miniDV - CCE or Tmpeg ?

[bumblebe]

I came across a thread that seemed to imply that Tmpeg was better for miniDV footage.
I've been using the various iterations of Tmpeg for 1.5 years now and have come to the conclusion that in Tmpeg (using 2.52 right now)SVCD bitrates really don't cut it for miniDV footage. There's way too much "graininess".
Solutions:
- going up to 4mbps fixes it, but no go for SVCD obviously
- I'm going to try deinterlacing
- would CCE do a better job ?
Any thoughts ?

[bumblebe]

no thoughts ?

[Trahald]

well.. would be nice to know the settings you throw at tmpgenc.. but anyways

try this method

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=18665

for tmpgenc..

imho - cce will do a pretty awesome job at about a 2000 kbps average... so try the method above... then give cce a whirl (3-4 pass)

480x480 needs some desent bitrate to look like anything.. ive gotten 110 mins onto 1 disk with cce and looking pretty good. but generally you need AT LEAST 1700 avg kbps to get good quality imo.

ive never been able to get anything close to what i get on cce with tmpgenc... but im gonna give the (above url) method a try. only thing i dont like about cq is final size cant be predicted.

[bumblebe]

Thanks.
Actually, even with 2 pass vbr, Tmpeg struggles on miniDV material, there's a lot of "gravel noise" due to the interlaced nature of the material.

CCE is such a pain in the b***. I'm trying to use DVD2SVCD's AVI2SVCD subset, but CCE systematically stops at 30% and I don't think you can specify a range in DVD2SVCD.

[EMonty]

Originally posted by w00kiee

ive never been able to get anything close to what i get on cce with tmpgenc... but im gonna give the (above url) method a try. only thing i dont like about cq is final size cant be predicted.

I tried it with TMPGEnc 2.52 CQ setting and it and the correct filesize is generated:)

[R23]

I have had pretty good luck with my home shot miniDV avi files with (latest version) of DVD2SVCD. I use a video bitrate of about max 2700, average 2300, 5 pass, smart deinterlaced, 128 kbs audio CCE encoding.

The above is about the max my pioneer dvd player will handle.

My experience has not been as good with TMpeg and it also takes WAY to long.

[bumblebe]

Yeah I'd love to try CCE with miniDV footage but can't get over that 30% hurdle !

I've found that deinterlacing induced some "strobing" when the camera pans. In effect you've reduced the refresh rate of 50/60fps to 25/30fps.

[mrbass]

I've tried tons of various settings for mini-DV material and it's acceptable (not jerky) but still I want better if possible. This was using main-concept codec. I'm almost done encoding a non-compressed 2min mini-dv which is a whopping 4GB to see if it'll show quality any better. These are my settings I'm using:
Avg bitrate 2200 (gonna play with a lower one 1800 and see if it's decent or not)
--Blendfields, uncheck UpperField, uncheck zigzag, cce vbr 4 pass.

ok it's about the same maybe 2 to 3% better if that. Definitely not worth it using that much disk space
4GB for 2min or 300MB with mainconcept dv codec.

tried just about everything..various deinterlacing, temporal smoother, etc.

[Zeppeliner]

I used avi2svcd on a 13gig pal dv file (58min; home edited; lots of action) with 224kbit audio, and one attempt with 3-pass and one with 4-pass. Both went perfect, never locked up at all (two pcs - p3-800/384mb ram+Laptop P3-600/128, both fitted with win2k sp2, cce 2.50, dvd2svcd 7 1.03). Since I have a Pioneer DV-444 I had the video set at max around 2450kbit, min I don't remember, but the average was around 1630. The picture quality is very nice - I deinterlaced it and used bicubic resize.

One thing that bugs me though, is that there are quite a few 'freeze-frames' or whatever you want to call them. I checked with Bitrate Viewer and the max bitrate is a whopping 2900?! Which I think is more than the Pioneer can handle.

[mrbass]

@Zeppeliner
perfect results eh?..that's great. Which deinterlacing method did you use outta curiousity?

[Zeppeliner]

"Perfect" is in the eye of the beholder though - I don't claim to be an expert on video image quality :)

I used Telecide.

[bumblebe]

I finally got avi2svcd to work but there were problems with the size of the frames so it crashed the i-author muxer.
I was able to compare a short passage with a Tmpeg encode on my DVD player and...I was unimpressed by CCE. No better than Tmpeg IMHO especially since there was more strobing on camera pans. I hadn't selected any deinterlacing so I'm not sure what it's due to.

I guess Tmpeg with a higher bitrate is the way to go !