?????



I'd love to know how that one is accomplished. you normally have to use a filter to make it deinterlace back to a full progressive file. it certainly doesn't to my knowledge deinterlace on the fly on its own without being told too.

if it did that, and you wanted to keep a source fil interlaced (for whatever reason) you would have to add a switch or command to your AVS file to NOT deinterlace automatically. no such mention of that on the avisynth.org site.

in addition, if it did do this on the fly, then the likes of Donald Graft wouldn't have bothered to create an avisynth deinterlace plugin surely?

most interested.

What ya tryin' to do, confuse me even further?!

I though that too, until the above discussion and reading threads such as this one.

I believe if you are capturing a PAL source that was originally created from film, then you only need a deinterlacer if the fields need swapping for whatever reason.

I think you've read it wrong moth3r

regardless of how the source was originally created, if you have an interlaced capture file, unless you deinterlace it, it will be nigh on impossible to run filters on it to sharpen or improve the image further as most filters for avisynth and vdub are designed to work with a progressive non-interlaced sourec.

so even if it looks fine on your PC screen, it is still interlaced. to smooth, sharpen or do anything else you will need to deinterlace to get it back to a non interlaced progressive source file.

eg Star wars on LD PAL.

25fps interlaced file, deinterlace back to 25fps progressive.

Star Wars on LD NTSC

29.97fps NTSC interlaced file, IVTC back to 23.97fps progressive using deinterlace and frame decimation.

that's my read on this situation.

tellan is right on the money!

and answered my own question to boot to some extent. hooray!!

OK I've had a play at splicing the "screen wipe" frames capped from the VHS tape between sides 1 and 2 of the laserdisc.

In terms of quality, there's not that much difference - they're both noisy analogue sources, however the brightness, colour saturation and screen centring are completely different between the two clips.

So what should I do?

• Spend time trying to get the picture from another source to match as close as possible that from the PAL laserdisc (but it'll never be a perfect match)
  
• Leave the audio as it is and just insert a few black frames into the laserdisc capture where this wipe is missing
  
• Skip those frames completely, and have a jump in the audio at that point
  

color correction for a few frames is actually not that hard.

use the following filters by donald graft as a good start (*note, these are all Vdub filters)

http://neuron2.net/index.html


hus/saturation/internsity
red/green/blue adjustment filter

in his hosted section

white balance filter

Screen wipe added to end of side 1

Update:

I'm still playing around with the capture settings - I strongly believe it's better to capture the video correctly in the first place than to apply filters to correct it during post-processing.

With reference to the screenshots I posted in the "official" thread, I think that the brightness (aka "black level") and contrast ("white level") are set pretty close to the ideal. Vader's cloak is black and the roof lights are white. (I should make spot checks to ensure that all the discs are all consistent with each other).

Using the vdub plugin here to analyse the video, it turns out that the colour is slightly over-saturated. Where Artoo wakes up in the sand crawler, his red light is too "hot" and will clip on a TV.

Also I dislike the edge enhancement effect I'm seeing in my screenshots - this isn't caused by the sharpening filter as I first thought, it's present on the source video. Again I'm going to have to look at the capture card drivers, and if there's nothing I can do there then maybe look for a filter to reduce the effect.

I think you;'ll find moth3r that disc 1 if using the DE LD's, if using the faces then basically, up until 19 minutes in, the color values are off in relation to the other discs.

highlights are a bit blown. the rebel troopers face around frame 5100 is oversaturated in comparison to skin tone against the rest of the first 19 minutes. red on the tantive wall displays is very intense and needs dialing down. intensity of white needs adjusting too.

wadetv, yes, I've been round the block a bit on this one.

First I tried playing the "THX Optimizer" on a DVD player connected via s-video to my capture card, and adjusted the settings so that the captured images were almost identical to the images copied directly off the DVD. However, my laserdisc player's output is darker than that from my DVD player, so the actual caps were coming out too dark.

Then I tried a video calibration laserdisc (see this post) and set up the capture card with that. However, the disc was NTSC (I don't know of any PAL calibration discs) and again the captures from my PAL laserdiscs were too dark.

So I resorted to what I should have done in the first place; capture some scenes from the actual discs, and adjust the brightness/contrast settings until the darkest pixels (in the actual picture, e.g. Vader's cloak - the black bars seem to be darker than the main image) are coming out as black and the brightest (e.g. the roof lights in Tantive) are white. The waveform monitor in the colortools vdub plugin is very useful here. Assuming that the levels remain consistent throughout the disc, this is the best way I think to get things right.

MeBeJedi's philosphy was to black set a bit higher and white a bit lower, to capture all the detail possible, then to adjust the settings during post-processing. His thinking may hold some weight, but it makes more sense to me to capture the full range and leave alone rather than capture a reduced range and then extrapolate.

if I were you moth3r, I would do what mebejedi has done and capture slightly black higher, white lower and post process. the reason being is that the light and colour values on the LD's are not consistent so there are some scenes where you will lose detail as whites get blown and blacks are too black.

I did what you did (ie capture pure blacks etc) and have overblown whites in the tantive sequence. the section where vader and the officer are walking down the corridor saying, she'll die before she'll tell you anything, leave that to me etc, around frame 12000. the white corridor totally blows out in the background on my capture and loses all the detail, it also hurts the eyes too.

if you capture mebejedi style, then you have total source control and can adjust individual scenes if you have too. it will make for a better capture.

I've found the colortools vdub plugin to be very useful, more scientific than doing adjustments by eye (televisions and monitors have different gamma characteristics anyway). The only thing I now need to check are whether the levels output by the player are consistent or vary depending on the disc.

Thanks to Zion, you can now see my latest screenshots on his updated pages Here.

Good:
- sharper picture, nice level of detail (the starfield in Shot 1 is nicer than any of the others - even the official DVD! - and you can see the engines of the blockade runner quite well).
- Whites aren't overblown and blacks aren't crushed, see shots 6 and 8.

Bad:
- doesn't show up on screenshots, but quite a lot of "speckles" or drop outs in the video. Discs need a thoroughly good clean.
- colours are not as saturated as the other versions (shot 4)
- still a presence of halos/ghosting/edge-enhancement/whatever-you-want-to-call-it (shot 7)

I think I'm going to leave the video and concentrate on other things for now, i.e. splicing in the screen wipes and syncing the English audio. I've realised you could play with the settings and post-processing for months and still see things that need fixing - regarding the colours, if I increase the saturation then colortools plugin detects some of the reds (e.g. in shot 10) are too high. Instead of messing about with reducing individual colours, I will use the video as it is now and go on to make a non-anamorphic DVD5 "screener" version to use as a baseline for future enhancements.

Your new screenshots of 7-10 are now up as well. Sorry for the delay.

You've improved on the video clarity. Much shaper than before and more detailed. The most obvious difference though is, like you said, the saturation is much lower when compared to the others.

I followed the good ol' Doom9 analogue capture guide; see section 7.1.9 Here; the only difference is that I applied it to the initial capture settings rather than through a post-processing filter.

When I first started this project, it wasn't intended to be a dual-layer DVDR. But considering how the length of time I thought it would take has multiplied dramatically, by the time I have a finished video that I'm happy with, dual-layer media may have become more affordable!

I wasn't considering multi-angle, as the French discs have the crawl in English but with subtitles in the lower black bar. Presumably I could do the same but with German subtitles.

My current plan is to finish an English, non-anamorphic, movie-only (no menus), single-layer DVDR set. I'll make these available for feedback purposes, and you could put your own soundtrack to my video if you want to have a go.

When I've finished this initial "taster" set, I'll go back and look at enhancing the set with multiple languages, anamorphic widescreen, menus and maybe make it dual layer then. Unfortunately this "final" set looks to be a long way off at the moment!