How to tweak FACAR detect settings?

[windtrader]

I use FACAR alot and it has always worked very well. Sometime I need to hit preview a few times but FACAR detect borders has always gotten it correct.

I have a movie that FACAR detect is just not able to get right. There is a vertical fringe about 4-6 pixels wide on the very left border. FACAR detect keeps selecting 2 pixels for the left border. It should be more like 6.

I tried finding the right variable to manually tweak the left border but could not find it. How do you manually override the border values determined by FACAR detect?

thx

[manolito]

First of all you can change the detection threshold in the "FACAR DetectBorders" script. The default value of 20 works well, but for very dark or very bright movies you might have to play around with it a little.

But in your case this is completely irrelevant. Only the values for DetectedTop and DetectedHeight are actually used by the FACAR script. Left and right borders are shown in the detection window, but never used.

Cheers
manolito

[windtrader]

Manolito,

I changed the DetectedTop a higher value and DetectedHeight value to a lower value by 4-5 pixels. overscan vert and horiz are set to zero. The vertical leftmost pixels are still there. I thought that if I made the vertical size smaller and the target size remained the same, then a slight "zoom in" would occur and clip off a bit of the left and right of the picture. This did not happen.

I also tried to change the overscan values to a small minus value thinking I may get a "zoom in" but it blew up.

So, it remains that I can not set a value to control how much of the left,right to eliminate.

I'll play with the threshold but this does not seem to be the correct action long term to control left/right values

[manolito]

windtrader,

you are absolutely right, you cannot control left and right borders with FACAR. FACAR also never tries to zoom in or out of a movie to fill the screen better. But this is not a bug, it's a feature. It was Gerti67's (the original developer) objective to make the encode look exactly like the source DVD on a TV set.

AutoFitCD with FitCD on the other hand normally "zooms out" a little to fit more pixels on the screen. Generally you can manipulate many more parameters in AutoFitCD than in FACAR. If you have to cut off some vertical pixels, AutoFitCD can easily do this, so you might want to give it a try.

Cheers
manolito


P.S. The current version of AutoFitCD 1.5 only works with the slightly older FitCD 1.1.2 which is a little hard to find. Use Google...

//Edit//
I just found a link on the last page of this thread:
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=44445

[windtrader]

If you have to cut off some vertical pixels, AutoFitCD can easily do this, so you might want to give it a try. Thanks Manolito. I got this AutoFit and FitCD working and was able to adjust the settings to clip off the leftmost few pixels. Worked great.

Is there any reason I would not continue using AutoFit-FitCD instead of FACAR? It seems there is more control settings with AutoFit.

Now I realize how little I know about the processes of frameserving, filters, DVD2AVI, MPEG2DEC, AVISYNTH, and CCE. Got lots of reading to do. Biggest void now is understanding when and where filters are applied before/during the CCE encoding. Also pretty confused about the relationship between D2SROBA predicitng compression and what AutFit does. Seems like both try to predict best settings for compressing.

thx again