most of your noise away.

Also, you might want to check out Steady's Greyscale filter. This might increase compression, but I haven't tried it out myself yet on a full movie. Supposedly it takes out all color, and since it's already black&white it shouldn't visibly alter anything.