I am just coimpleting a wedding video for a friend who shot it all in Hi8.

I find that it looks the same as when i did Svideo out from the cam to my TV as it does using the DVD version i created with VV4 - the first draft i made i add no colour curves or anything, just the raw footage and it looked the same on DVD as the cam.

I haven't got the Canopus thingy and have a Pinnacle DC10+ card that isn't compatible with V4 - sadly.

After following another thread on this matter I installed the Demo version of the MainConcept MJPEG codec on the 18th of this month and captured some stuff from TV then dragged that straight into V4 and it looked good. Now when I dragged the AVI captured from my Hi8 to Studio 7 into V4 the video was very blocky - I mean very large blocks. I thought the demo timed out after a while and just added a watermark when used for rendering so I can't see it being that codec.

Can anyone shed some light as to why this shouild happen. I had to resort to rendering an uncompressed AVI from Studio to get a file I could import to V4.

If you're going out to DVD try to get rid of us much noise as possible on the video. Also when you come in from analogue you get ragged edges on the ends of each line, mask these out before encoding.

Love tips hear your tips on removing the noise, but then again i am not sure i want to go throiugh another 15 render of this footage. But be handy to know for the future.

I've done lots of transfers from SVHS, which is roughly equivalent in resolution and is also an analog format. The results look very good on DVD and are pretty much indistinguishable from the original analog footage.

If you are willing to work at it, you may even be able to make it look better than the original. Search around on this forum for discussions about VirtualDub noise filters (search for VHS and VirtualDub). If used carefully (just a little noise reduction goes a long way), the results will be very clean. Also, there have been some recent discussions about using the curves filters. While these centered on DV footage, you may find the same techniiques help your Hi8 video as well.

Can someone explain what is meant by noise, please.

Maverick, take a close look at some darker areas of a video clip on your television. You'll notice swarms of faint little colored dots flickering there. They are especially noticeable when viewing a home-made videotape. This is noise.

Cheers

I thought it may be something like that. Up to now I have just thought it was something I would have to put up with - now I know better.

I'll do a search to get info on tackling this.

Thanks again

You might want to try the PicVideo MJPEG codec. I had really great results with that when I used my old DC10+ card. Also you might want to try VirtualDub to remove some of the noise. Try the Smart Smoother by Donald Graft, or 2D Cleaner, or Temporal Cleaner filters by Jim Casaburi. Here is a link to site which lists many of these filters. You just want to smooth out the background noise. FlaXen also makes some nice VirtualDub filters for removing noise from VHS captures. VirtualDub and its plugin filters are free and make a great addition to your editing toolbox.

~jr

Thanks JohnnyRoy but I am a little surprised that V4 hasn't got any noise filters.

To answer your original question though;

When you capture your video with Studio 7 you are actually encoding this video to MPEG-2. That's why you saw the blocks in the picture. MPEG-2 and AC-3 encoding are separate and distinct tasks in the DVD asset preparation chain of events.

One of my greatest frustrations in helping folks learn DVD authoring and production is the manner in which software manufacturers bundle disciplines and call them collectively, DVD authoring.

I'll go out on a limb here (but I know that it's a very strong branch) to tell you that there are no bundled encoders that deliver professional results. Not MainConcept, Ulead or any other. If you want results you can be proud of consider either a hardware or software solution that is dedicated for that purpose.

Two Canopus products fit the bill very nicely; the hardware-based MPEGProEMR (or the internal MPEGProMVR) and the software ProCoder.

Both of these will produce excellent results.

I strongly urge anyone seriously interested in producing DVD titles for fun and profit to read at least one of two books on the subject; "DVD Authoring and Production," by Ralph LaBarge and "DVD Demystified," by Jim Taylor. Both are easily found on Amazon.com. Within their pages the requirements and processes of asset preparation are discussed in detail. You'll soon learn how different techniques during the encoding process can affect the outcome of your DVD project.

More importantly, you'll learn a lot more about the DVD Forum specifications and you'll soon discover how limited almost all of the DVD authoring software available today really are. There shouldn't be a need to spend $8K for Scenarist Studio just so you ca get to the SPRM and GPRM registers in the PC world, but right now that's about all there is. Once you have access to the registers you can fully exploit the capabilities and potential of DVD authoring. It is much more than menus and transitions.

I'll be conducting classes on the site below in the not too distant future. I am a professional DVD publisher along with a DVD technology retailer. I do not publish weddings, Bar Mitzphas, etc. I publish for local and state governments, medical innovators and major league sports. Using Wink from Satish I'll be adding simple how to instructions for the Sonic Foundry products I sell because I use them almost daily.

Right now, VV4 is my NLE of choice. It can do some really sophisticated stuff in a fairly intuitive way. If you are trying to use or experiment with motion menus and transitions, VV4 is an excellent tool on which to learn.

But remember; have patience. Any result worthy of merit will take time. You can not build a DVD with full motion graphics, menus and transitions overnight. I like to think I know what I'm doing and for me, even a simple title with motion graphics, transitions, synchronized music and audio, etc. takes about 3 weeks.

The best thing you can do is read one of the books recommended above. You will be forever grateful that you did.

Richard
http://radcamdvd.com
"America's One-Stop Shop for DVD!"

Richard, when you do the tutorials using Wink can you send me the URL so that i can see how you are using it and get some ideas to improve? Thanks

> I am a little surprised that V4 hasn't got any noise filters

It actually does if you consider the Adapter in Satish’s (free) PluginPac which will let you use VirtualDub filters right in Vegas. If you’re doing a lot of correction, you might want to preprocess your AVI files in VirtualDub first, but if you just need to patch up a bad shot here or there, the adapter is the way to go.

The only reason I suggest preprocessing for removing noise from an entire video is because this is very CPU intensive and you may experience slow playback in Vegas while it processes the noise while trying to do other editing tasks. I find it easier to clean up the AVI first and then edit it. If you have a really fast CPU this may not be a problem.

~jr

I have found using tutorials from others (billyboy was one of them) and experimenting with color curves you can get amazing results from them. If done properly it will almost completely remove noise from dark areas. Here is a link to some clips that I cleaned up and did frame grabs from I think they speak for themselves!
PS. they shouldn't tax your system heavily either as some Virtual Dub filters can.

ftp://totalsolutions.bz/pub/curves.jpg