"quick and dirty" video capturing and post processing

[emazur]

Alot of the guides I'm seeing for tv capture are for obtaining the upmost quality-> capturing using full-res, cropping, resizing, filtering, and using a million-pass encoding that might finish by the the end of the next lunar cycle. But how about some guides for obtaining the best quality where speed is concerned? Maybe they already exist, so point me in their direction if you know where they are. Currently for quick and dirty avi captures, i use iuvcr or virtual vcr at 320x240 + crop filter + (xxx) kbps divx 5 + 44 khz wav (which I compress to mp3 in vdub afterwards to prevent sync issues). For quick and dirty vcd mpg, I use powervcr II, and for dvd mpg powerproducer II (using the default profiles of the programs). Don't know if there's a better way for fast captures, but I'm guessing there is. Also I'm interested in "mid grade" capture guides, where on the focus is not on speedy on-the-fly encoding, but speedy post processing. For example, such a guide would tell say to be capturing in 352x240 (near)lossless avi for vcd in order to prevent taking up time resizing, and encode later using a high quality encoder like cce. And maybe tell you how to denoise/normalize audio too.

[bb]

As you already found out, the main focus here is on quality video :) But you're right, I wished we had a few "quick-and-dirty-the-best-way" and what you call "mid-range" guides available. Maybe someone takes the time and writes one; in the meantime I suggest to use this thread for information exchange. You'll find a lot of information about this topic distributed over a bunch of threads, though, which means if you don't mind searching, you'll find a lot of useful hints.

bb

[emazur]

Well maybe I'll be able to write one myself if someone helps me out with a few issues I'm having using the pre-existing doom9 capture guide. It will require your patience though :) In this case I have a 7 min clip made with a Asus 880 Capture Card (10bit CX2388x chipset), I have used virtual vcr, settings:
video: NTSC 720x480 (filter cropped to 704x480), picvideo mjpeg (quality 18)
audio: 48 khz stereo pcm (uncompressed)
Desired end result is either a DVD or VCD compliant mpeg using virtual dub and DVD2SVCD or TMPEGEnc b/c I am familiar with the basic uses of these programs.

Here's an outline of the procedures I attempted:

step 1) add deinterlace map filter in vdub

step 2) resize. I skipped this step b/c:
A) 704x480 -> DVD -> resize is unnecessary?
B) 704x480 -> VCD -> don't know what to resize to. besides, don't TMPEGenc and DVD2SVCD do the resizing?

step 3) crop with nulltransform filter. I skipped this step b/c guide guide says you can use TMPEGEnc to crop. But what about DVD2SVCD? Also, if I cropped the 704x480 down further, it would fall out DVD spec, which would require resizing, which would require wasted time right? I read on the forums you can pad with black bars, to bring back to spec without resizing, but I don't know how.

step 4) additional filters. I skipped b/c I don't know anything about this

step 5) cut commercials. no need in this case

step 6) Vdub frameserving:
A) Auxsetup
B) video -> compression -> uncompressed RGB
C) File -> start -> frameserver -> x.avi & x.vdr
D) Use DVD2SVCD or TMPEGenc

At this point I wasn't clear on what to do. I've used DVD2SVCD to successfully create vcd's from DVD's. But here I changed input to AVI. When I try to "load avi" it ain't there yet since I'm frameserving, so then I selected "view all files" and opened the .vdr file. It loads but I can't select "go" to start the conversion process. So I tried TMPEGenc. But someone please tell me how to get DVD2SVCD to work- I wanna use CCE instead of the slower-than-dirt TMPEGenc.

In TMPEGenc, I used the wizard and selected vcd. I didn't attempt DVD b/c I didn't see a 704x480 profile. Anyway, unlike DVD2SVCD, I could open the .vdr file without problems and proceeded to encode using default settings. The 7 min clip took 24 min 21 sec to encode, which is slow but tolerable (hey, I if rip dvd's to vcd with dvd2svcd + cce, the video encode speed is double realtime on my p4 2.2). Output quality looked better than what I'd get doing realtime capturing with powervcr II.

So if anyone could bare to read all this, I'd appreciate input on my methods and to help me troubleshoot the issues mentioned. I'm also interested in denoising/normalizing audio, but that can wait til later.
Also I didn't see anywhere in the capture guide or the virtualdub procedures guide on how to adjust the color/contrast/brightness/sharpness to the proper level. On virtual vcr I have it adjusted to it "looks guide to me". If I capture using huffyuv it looks right, but picvideo makes it look brighter, contrast is lower, and colors not as vivid. Doesn't matter even if I bump up quality to 20. I may buy a new hd and use huffyuv, but only if I get satisfactory results with this guide using mjpeg

[emazur]

Also I was reading on http://www.digitalfaq.com/index.htm
the interlace vs. deinterlace article. If I interpret this correctly, I should not deinterlace in vdub if I intend to make DVD, but I should deinterlace if I wanna make a vcd. Is this correct? If so, why not mention this in the doom9 capture guide?

[echooff]

Thats a lot of info. Dvd ntsc resolution is 720x480, 704x480, and 352x240. VCD is 352x240. So if the target is dvd, any of these three resolutions are acceptable for the authoring programs. Tmpgenc locks you in in this respect, but they have a unlock template. It is located in the subdirectory you see when you select the dvd template. Double click on it and then on the unlock template. This will allow you to to change any setting in tmpgenc. Be careful. It will allow you to change anything and you could end up with a unworkable mpeg. CCE is the best IMHO, but I have never used dvd2svcd, sorry. Have you considered AVISYNTH. It is frustrating when you first start using it, but after you get used to it you can't imagine how you did without it.
I don't deinterlace.

[Wilbert]

Also I didn't see anywhere in the capture guide or the virtualdub procedures guide on how to adjust the color/contrast/brightness/sharpness to the proper level.

True. This will be added in the next version.

If I capture using huffyuv it looks right, but picvideo makes it look brighter, contrast is lower, and colors not as vivid. Doesn't matter even if I bump up quality to 20. I may buy a new hd and use huffyuv, but only if I get satisfactory results with this guide using mjpeg
Yeah. The problem is the luma range conversion when converting from YUV to RGB. huffyuv: [16,235] -> [0.255], mjpeg: [0,255] -> [0.255] Your video is converted to RGB when using TMPGEnc.

I suggest reading the following thread "backwards"

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=70589


If I interpret this correctly, I should not deinterlace in vdub if I intend to make DVD,
Yup. You can leave it interlacing. In that case you must be very careful when applying denoisers (which is not covered for vdub in this case).

but I should deinterlace if I wanna make a vcd. Is this correct?
Yup. According to the specs VCD should be progressive.

If so, why not mention this in the doom9 capture guide?
It will be mentioned in the next version. The current version is more aimed at conversion to XviD/DivX.

[avih]

you may try this (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=75046) about real time encoding. it has my settings (sort of) for this kind of encoding.