Improving DV->DVD quality [Archive]

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alekz

31st July 2005, 20:55

Hi!

I have browsed this forum for days now reading threads on everything that has something to do with DV to DVD encoding, but I still have some questions.
I have got an Sony HandyCam that came with some useless software.

I have been playing around with trial versions of different encoders but I know too little about the actual settings so I need your help.

1) Which MPEG-2 encoder is the best for encoding DV PAL-footage and which one should I buy that's not too expensive, I can consider paying maybe $2-300 if the quality is close to the DV-original. Encoding time is not an issue.

Thank you. :thanks:

Video Dude

31st July 2005, 22:53

First you should look at HC. It is free and produces very good results.
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=93211&page=1&pp=20

Other good inexpensive MPEG-2 encoders are:

CCE Basic
http://www.cinemcraft.com

TMPGEnc
http://www.tmpgenc.net

ProCoder Express
http://www.canopus.us/US/products/procoder_express/pm_procoder_express.asp

I personally use CCE Basic with a bit rate of at least 6500 for DV.

Video Dude

31st July 2005, 22:59

tigerman8u

31st July 2005, 23:38

I like mainconcept. cost $150. the fastest encoder I've tried

Video Dude

1st August 2005, 00:28

The free QuEnc also deserves to be mentioned.

Archimedes

3rd August 2005, 01:18

On (interlaced) DV sources, Procoder Express (and Procoder 2) produces the best results.

Mug Funky

6th August 2005, 09:34

are we talking NTSC or PAL? NTSC DV IMHO is nowhere near even DVD quality - 4:1:1 sampling is just too ugly.

if you are in NTSC land, you can improve the look somewhat using avisynth and scharfi's "reinterpolate411" script (i think it's scharfi's). this will get rid of the horrible aliased chroma bleeding.

for PAL DV, i usually deblock it using ffdshow's postprocessing (DV will block on some sources, in spite of it's high bitrate) and encode with QuEnc (free).

scharfis_brain

6th August 2005, 09:41

Mug Funky

6th August 2005, 10:03

aaah. my bad. i knew one of them was you :)

Chainmax

6th August 2005, 18:01

reinterpolate411 is from trbarry.
reinterpolate420 is from me. but it should NOT be used for direct DV->DVD conversions.

reinterpolate420 is only useful as preprocessor for heavy video manipulations, such as deinterlacing, deshaking, zooming etc...

Really? Doesn't your function work like trbarry's but on PAL DV? If so, does that mean that reinterpolate shouldn't be used for PAL DV->DVD conversions either? Or do you mean that if one intends to make a DV->DVD conversion then the reinterpolate functions can't be the only thing in the script?

scharfis_brain

6th August 2005, 18:21

PAL DV is YV12, commonly upsampled by pixel duplication to YUY2
PAL DVD is YV12, commonly the MPEG2-encoder only accepts YUY2 and subsamples it itself by averaging two chroma pixels.
But those chroma pixels previously had bee pixelduplicated by the DV-Decoder.

so there is absolutely NO loss by encoding PAL DV to PAL DVD if there is no pixel manipulation done.

introducing reinterpolate420 here, the relulting MPEG will be smoothed.

reinterpolate420 is only needed, if you want do deinterlace (film-look), deshake or so.

Kika

6th August 2005, 22:52

For DV -> DVD there are only two really good encoder: ProCoder in Field mode (even Frame mode does a very good job) and TMPGEnc without(!) B-Frames and a GOP-Size of 12 (AVG of 6000 kbps). CCE is OK, Mainconcept also. But if you want good results without too much knowledge about settings, i suggest ProCoder.

HCEnc and QuEnc are good for progressive Video, but not (yet?) for interlaced Source.

E-Penguin

12th August 2005, 10:32

I recently went to an air race / aerobatic display thing and took my Sony HC-39e along to test it out. Because of the subject matter there is a lot of movement in each frame (camera pan, planes flying past and zoom-wobble). When I play the .avi back with MediaPlayer it all looks nice and smooth but if I then use ProCoder2 to encode it to MPEG2 it looks just awful. Its certainly an interlacing problem, there are many shots where a shadowy plane tails the other by a short distance and sometimes there half a plane here and the other half there...

ProCoder1 seems to do a better job at it, which I don't fully understand. One thing that did catch my attention was that the resolution reported in ProCoder2 is 1024x576 rather than 720x576. I shot the film in the native 16:9 mode on the camcorder, it has a 16:9 CCD on it so its not cut & cropped or anything. I used the reinterpolate420 and tomocomp filters to deinterlace it prettily and everything looks much better but its a bit of a chore. Have I got something set up incorrectly in ProCoder2?

Also, a bit of a n00b question I'm afraid, but obviously using AviSynth slows down the whole process of the video encoding and in DV the audio isn't locked to the video - would this cause audio synch to be lost, or should ProCoder compensate for this?

Cheers,
EP

Video Dude

13th August 2005, 03:49

AviSynth does not cause the audio to get out of sync.

J-Wo

13th August 2005, 19:12

I recently started to make NTSC DV --> DVD conversions using CCE. I'm well versed with mpeg4 and dvd encoding but this is my first foray into DV. I have a couple questions:

1) Is it recommended to leave my interlaced source material as is and encode interlaced? Or am I allowed to use a filter that will convert from 29.9fps --> 23.976? I beleive Sharrif_Brain had such a filter but I can't seem to find it. I used it before on interlaced movies with great success, but it looks like most people here leave as interlaced.

2) Can anyone provide a good recommended script for NTSV DV encoding with avisynth? The one provided in the FAQ is over a year old, and I'm not sure if anyone uses filters such as convolution3d anymore

3) Could someone confirm the correct settings in CCE 2.70 for me? e.g. in the Picture Quality tab, I should uncheck progressive and set block scan order to alternate, right? I'm also not certain where I should be setting field order settings in cce, or how to check what the field order is in my original source either.

Thanks for any help guys!

Kika

14th August 2005, 00:14

Or am I allowed to use a filter that will convert from 29.9fps --> 23.976?

DV_Source is mostly true interlaced with 29.97 fps, you can't use a convertion to 23.976 fps without getting jerky playback.
Encode it as is - interlaced!

The other questions are well answered here, use the search option.

scharfis_brain

14th August 2005, 00:37

at least it is possible - with some strict limitations - to achieve some kind of filmlike 23.976p look.

Kika

14th August 2005, 00:51

OK, that's true. But from my point of view, that's a kind of special effect.

North2Polaris

16th August 2005, 13:51

2) Can anyone provide a good recommended script for NTSV DV encoding with avisynth? The one provided in the FAQ is over a year old, and I'm not sure if anyone uses filters such as convolution3d anymore!

If you don't care about speed, this is the script that I use with TMPGenc, which accepts bottom field first:

LoadPlugin("C:\Program Files\AviSynth 2.5\Warpsharp\LoadPluginEx.dll")
LoadPlugin("C:\Program Files\AviSynth 2.5\plugins\dustv5.dll")
AVISource("F:\source.avi")
ReInterpolate411()
JDL_UnFoldFieldsVertical(flip=true)
PixieDust(5)
JDL_FoldFieldsVertical(flip=true)
saturation = 0.9
cu = - (1-saturation)*256
ColorYUV(off_y=2, gain_y=-4, cont_u=cu, cont_v= cu,opt="coring")

You would need to adjust the color and saturation settings for your source. This is described in the capture guide on this site.

The JDL plugins can be found by searching the forum. This is one of the ways to use PixieDust on interlaced sources.