mpeg2 rendering quality from grainy source, awful...

essami wrote on 4/27/2004, 2:34 AM
Hi,

Im trying to make dvd out of material that proved to be very difficult. The source material is extremely grainy image (film). I've tried to use highest bitrate (8000) and max image quality (2-pass VBR, Rendering quality Best, video quality High 31) but it looks awful You can see the compression as clearly as in a JPEG image with quality set to 1!

I can understand this since the image is so grainy that every pixel changes in every frame. But I dont want to believe this!! Is DVD really only going to work if the image quality is good (constant colors and pixels)?

When looking at the video from TV you can see the difference but it is not as huge as when I project it on a wall to 2x3 meters, this is when it becomes unacceptable. It looks very nice when plaeyd from miniDV tape. Even looks better with VHS.

essami

Comments

JJKizak wrote on 4/27/2004, 5:17 AM
You might try using the Canopus ADVC-300 which helps with the noise
and/or the filters available with Virtual Dub. Also FX the whole track with .002 Gaussian blur. Remember these old sayings, noise in, noise out. Mpeg2 encoding does not like noise.

JJK
stormstereo wrote on 4/27/2004, 5:26 AM
You should try and clean up the grain then. There are several threads on this if you do a search.
Best/Tommy
essami wrote on 4/27/2004, 5:39 AM
The grain is not there by accident. So the last thing I want is to blur it.

Yes JJK! Noise in, noise out... Exactly what I want. But with mpeg2 it's noise in, tetris out...

essami
TheHappyFriar wrote on 4/27/2004, 5:58 AM
Try the TMPGenc mpeg-2 encoder & the main concept standalone encoder trails. See if those to a better job.

I also did a test render with a checkboard & color noise. It didn't look great, but it wasn't horrible. It's possible you could have to much noise on your video! :)
farss wrote on 4/27/2004, 7:26 AM
You've just got to loose the grain / noise. Look at a Hollywood DVD, how much grain do you see?
They've got encoders worth a mint and even they cannot cope with it. And I'd bet if you knew exactly what to look for in the DV copy you'd see it having an effect as well. Even though it ins't using temporal compression it still cannot cope with too much detail in a frame.

You might do better by not going through DV25 before encoding but that'll be expensive.
stormstereo wrote on 4/27/2004, 8:14 AM
Yeah, if there's a budget you could rent some time with a hardware encoder. I used to work with one of those and the result is unbeatable. And this was in 2000! If you were in Sweden i could set you up with my old company.
Best/Tommy