could need some advice on old movie sources

[((( atom )))]

hi all,

recently i really got into old movies like all the hitchcocks and such.. i experience quite some difficulties in compressing them and i hope some of you can help with advice.

the main trouble of course is noise, wich i don't like to filter out too much, since it kinda belongs into old movies. what i do is use convolution3d in hq-mode to boost compressebility a bit and my experience is that xvid meanwhile is very capable of preserving noise.

i always aim for 2 cds and for old movies i use mp3-audio, so there is plenty of space.

i tried Bulletproofs High Quality Matrix and like it quite much, what i really don't like is h263 (not for 2 cds).

i use bframes (3/128/100) and chroma optimizer.

the worst artifact i get is ringing, wich actually surprises me.

for instance i ripped north by northwest wich is accurately noise-filtered already and the picture comes with an astonishing high amout of detail. like in most oldies i have high contrasts and always a bright picture, that makes it hard, ok. the rip itself is rather good, exept for ringing around most of the edges wich i really want to get rid of. i wouldn't have complained about some ringing in an average old noisy movie but in this case i dont understand why its there. it is there even at a quant 2-encode, btw.

so, well.. any advice is highly appreciated, since alfred hitchcock made at least 15 movies and i still have plenty to go.. ;)

also i would be very interested in some advice on different matrixes. i started experimenting around with a few, but it always flattens the trial & error-curve to hear some opinions, right?

my regards,

[Wormz]

What is your resolution and bitrate? It is my understanding that too high of a resolution gives macroblocks, while too low of a resolution gives ringing.

[mf]

Yeah, I'd go for maximum crop res floored to nearest mod16. Meaning you crop all the black bars off (also left/right) and downsize (bicubic/lanczos) to the nearest value dividable by 16. Usually that'll give you 704xsomething, and if you don't need to crop left/right it'll be 720 (no need to resize then). If you still have ringing, at that res it probably won't hurt to use h263 quant.

[Koepi]

UnFilter(-15,-15) works wonders on oversharped sources which tend to produce much ringing. You'll notice that the noise gets less, too. It is amplified by sharping on the source.

I think that'll help.

Regards
Koepi

[((( atom )))]

a always go for 640 res, since i believe it to be enough and also i hava a stondalone mplayer here that outputs to a vga-tv that accepts only 640-res input. no further rescaling involved! ..and who'd encode black bars? ;)

unfilter has to be tried now.. throw convolution3d overboard then?

[Koepi]

Unfilter just removes the "sharping-edges" which i.e. are around "grain noise", that's what i meant with "less noise".

I'd still apply a convolution3d(preset="movieLQ") as the quantization noise gets decreased with that.

Best regards
Koepi

[((( atom )))]

unfilter did it - ringing is nearly gone. thx! i saw myself the convolution3d would simply be too much with unfilter..

[((( atom )))]

well, i'll try out some combinations..nu filter (4 me) - have to get into its pros & cons first..

[rcjc]

thx Koepi :) I tried unfilter on some of those old films and it's working well

[crusty]

With old movies the audio is often mono. You can go for mono mp3 to gain some space for the video.

Another filter you should try is Undot. It improves compressability a lot and it won't show at all. It's avisynth 2.5 only.
Convolution 3d can produce artifacts when at high settings, but I wouldn't throw it out if the settings where low.
Álso I don't like film noise, but that's personal. I actually tried a manual retouching of a noisy movie, by dumping the frames to bitmaps and editing them in a paint programm. The retouching is very easy, but you need a trained monkey farm to do it unless you want to go bonkers or die from boredom.
I gave up after 400 frames took me 8 hours...out of about 150.000 frames :D :D :D
Yep, that's 8 hours for the retouching of 16 SECONDS of movie. Heck, I just wanted to know how to do it.

But it definitely looks much cleaner. Won't help compressability much tho.

[((( atom )))]

LOL, crusty, that's the spirit!

;)