Best method to encode high quality short video?

[eleven32i]

Hi,

I capture alot of music videos and other shorts segments directly off DTV or SVHS tapes. I use a Canopus ADVC-100 to capture and convert the analog video to DV on my computer. Most of the video I capture has been telecined, so I use ITVC in nandub when compressing to divx 3.11a. I also do a TV crop 12x12x8x8 on the 720x480 DV. I then do a static noise filter and a dynamic noise filter before resizing to 512x384. The output looks nice, but I was wondering if there is a better codec or process then what I'm doing. Any ideas? I've tried using DivX 4 in the past but even with a high bitrate the quality seemed to suffer from the original...

I'm very anxious to get some feedback on what other people are doing to video that isn't ripped from a DVD.

Jason

[praying mantis]

thats pretty much the same as what i do.

though i capture a little differently, i encode to divx 3.11 with nandub 2 pass, i crop and resize to about the same size as you and all my videos are better than the garbage you can download.

i personally capture with asus digital vcr, hooked through my vcr, as it works well with my geforce video card.
alternatively, i do it with my sony pc5 through firewire, though i have to record to my camera first from the vcr, but the video is awesome. this way ive never needed a noise reduction filter.

[phrentec]

in the divx 4 settings, try using "slowest" for the performance/quality settings.

[eleven32i]

I just did a music video using Divx 4.12, slowest, and 100 quality settings. It does look pretty good. Is there a definite downside to using 4.12 instead of 2 pass nandub?

Jason

[theReal]

I just experimented with encoding a DV home-video (vacation in the midwest of US, many "on the road"-scenes from out of the driving car).

I tried resizing to 512x384 with DivX 4.12, I tried smoothing filters - it just looked crappy, not at all like the original DV.

Then I tried Gknot/Nandub - it was better, but still not ok.

I finally found a solution that gives me a HQ file which kind of preserves the DV-quality:

Gknot/Nandub 2-pass, Bitrate 3000 kbps, resolution 640x468, resizing in Nandub with Precise Bilinear filter (this is enough filtering to make it at least a bit compressible, but the picture is still quite sharp)

The only drawback is that I can only fit 30 minutes on a 700MB CDR, but the quality is amazingly good!

[wing1]

If you like Divx4.12 perhaps you should give xvid a try. I've been using mpeg4v3VKI as my compression codec for capture. When I heard about xvid and tried it out, it has been my codec for capture eversince.

btw, how do u go about ITVC a capture source? for the life of me, I just can't get ITVC to work without jerky movement.