Anyone have success with Band of Brothers DVDs?

[rbergero]

I've been using DVD2SVCD for quite a long time and done about 400 movies by estimates and am finding that by far, Band of Brothers is producing the blockiest, mosquito noise invested, backups that I have ever seen.

I've tried multi-pass VBR with Normal processing, Blend Fields, Deinterlacing, IVTC, Temporal Smoother, you name it.

These are yet another quality DVD set (grin) produced by HBO (see quality on Sopranos for another example).

Has anyone out there been able to produce an acceptable backup of these episodes? The only real problems that I see are during the action scenes and things become blocky and full of mosquito noise.

I saw another thread that referenced the TV series but I tried IVTC and Interlaced methods to no avail. Is Band of Brothers a "hybrid" type dvd (part normal, part interlaced)?

Thanks in advance - looking for suggestions.

[markrb]

Have you tried setting FF to off and not IVTC or Automatic?

I can't say for sure it will work, but it's worth a try.

Mark

[GreenDrazi]

NTSC Region 1, DVD2SVCD v1.1.0 build 1a, CCE 5 pass vbr

Did you check your log files to see if IVTC was kicking in (assuming NTSC Field Operation was set to automatic)? The title sequences and interviews at the start of the episodes appear to DVD2AVI as a mixed bag (hybrid)of film\NTSC\interlaced\progressive video.

The rest of the video (the bulk of the film) is not hybrid and I was quite happy with just using “Force Film” and no filters (which makes for a really fast encode).
There is so much camera movement, color saturation (S. Private Ryan), digital “stop action” camera effects (don’t know the real name of this “staccato” effect), and super grainy film effects that I see no reason (IMHO) to try and clean it up with any filters. In fact, I can imagine that trying to deinterlace all of these effects just adds an incredible amount of really bad artifacts.

I’m also able to compress very well most of these episodes which are 55+ minutes onto a single 80 minute CD-R. So try “Force Film”

From my LOG file “SVCDInfo.txt”

VIDEO INFO:
- Encoder: Cinema Craft Encoder 2.50.1.0
- Encoding mode: Multipass VBR
- Passes: 5
- Max. bitrate: 3000
- Avg. bitrate: 1722
- Min. bitrate: 300
- Bias: 20
- Image Quality Prio: 25
- Antinoise filter: No
- Linear quant. scale: No
- Zigzag scan order: No
- Upper field first: No
- Progressive frames: No
- iDCT Algorithm: 32-bit SSE MMX
- NTSC Field Operation: Force Film On
- Deinterlace: None
- Pulldown: Yes
- Width: 480
- Height: 480

[rbergero]

Thanks for the suggestions guys! I'll give it a shot.

Randy

[wakebrder]

This series was shot with and intentional grainy, "saving private ryan", type look to it. It was shot this way to add to the effect of the series. I watched the entire series in HDTV and it still looked grainy. This could be part of your problem?