Encoding Interlaced DVD (Hong Kong release) need tips

[ArdenDag]

Ok, I know this is my first post, and a lot of people sound a little off/awkward when doing this, so please be kind. I've read a lot of the guides and many threads on here, but I'm trying to get some info from the many helpful people here on my particular issue.

First, I've read the IVTC faq at: http://www.doom9.org/ivtc-tut.htm

I've gone through the trouble shooting steps on how to pick out the best way to IVTC/De-interlace my video, but I'm still getting poor quality (I'll explain in a minute).

First, the DVD is Kiki's Delivery Service (anime) from a Hong Kong bootleg (Studio Ghibli box set). If anyone has encoded these DVDs, I would appreciate feedback on your particular issues/resolutions. In any case, the DVDs run under NTSC when I preview it in DVD2AVI, so I leave it under 29.970 fps and I don't force film, to de-interlace/IVTC it later. After making the project file, I create the .avs file, originally (I don't know why) but GKnot automatically assumed it was a 16:9 anamorphic film, but it plays 4:3 on my regular DVD player (this kind of confused me). Well, I set it to encode using the standard de-interlacing setting, here was my initial .avs file:


LoadPlugin("C:\PROGRA~1\GORDIA~1\mpeg2dec.dll")

mpeg2source("C:\Documents and Settings\Arden\Desktop\Kiki's Delivery Service.d2v")

VerticalReduceBy2

BicubicResize(608,448,0,0.75)

(For whatever reason, GKnot keeps putting the Crop line even though I disable cropping, VDub has issues with this, so I just removed it. If I shouldn't tell me why)

After doing this, I noticed the quality was a little 'fuzzy' but passable (I didn't notice any interlaced frames just watching the video). I encoded it with DivX 5 codec, 2 pass, 800 kbps. I wanted a video file around 700mb to get it on one CD, so GKnot calculated that would be the rate to use.

I wanted to see if using the GreedyHMA filters would be better, so I also attempted this .avs file, but it seems it came out a bit worse...

LoadPlugin("C:\PROGRA~1\GORDIA~1\mpeg2dec.dll")
LoadPlugin("C:\PROGRA~1\GORDIA~1\GreedyHMA.dll")

mpeg2source("C:\Documents and Settings\Arden\Desktop\Kiki's Delivery Service.d2v")

GreedyHMA(1,0,0,0,0,0,0,0)

BicubicResize(608,448,0,0.75)

Is there any way I can keep the original clarity a little better without upping the bitrate? Maybe changing the type of filtering? Trying a different Bicubic setting? I thought that sharp bicubic would be the best for the type of movie I'm working on (anime). I am working on a project to get a good subtitle job on this (as it's not yet released on DVD in the US, and I want a have a copy I'll be proud to show to people, and until I get a DVD burner I can keep a decent AVI filesize to fit on 1 CD) and I'm somewhat anal about the quality of things I have on my computer...

Any help would be appreciated, or any feedback, as this is my first post here.

[jggimi]

Welcome!

I'll be kind. I promise.

If you've examined a scene with movement, and determined that every frame is truly interlaced, then you probably will get much better results with a different deinterlacing filter.

VerticalReduceBy2 ("Fast Deinterlace" in GKnot terms) has exactly one advantage over Field Deinterlacing. It's faster. Everything else about it is usually a disadvantage. It resizes your 720x480 video stream, and makes it 720x240. Your final resize restores the aspect ratio, with half of the source image removed. It does, indeed, deinterlace, but unless you are going for a small resolution, I'd recommend field deinterlacing over it.

If it seems like a non-standard telecine, where, say, 3 of 5 or 4 of 5 frames appear interlaced, then you might try Telecide() as your deinterlacer. And I've even had good success using Telecide(post=false), which reassembles frames if the fields arrive in the wrong order every so often, but eliminates Telecide's built-in Field Deinterlacing. Sometimes, what appears partially interlaced is partially swapped field order.

You might do well to create a test.d2v project of a high-motion scene using the [ and ] buttons. Then try different filters in a test.avs, and see which look best while moving forward a frame at a time through the .avs in Vdub. This is what I normally do. It only takes a couple of minutes to edit an .avs and test what the frames look like, without having to do any encoding at all. In 15 or 20 minutes, you'l be able to test quite a few options.

[ArdenDag]

I never even thought about just testing a bunch of different filters on a small portion of the DVD (I completely forgot about using [ and ] to select a portion of the DVD rip to make a project out of)

I might just test various filters to see if the quality is better with any 1 filter.

Also, another question:

Will adding .ssa subtitles while encoding in virtualdub affect the overall quality of the .avi that's encoded? I'm using Sub-Station Alpha to make subtitles for the movie, the subs are running under the video (so it doesn't interfere with the video) in 4:3 format. Virtualdub is doing this automatically with the TextSub plugin. Will this reduce quality? I also noticed this isn't causing the file-size to go up much (if anything a megabyte). Is there a better way to input subtitles in an .avi file? I know VOBsub can mux them separately, I might consider that too...

Thanks for being kind btw :) I appreciate any help you can offer.

[ArdenDag]

Umm :) I was amazed...

Telecide(Post=False)

actually did the best, because it kept the original framerate (29.970) instead of deleting frames, making the video look choppy, and fixed the interlacing effects.

Appreciate it MUCH!

[jggimi]

Don't thank me, thank Donalt Graft; he's the guy who wrote the filter.

I've tried subtitles burned in, I've tried them left separate. I prefer the latter, as I didn't care for the results. I did find, when I burned, that I liked the resizing to come before the subtitles in the filter chain. But I've always found displaying subtitles from a separate file looks better to me. That said, I've never tried burning them below the video image, as you seem to be doing. And I do prefer the subs below the image.

With subs in a separate file, I use BSPlayer's subtitle display capability rather than Vobsub -- usually -- because I find it a little easier with BSPlayer to move the titles below the image, and change the font size. But that is merely personal preference.

[manono]

Hi-

...because it kept the original framerate (29.970)

How do you know that's the original frame rate? Are you sure your Kiki is pure interlaced? I have one a friend gave me, also from a Hong Kong bootleg, and it IVTC'd perfectly well and plays perfectly smoothly. Did you actually advance frame by frame through the .d2v in a motion scene in GKnot and determine that every frame is interlaced? I'd almost be willing to bet that yours can be IVTC'd. You said that Telecide(Post=False) fixed the interlacing and that pretty much proves that it can be IVTC'd.

Crop the black bars. Yes, burning the subs onto the .avi requires a lot of extra bits and degrades the rest of the image. I recommend using GKnot to crop the black bars and then resizing. I also recommend keeping the subs separate, and then using the player to add back the black bars so that the subs will still be in the black. BS Player (among others) can do this.

GKnot automatically assumed it was a 16:9 anamorphic film,

That's just GKnot's default setting. You choose 16:9 or 4:3 depending on what DVD2AVI tells you.

Also, update your version of Decomb as the one included in GKnot is old and somewhat inferior.

[ArdenDag]

How do you know that's the original frame rate?

I think you misunderstood me, I meant the original frame rate on the DVD, as it was made to play in the US, the frame rate is 29.970, NTSC standard.

you sure your Kiki is pure interlaced? I have one a friend gave me, also from a Hong Kong bootleg, and it IVTC'd perfectly well and plays perfectly smoothly. Did you actually advance frame by frame through the .d2v in a motion scene in GKnot and determine that every frame is interlaced? I'd almost be willing to bet that yours can be IVTC'd. You said that Telecide(Post=False) fixed the interlacing and that pretty much proves that it can be IVTC'd.

It is not purely interlaced, it was telecined. Sorry if the way I was explaining my situation was a little confusing, but I am new here, and still fairly new to encoding video. What would be your best recommendation for IVTCing? I did the ways that GKnot supplies from the .avs file it creates internally, and they made the video look choppy (the movie moves slowly in action scenes, skips parts, etc). I assumed this was because IVTCing deletes frames, and the fps jumps from 29.970 to approximately 20 fps. Using Telecide(post=false) didn't delete any frames, but as jggimi said, it reorganized frames that might have been out of order. I don't know if that was the problem, but it certainly fixed how my rip looked, it removed the interlacing effects.

Yes, burning the subs onto the .avi requires a lot of extra bits and degrades the rest of the image. I recommend using GKnot to crop the black bars and then resizing. I also recommend keeping the subs separate, and then using the player to add back the black bars so that the subs will still be in the black. BS Player (among others) can do this.

I want to make it as easy as possible for my friends to watch the video with subs. Is it possible to leave the subs seperate but have them able to play in a standard windows issue player like Media Player?

Also, update your version of Decomb as the one included in GKnot is old and somewhat inferior.

I didn't know that, and will do it ASAP.

Again, I thank you for all the insight you've given me.

[manono]

Hi-

What would be your best recommendation for IVTCing?

That's a tough one. However, I'd try Decomb first. First I'd get the most recent version of Decomb from the Doom9 download page, and replace the Decomb.dll included with GKnot, and replace the HTML doc with the more recent one (which you should study). Then I'd use this as part of the script:

Telecide(Guide=1,Chroma=True)
Decimate(Mode=2,Quality=3,Cycle=5)

Then I'd examine the .avs in different places using VDub. If you got jerkiness before when using Decomb to IVTC, it was because Decomb was dropping the wrong duplicate frame. That is, when movement was every 3 frames (drawn as 8fps-it should have been 3,3,3,3,3), Decomb might have given you 3,2,4,3,3,4,2. So, first make sure that the correct frames are dropped. If that doesn't work (although it should), you might try the Inverse Telecine known as IVTC2.2 (also available at Doom9's download page) with the line IVTC(44,11,95). It doesn't have a Deinterlacer included as Decomb does by default, so you may or may not want to add FieldDeinterlace back into the script.

I want to make it as easy as possible for my friends to watch the video with subs.

Another tough one. So, you don't want to teach them to install and use VobSub, or use another player, and teach them how to get that player to add the black bars. You just want them to be able to double-click and play the movie. If they are separate SRT subs, then I believe WMP will play them (but on top of the video by default). If you use the much better SSA subs, then they need to have VobSub installed. But none of that is too hard to do. If you still want the subs burned in and playing in the black, then at least crop the black on the top and sides and use GKnot to give you proper AR.

And you can put TextSub in the .avs and use the faster Fast Recompress, instead of using the VDub version and Full Processing. If you do a search on TextSub, you'll find some instructions how to do it.

Good Luck-it's a fine movie.

[ArdenDag]

Thank you so much for all your help (both of you). It's more than I expected for it being my first time here :)

As a matter of fact, cropping the black bars and using simple IVTCing:

Telecide()
Decimate(cycle=5)

actually gave a better quality on the final movie. Now to see if I can get that better by getting the new version of Decomb, and using the parameters you showed there.

Hopefully I can get the subtitles below the movie by having a little black below when encoding and being able to have them burned there, even if I use VOBsub later. I'm lazy and some of my friends are too, so the less they have to do to watch a movie, the better. Double-click, watch. *grin*

[ArdenDag]

One last question, this will be the last for this thread, anyway.

What is the better resize filter to use for this type of movie? (Since you seem to know a bit about encoding this movie, and have probably experimented with a few settings...) Or for anime in general, as most of my encoding will be anime.

Thanks again :)

[manono]

Hi-

What is the better resize filter to use for this type of movie?

You'll get lots of opinions on that one. I've done most of mine with BicubicResize(xxx,xxx,0,0.5) and then used SSHiQ or Convolution3D to try and get rid of the noise common in anime. But sometimes they turn out a bit soft. Recently I rencoded Spirited Away and other anime using LanczosResize and no other spatial filtering. They look nice and sharp but retain the mosquito and other noise. I can only recommend that you follow jggimi's suggestion and encode small parts using different resizers and other filters and see what looks best to you.

But, since you have the bootleg set, you've got 2 movies per DVD. That means that they don't have the high bit rate when compared to the official releases, so there are more encoding artifacts than usual. So you may need some kind of spatial filtering. Kiki from the bootleg set looked pretty good, but Laputa was a mess, and needed a lot of spatial filtering to clean it up. And as a result, it looked noticeably smoothed when DivX'd.

[ArdenDag]

Ah, yeah.

I was going to rip Laputa just to capture images from the stream to have on my computer. I love the beautiful imagery from Laputa, and the simple storyline. My favorite movie atm.

I've been using the Neutral Bicubic (0,0.5) I might stick with that, as I think the sharp filtering added a little crispness, but also it looked like the quality was a little lost, because the DVD itself was very poorly made (I mean it IS a Hong Kong bootleg...). The subtitles on almost all the movies are HORRID, but oh well :) Still DVD quality to watch when I want.