Change Mastertape from DV to x264

[mbcd]

Hi Guys.

I want to capture my Familytapes because my old Camcorder is at the end of its lifetime.

My question ist about the correct options for encoding it with x264.

Material is 50i (PAL-DV), I want to deinterlace it and store it as 50p in SD (Pal).

Goal is not to be compatible with any Playbackdevice or heavy compression. I want to have it as "new" Mastertape, so goal is the best-possible quality.

Also it is important to keep the editability with x264. I want to edit my videos in some months, so the x264-streams should be as good as possible be editable.

Are there some suggestions to take the right encoding-Options?

[ChaosKing]

Why not keep the DV-Avi's and edit them later? .... => "best-possible quality"
x264 has a lossless mode

[Blue_MiSfit]

I'd suggest making two versions:

1) One version in lossy H.264 at 50p using a good deinterlacer like TGMC. This is the version you can watch / share

2) One version either in lossless H.264 at 50i, or, simply, the original DV. Do some tests and see which is smaller. I'd imagine the DV will be smaller, so just keep that. Lucky you that with PAL DV you get standard 4:2:0 :)

[smok3]

irc, 4:2:0 in DV and h.264 are different (basically you will never get transparent results, unless --- put solution here ---).

[foxyshadis]

Yep, before deinterlacing it would be worth converting to 4:4:4, if color clarity is at all important. It's a pain to do so because PAL DV is more akin to demosaicing than basic upscale-and-shift, and I'm not aware of standard filters to do it... but since no player supports that format, doing so will definitely improve color sharpness.

[vivan]

>4:4:4
Is it actually possible with QTGMC?

IIRC yv16 should be enough (chroma samples in DV are located in the same places as half of 4:2:2 chroma samples).
Also avisynth's convert supports DV chroma.

So DV -> YV16 -> QTGMC (-> YV12) -> encode.
I've bothered with this once, difference was nearly impossible to spot (let alone say that it's better), so try for yourself.

[mbcd]

Thank a lot for all your input and hints, I will try the suggestions.

Basicly I want to deinterlace, so I thought it is a good way to directly use some light ""improvements"" and using an actual well known codec for saving the results. DV is an old format, so I will try to use a newer solution.