Need help - MeGUI to encode football/sports

[dutchMasta]

Hi all,

Encoding noob here. Trying to encode this DVD I have. It's a 2-hour long football/soccer DVD and it's been ripped to my harddrive. Would like to create a 1.4GB x264 rip of it, mkv container. Used 0.3.5.0 up til now, but just changed to the 0.3.5.6 (haven't tested using that yet). Several issues I have:

1) De-interlacing. Did research on several methods and TempGaussMC seems to be the best, but every time I use it, I get really jerky video, and it ends up twice the framerate it's supposed to be. With other methods such as Yadif or LeakKernelDeint, I sometimes get artifacts, but it's smooth and 25fps as it's supposed to be. How do I use TempGaussMC properly, or what other methods are there, good for football?

2) Quality. Seems I always get these bad video artifacts, and comparing to other people's encodes with same or less bitrate, mine's clearly worse. Have tried "x264: DXVA-SD-Insane", "x264: HQ-Slowest" and "x264: Unrestricted 2pass Insane" presets so far, modifying only the encoding preset to placebo each time, and bitrate to around 1440kbps (according to bitrate calculator, with 96kbps ABR MP3). Is there another preset I should use, and if it's for football, what's good? If not presets, what values should I play around with?

Here's my AVS script:
LoadPlugin("E:\Program Files\megui\tools\dgindex\DGDecode.dll")
DGDecode_mpeg2source("C:\Downloads\1.d2v", info=3)
LoadPlugin("E:\Program Files\megui\tools\avisynth_plugin\ColorMatrix.dll")
ColorMatrix(hints=true, threads=0)
Trim(44000,44200)
TempGaussMC_beta2(edimode="nnedi2")
#crop
BicubicResize(720,400,0.333,0.333) # Bicubic (Soft)
#denoise

Some samples (not sure about x264 presets):
Yadif - http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?q9h9ffuozbfww08
TempGaussMC - http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?04zhhgfjjd43w5p (incorrect AR)

[Sharktooth]

1) if you end up with twice the framerate it's because it's "bobbing". If you would like to re-encode at the original framerate just add ChangeFPS(25) in your .avs script after the TempGaussMC line.
if you have a supported nvidia card, it's highly recommended that you buy a dgindexnv license and use the Hardware deinterlacer that's much faster.

2) please describe the artifact you're getting.

[dutchMasta]

1) Got an ATI card. I'll try that changefps thing, thanks.

2) Generic bad quality vid, like around the players, it's more pixellated, and quite blocky.

[Adub]

A screenshot would be nice.

[Sharktooth]

it's obviously due to too low bitrate. that's coz 50FPS content needs more bits than 25FPS.
once you add the ChangeFPS(25) line to your .avs, results will be of better quality.

[dutchMasta]

Alright, upped a comparison image between the original DVD and my encode using the DXVA-SD-HQ preset, changing it to slower in the x264 settings, and using the above plus the added changefps.
Big image, but didn't want jpg compression to screw with the image quality.
http://img204.imageshack.us/img204/9934/comparec.th.png (http://img204.imageshack.us/img204/9934/comparec.png)

Does that look about right or can I squeeze more quality out of it (noticeably)? Thanks!

[Sharktooth]

post images as PNG 24 (it's lossless) and cut away the borders before encoding ;)
also, what is the source resolution? in the screenshot they appear to be the same.. so why use bicubiresize in your script?

[dutchMasta]

Ah sorry, should've explained further. It's a compilation DVD so there are many different sources. Some have borders, some don't. Isn't what I posted PNG 24 though? :confused:

The source resolution is 720x576 with a 16:9 AR, so it displays in MPC as around 1028x576. Used Photoshop to increase the size of the lower shot. What resize should I be using?

[Sharktooth]

sorry i thought they were jpg. try using lanczos resize or blackman (you dont need to re-encode the whole thing just trim a significative part).

[dutchMasta]

Alright, but:
1) In terms of x264 presets, which is the way to go for football/sports?
2) Anything else I can do to squeeze out more quality? I don't mind waiting 3 days or whatever for an encode.
3) Are add pre-rendering job/queue analysis pass worth it?

Yep, have been using trim this whole time, would go crazy if I didn't know about that. :p
Thanks so much for the help so far btw, appreciate it.

[Sharktooth]

1) obviously using the unrestricted megui preset and the slider on "placebo" but that also could have drawbacks on HW compatibility, so the encodes would be playable only on PCs.
2) see 1), a good deinterlacing, a softer resizing and maybe some filtering to rise compressibility a bit without loosing details.
3) pre-rendering is usefull only if the encoding speed is greatly limited by the avs script processing but does not help rising quality. analysis pass does not help quality too and it is only useful for very limited situations.

[dutchMasta]

Alright, did the encode, took a while, but turned out pretty good! Thanks for all the help!