Poor quality B&W backup

[glassvial]

Just tried to backup a black and white disc, took over 15 (!!) hours and the quality is just horrid (not that the original material is great in the first place, being B&W and all). I initially tried to backup these discs with DVD Shrink, but it just won't do it, it thinks the disc is still over the limit (bar is well in the red, even with the automatic settings). What can I try next that won't take another 15 hours? :)

[The_Flash]

You need to provide a few more details on your settings. I've had great success backing up "The Man Who Wasn't There" and "Seven Samurai", both of which are black and white films. The latter is over 200min. and full screen. I didn't use DVD-RB, but I still used CCE as my encoder. Give us some more details.

[glassvial]

RB .63a, CCE 2.67.00.27, AVISynth 2.5.5, etc. Latest/proper versions of everything. What other info do you need? R1 NTSC discs, there's like a "black box" around the material, 4:3 FS. Don't know what else you need, so let me know and I can answer as best I can.

[The_Flash]

How about your VBR bias or image quality precision? What's the average bitrate looking like?

[glassvial]

Default, 25/16, 4 pass. Don't know how to check what the avg bitrate is/was.

[The_Flash]

DVD-RB should tell you after it finishes the prepare phase. Honestly though, unless it is extremely low I can't see why the encode would look that bad. With v2.67 I like to use a higher precision rate, I would also up it due to the film being FS. A value of 28 wouldn't be unreasonable. Why don't you try that and maybe a few other values and compare some of the earlier scenes rather than waiting for the whole thing to finish.

[Faust2]

I second what flash said, esp the "look at the first enoded m2v's so you don't have to wait the whole process to judge the quality"-part :)

Maybe the source material is very noisy? I had similar problems whith "the third man" where the source was looking awfully noisy. After some pretty heavy filtering (undot().deen() ) it was at least acceptable. I still wonder why sometimes b&w seems to require such bigh br??

You can look at the average bitrate of each sequence in rb-opt after the prepare phase. The number rb gives you in the feedback window is average fo the whole project, which isn't so interesting in case you did select stealspace or half&half options. Although you could look at the video compression figure in rb's feedback window.

[Faust2]

By the way, what does FS mean?

[Morien]

FS means Full Screen. Signifying the picture taking up the whole 4:3 (1.33:1) screen.

[glassvial]

Unfortunately I already closed the RB window so I don't know what it said for bitrate. Again, while the quality of the original material isn't the greatest, the process introduces major blockiness (best way I can describe it) and I was expecting much better as I've backed up other discs without issue (first time B&W attempt though). What's a good program to cap a frame from the original and then cap a frame from the processed copy so I can post it here so you can see the difference?

[glassvial]

Oh yeah, I did this in one-click mode, and did not use stealspace or half-and-half, as there aren't any extras on these discs anyway.

[glassvial]

Ok did another encode with .64a and the new dgdecode. Here's the (still crappy) results (if these file attachments work) original followed by the encoded jpg.

[Paced]

Originally posted by glassvial
Just tried to backup a black and white disc, took over 15 (!!) hours and the quality is just horrid (not that the original material is great in the first place, being B&W and all). I initially tried to backup these discs with DVD Shrink, but it just won't do it, it thinks the disc is still over the limit (bar is well in the red, even with the automatic settings). What can I try next that won't take another 15 hours? :)

Is the original material interlaced? This movie sounds like it needs extreme amounts of compression to fit on to one DVDR (maybe because it's a very long movie?), and when this is the case, the average bitrate will be very small:

low average bitrate + 4:3 (FS) + interlaced material = bad.

The only recommendation I can give (if the source is in fact interlaced) is to deinterlace it, which will give you better results than you are currently receiving. The easiest way to tell if it is interlaced or not, is to open (with Notepad) one of the AVS files that DVD-RB creates after the 'Prepare' phase, and if you see the line: ConvertToYUY2(interlaced=true) somewhere in there, it means DVD-RB detects the the source as being interlaced.

On the other hand, if the source is progressive, yet the average bitrate is still very small (again, perhaps because it's a long movie?), I can imagine the output would not be very pleasing, especially since it's 4:3. Thus, if your source is in fact progressive, the only other recommendation I can make is to split the movie in half, and burn it on to two DVDRs.

[glassvial]

Originally posted by Paced
Is the original material interlaced? This movie sounds like it needs extreme amounts of compression to fit on to one DVDR (maybe because it's a very long movie?), and when this is the case, the average bitrate will be very small:

low average bitrate + 4:3 (FS) + interlaced material = bad.

The only recommendation I can give (if the source is in fact interlaced) is to deinterlace it, which will give you better results than you are currently receiving. The easiest way to tell if it is interlaced or not, is to open (with Notepad) one of the AVS files that DVD-RB creates after the 'Prepare' phase, and if you see the line: ConvertToYUY2(interlaced=true) somewhere in there, it means DVD-RB detects the the source as being interlaced.
Ok, yes it is interlaced judging by what it says in the avs file in notepad. I'll give it a shot with decomb and see what happens.

[Faust2]

Just out of interest: Did you try it with a little bit of filtering? Even if the source is only a little noisy, when you shrink it from dvd-9 to dvd-5, you have a considerably lower bitrate, so you need as much of this lower bitrate as possible to encode the content, not the noise. Especially when you have fullscreen, which requires of course more bitrate.
For really considerable noise, imho undot().deen() does a good job in lowering bitrate requirements, but degrades definitely the picture. FluxsmoothT(3-5) is an only temporal denoiser, so it is more cautios with the material. In both cases, if you deinterlace with decomb (which maybe is a good idea), you should put the filtering in the script after the fileddeinterlace-line. And of course, its much slower with filtering, esp with UnDeen.
Oh, and imho 4 passes is a waste of time, esp when filtering. My experiance is that everything beyond 3 passes (including the vaf-creation-pass) makes no visible difference.

[glassvial]

Hadn't tried any filtering (not even decomb) up until this point. I didn't realize the material was interlaced. How do you tell if the material is interlaced before you start the encode job? Also, filters like fluxsmooth and etc are plugins, right? That's starting to get a bit beyond my knowledge of using RB and I need just a wee bit of hand-holding LOL

[glassvial]

Do I have to ask a moderator to allow my file attachments? I'm going to try posting here my results (an original cap with a decomb cap) here. It still looks horrible, lots of blocking/fuzz compared to the source. I guess this is going to need some pretty heavy filtering, of some sort.

[Fr4nz]

Please could you tell us the title of the film you're backing up??

[Paced]

Originally posted by Fr4nz
Please could you tell us the title of the film you're backing up??

Or at least the runtime of the film...maybe even the compression ratio that DVD-RB reports back.

@glassvial

As I said earlier, if your average bitrate is extremely low, the output is more than likely going to be "horrible," as you put it - even if you deinterlace it. Working with 4:3 sources becomes very difficult (even with filtering) when working with low bitrates. I can however, make some more suggestions:

- deinterlace the video first, then resize it to half D1 (AVS Options -> Advanced (Expert) Options -> Resize to Half D1 -> Apply to All); or

- deinterlace the video, apply filters such as Undot().Deen(), "resize" the video with an AviSynth filter - such as GripFit - and set the overscan to "2" or "3" (this will add borders to all four sides of the video - whilst keeping full D1 resolution - but they will not be visible when you play it back on your TV) as it helps for more effective compression.

I would say the first suggestion will produce more effective results (it's also quicker, I can almost guarantee it will take much less than 15 hours to complete), the output just won't be as sharp (due to halving the width of the video). The second suggestion will keep the original full D1 resolution, but applying all those filters may not be worth it, since I can almost guarantee you'll get very similar (most likely better) results by going with the first suggestion.

[glassvial]

It's a 2-Disc box set, "The Great American Western" one disc has Roy Rogers movies the other has Gene Autry movies. The disc that I'm having the issues with is the Roy Rogers disc, the Gene Autry one I can do with DVD Shrink. The DVD case says "4 movies, over 5 hours"

@Paced

---
- deinterlace the video first, then resize it to half D1 (AVS Options -> Advanced (Expert) Options -> Resize to Half D1 -> Apply to All);
---

So you're saying encode the backup with decomb and also the Resize to Half D1 at the same time? What does this do?

---
- deinterlace the video, apply filters such as Undot().Deen(), "resize" the video with an AviSynth filter - such as GripFit - and set the overscan to "2" or "3" (this will add borders to all four sides of the video - whilst keeping full D1 resolution - but they will not be visible when you play it back on your TV) as it helps for more effective compression.
---

If my file attachments show up, you can see that there is already some black bordering on the source around all 4 sides, wouldn't something like GripFit make it worse?

Like I mentioned before there are no extras on the disc and no other audio tracks to strip out to help. Also, how does one tell what the bitrate is/was after closing RB? Is there a log file or something?

[Faust2]

Originally posted by glassvial
Hadn't tried any filtering (not even decomb) up until this point. I didn't realize the material was interlaced. How do you tell if the material is interlaced before you start the encode job? Also, filters like fluxsmooth and etc are plugins, right? That's starting to get a bit beyond my knowledge of using RB and I need just a wee bit of hand-holding LOL

1. Put the required dlls in your Avisynth plugin dir. Its Undot.dll and Deen.dll for Undot().Deen(), and Fluxsmooth-2.5.dll for FluxsmoothT(). Look out for them at avisynth.org. Maybe these aren't the latest versions; but they work (at least for me). Watch out that you don't have too much stuff (outdated or whatever) in your plugin-dir.

2. Put rb in three-click-mode and run prepare with maybe deinterlace and half-d1 selected. both is a worth a try, but with half-d1, your subs won't be displayed correctly when using a software player.

3. Start rb-opt and load the created rebuilder.inf. Link all vob's in the vts(s) that are of interest. Then click avs editing and add the following line before the converttoyuv2-command.
For Undot and Deen the usage with default values is simple: "undot().deen()". (without "") Undot has no parameters, and Deen is said to be complicated with non-default-values. (but you can try of course...)
For Fluxsmooth I personally use only "FluxsmoothT(x)", where x is a value of 1-7 (IIRC) and sets the strenth of filtering. 1 is the lightest setting. I use mostly 3 or 4. FluxsmoothT does only temporal filtering and degrades the picture (IMHO) not so much as Deen(), but in really difficult situations, when you actually "want" to degrade the picture a little bit, to lower bitrate requirements, my first choice is undot().deen(). (just my two cents...)

4. You can test the scripts within rb-opt, which is a very nice feature, because so you can judge very quick the impact of different filters/settings.

5. After saving proceed as always in dvd-rb...

Also, how does one tell what the bitrate is/was after closing RB? Is there a log file or something?

Just re-run the prepare phase :) and read the feedback window. Or look at it in rb-opt (see above)

All the best...

[Paced]

So you're saying encode the backup with decomb and also the Resize to Half D1 at the same time? What does this do?

Yes, do both at the same time. Resizing to Half D1 will make your output have a resolution of 352x480 (instead of 720x480). In doing so, the lower resolution should work much better with the lower average bitrate (5+ hours of material, it's got to be low! :D), therefore producing less blocking, etc.

Additionally, if you wanted to, you could also use Undot().Deen() with this method, it will certainly help with compression (which is what you need). Here's how to do it:


First, you'll need the appropriate plugins (Undot, Deen); you can find them both here: http://www.avisynth.org/warpenterprises Once downloaded, extract them to your AviSynth/plugins folder (don't create separate folders for them). Once you've done that, open DVD Rebuilder: Options -> AVS Options -> Advanced (Expert) Options -> Filter Editor. Add the lines Undot().Deen(), then click 'Save and Exit.' Make sure you also do what I said in my previous post (deinterlacing, and turning on the Half D1 option).

If my file attachments show up, you can see that there is already some black bordering on the source around all 4 sides, wouldn't something like GripFit make it worse?

Yes, you are indeed correct. I wouldn't bother with GripFit in this situation.


but with half-d1, your subs won't be displayed correctly when using a software player.

Yep, I forgot to mention this, but if your output is intended for a hardware player, this should not be a problem.

[lamster]

Originally posted by glassvial
Also, how does one tell what the bitrate is/was after closing RB? Is there a log file or something?
If you turn on the "Status Logging On" switch in the file menu, everything output to the status window will be saved in a log file - see rebuilder.txt for details.

[dave88]

Originally posted by glassvial
[B]It's a 2-Disc box set, "The Great American Western" one disc has Roy Rogers movies the other has Gene Autry movies. The disc that I'm having the issues with is the Roy Rogers disc, the Gene Autry one I can do with DVD Shrink. The DVD case says "4 movies, over 5 hours"


I have some of those disks, the original material is quite low bitrate to fit so much on 1 disk. I am sure your problem is related to re encoding already very low bitrate material. I backed up some of those by splitting them to seperate disks.

good luck

[The_Flash]

ProCoder sometimes works better with interlaced material than CCE.

[Faust2]

@glassvial

I wondered if you made some progress or if you gave it up :)

Sounds like a very difficult undertaking...
I tried some b&w projects also and had my probloems. I think the most of them were related to 4:3 material needing a higher bitrate, and poorly mastered, noisy meterial. But I think, with combining use of filters, low bitrate matrices, half-d1 and maybe deinterlacing, you have a chance to get at least acceptable results.

I did a backup of "dances with wolves", which is incredible difficult stuff: noisy, 3hours 40 mins long, constant camera movement and lots of dust, smoke and all the gentle swaying grass in the background, and then these subtitles whithin the video, which seem to take alone some .50 Mbits/sec. Thus, the dialog sequences must be a pain for poor CCE...

I tried different things and then, all of a sudden, when I did movie only (via dvd-shrink at "no compresion"), only 1 audio track, ultra low bitrate matrice and undot().deen(), it looked at least acceptable.

So, don't loose your patience and keep trying... :)

[glassvial]

I haven't had time to get back to this little "project", way too many other things going on that have taken priority over this (some hardware issues plus lots of other things going on). I'll try to get back to it within the next week or two, if not then I'll probably just give up. Thanks for the ideas, if I get back to this I'll give them a shot.

[Boulder]

The original video is probably _not_ interlaced. If it is, there's something very much wrong there as a movie that old should be FILM origin (=23.976fps).

DVD-RB probably takes the information from some flag in the original stream and they can be very wrong at times.

[TheSeeker]

If you ever find that the material IS interlaced (though i agree it shouldnt be) then maybe try smoothdeinterlacer instead of the decomb function within dvdrb (which uses a fielddinterlace) I have found smoothdeinterlacer is much smarter and results in very nice quality. If its NOT interlaced I would do as faust said and do it movie only. Keeping one audio track and apply undot.deen, or maybe some sort of smoother filter. This is a tough one thats for sure.

[Boulder]

I would also try QuEnc to check whether it really is the movie that is the problem. The screenshot of the encoded clip looks really crappy to say the least.

[TheSeeker]

A few more things.. Have you tried running it in multipass or just OPV mode? i would definately try like 1+3 passes with dvdrb .67 and cce sp 2.67. Also use rb-opt to assign lower bitrates to the credits and to apply custom matrices. I like the kvcd notch matrice for real low bitrate situations. Again try undot.deen along with all this other stuff.. YOu should see some improvement.

[glassvial]

Ran multi-pass (3+1), and RB .67 wasn't even out when this thread started, LOL

Anywho once I get back to this (hopefully pretty soon) then I'll definitely try out some of these suggestions, probably undot.deen, smoothdeinterlacer and rbopt if I can figure it all out.

[glassvial]

Ok I'm an idiot, how do I use these filters? I go into the filter editor and typed "undot().deen()" (no quotes) and I get the black background/red lines issue. I extracted undot.dll and deen.dll to the avisynth\plugins folder. I assume I'm missing a step here or something, please fill me in, thanks :)

Oh and should I use these plugins on stuff that's slightly older material, like 60's or 70's TV shows, that sort of thing? These are in color not B&W like this other crap is.

[TheSeeker]

@Glassvial

Are you loading the two plugins before you call them with the undot().deen() functions? You need the LoadPlugin("path_here/deen.dll") for both deen and undot before you can call them. Or this could be a problem with the path to the dgdecode.dll file/mpeg3decdg.dll.

[Boulder]

Check that the plugins actually are in the plugins folder and not in some folder under that.

[glassvial]

Originally posted by TheSeeker
@Glassvial

Are you loading the two plugins before you call them with the undot().deen() functions? You need the LoadPlugin("path_here/deen.dll") for both deen and undot before you can call them. Or this could be a problem with the path to the dgdecode.dll file/mpeg3decdg.dll.
Using DGDecode.dll, path for that is fine, and all plugins are in the proper folder (AVISynth\plugins) not a sub-folder or etc.

So let me get this straight, when I open filter editor, it needs to look like this:

---
LoadPlugin("C:\Program Files\AviSynth 2.5\plugins\deen.dll")
LoadPlugin("C:\Program Files\AviSynth 2.5\plugins\undot.dll")
undot().deen().
---

Correct? Case sensitive or no (I'm guessing no, this isn't Linux ;) ) ?

[Boulder]

The LoadPlugin lines are not needed if the plugins are in the specified Avisynth plugins folder. They are then autoloaded when needed.

[glassvial]

Originally posted by Boulder
The LoadPlugin lines are not needed if the plugins are in the specified Avisynth plugins folder. They are then autoloaded when needed.
So, what am I doing wrong then? :)

[Boulder]

Do you have a dot after Deen() ? Remove it.

[glassvial]

Originally posted by Boulder
Do you have a dot after Deen() ? Remove it.
Just checked, no, I don't. Does the order of filters/plugins matter? Should I try "deen().undot()" ?

[Boulder]

No, it should work either way. Are the plugins really in the plugins folder and not in some folder under that?

You could also try opening an encoded mpv file and see if there's an error message to help tracking the problem.

[glassvial]

The plugins are in this *exact* location:

C:\Program Files\AviSynth 2.5\plugins

UnDot.dll dated 1/18/2003
deen.dll dated 8/13/2003

I tried to look at the encoded m2v file and it was just scrambled in WinDVD, Windows Media player, and VLC, so no help there.

[Boulder]

Could you post a screenshot?

[glassvial]

Originally posted by Boulder
Could you post a screenshot?
Of?

[Boulder]

The garbled output of course.

[glassvial]

pic

http://img3.exs.cx/img3/6124/garble.th.jpg (http://img3.exs.cx/my.php?loc=img3&image=garble.jpg)

[Boulder]

Try with only Deen or UnDot. This way you'll see if the plugin is to blame.

[jdobbs]

Originally posted by glassvial
pic

http://img3.exs.cx/img3/6124/garble.th.jpg (http://img3.exs.cx/my.php?loc=img3&image=garble.jpg) This is an error message being generated by AVISYNTH. Open the AVS in Windows Media Player and it should identify the error and the offending line in the AVS.

[glassvial]

Originally posted by jdobbs
This is an error message being generated by AVISYNTH. Open the AVS in Windows Media Player and it should identify the error and the offending line in the AVS.
Duh I should have known that. Well I was also playing with smoothdeinterlacer as suggested by TheSeeker and it was that which was throwing the error, something about only support YUV2 and RGB32 formats (I think...I deleted the job now) so...

A) How do I get smoothdeinterlacer to work?
B) Should I try deen/undot on other things besides this B&W backup, other older material like TV shows and movies from the 60's (Star Trek TOS, for example) or should I leave well enough alone on things like that?
C) Thanks for the continued help, all of you :)

[TheSeeker]

To get smoothdeinterlacer to work you have to put it after the ConvertToYUY2(interlaced=True) line in the avs script. To do this you will have to use RB-Opt to modify all avs files at once.

As far as undot() and deen() I would stick to using these very sparingly. Also as a note use ANY deinterlacer very sparingly. You should normally never deintelace unless nothing else seems to be working to improve the picture. Only use deen and undot on really noisey sources. Otherwise just leave well enough alone. Cause all you will do is distort the picture if you apply filters to an already clean source.

EDIT: To use rb-opt you need to setup everything as you want it in rebuilder and run the prepare phase. After this open up rb opt and load up the rebuilder.ini file created by the prepare phase. From here you can edit the avs files created for every cell of the movie.