Holy smokes.

Puggo - Jar Jar's Yoda said:

It's 1280x480, so you'll need VLC or similar to play it.

I had no problems whatsoever watching it in WMP.

Also, as for the corners, I'd suggest leaving them as-is; I didn't even notice them until I remembered to check.

Maybe it's just the way the film shakes around, but the pulldown looks jerkier than usual to my eyes? Or maybe I'm just imagining it.

Harmy said:

Looks great. It looks way better then Puggo Grande. I wonder if that is due to a better quality of the print or the scanning process being improved?

The scanning process was identical to PG.  The difference must be because I upscaled PSB rather than squishing it vertically and letting the player stretch it.  After I'm done with PSB - and have fully learned the best way of doing this - I'll go back and do the same for PG.

Asaki said:

I had no problems whatsoever watching it in WMP.

Also, as for the corners, I'd suggest leaving them as-is; I didn't even notice them until I remembered to check.

Maybe it's just the way the film shakes around, but the pulldown looks jerkier than usual to my eyes? Or maybe I'm just imagining it.

Recent versions of WMP can play it.

I will leave the corners... they look cleaner than I was expecting.

The jerky pulldown is something I need to find a way to fix.  For the PG, the video and audio streams were separate, and I did pulldown by setting the pulldown flag and letting the player slow it down (I only did a temporary pulldown so I could ensure that the pulled-down video would match the separately-encoded and correct-speed audio).  Since I knew for this demo I was going to encode them together, I did pulldown in software using cinecap (it adds frames according to standard patterns), before encoding. I agree that the results aren't entirely satisfactory.

Cinecap is capable of adding interpolated frames, which is supposed to make it smoother - but I've never liked doing that because it makes it harder if someone else wants to edit it later.  I still don't know what is the process I will use to ultimately encode PSB.  So I'm open to suggestions in that regard, and with respect to doing the pulldown.

Pulldown is not necessary for video in the MKV container - it can be 24fps (or 23.976fps) natively.

MPlayer has no trouble with it.  (though it's converted to 29.97 fps... which may not be ideal. mkv can support any framerate.)

Moth3r said:

Pulldown is not necessary for video in the MKV container - it can be 24fps (or 23.976fps) natively.

So, capture produces a DV file at one film frame per DV frame (which isn't 24fps).  So... I would edit the movie in DV (at its framerate), do a temporary pulldown like before so I can sync the audio, then do a final encode at 24fps?  How would I get the audio correctly into the mkv encoding?

In other words, although the film is meant to be played back at 24fps, the video is stored at 30fps (too fast) because it is captured as a DV .avi file, and the audio is a separate .wav file.  I need some way to sync them up, and also to tell the encoder to set the frame rate to 24fps.

The video is easy - if you're using an AviSynth script, just add AssumeFPS("film"). This will cause the video to play at the correct speed without changing any frames.

You could also use AudioDub() to add the audio for your sync check. There's also a great filter that adds the audio waveform over the top of the video to assist with this process, I'll post back when I remember its name.

Edit - AudioGraph

To mux final video and audio together into the MKV container use mkvmerge.

I would recommend using 23.976fps instead of 24fps, because 24fps can cause playback problems. Ady made his EpIV AVCHD 24fps and I know there were people who had to remux it to 23,976 in order to play it.

The demo looks positively super, Puggo! :D

Moth3r said:

The video is easy - if you're using an AviSynth script, just add AssumeFPS("film"). This will cause the video to play at the correct speed without changing any frames.

You could also use AudioDub() to add the audio for your sync check. There's also a great filter that adds the audio waveform over the top of the video to assist with this process, I'll post back when I remember its name.

Edit - AudioGraph

Ok, I was thinking more about how I would set it up to sync by hand. Remember that audio capture is a completely separate step with a different projector than video capture.  So they aren't synced at all.  I have to go through stretching and shrinking scene by scene until the audio matches the video.  Vegas makes that step doable, albeit tedious.  But when Vegas imports DV, it assumes the wrong frame rate, which is why I've made a temporary pulldown.  In PG, I discarded the version with the temporary pulldown and replaced it with the original video with pulldown flag set. In this case, I'm assuming that I'll need to replace the version with the temporary pulldown and replace it with the one that has been set to "film"?

To mux final video and audio together into the MKV container use mkvmerge.

Ok, I'll check that out.  Thanks!

Nerfherder said:

Amazed how blue Hoth looks esp. in the wampa scene, after all the hooplah about the 2004s colour balance. Perhaps it was always meant to be that blue afterall! At any rate its grand to see Empire looking like a film again :) Plays perfectly using VLC on my Mac.

The trouble with the 2004's color balance is that other things that aren't supposed to be blue are blue.  You can't tell the blue shift based on things that are already blue, but you can tell from the things that used to be white, or flesh-toned :)

Not to nit pick, but I've noticed with both the Puggo Grande and the Empire clip that there is a strange sort of 'echo-y' effect on some of the music. Almost like a vibraphone in places! Is this sort of audio effect common on 16mm film prints?

I don't know the answer to that.  If both this and PG have the same effect, then I'm not too worried about it.  I used a different projector to grab the audio this time, and my main concern was that the audio be comparable. I'm not sure why there would be an echo-y effect... that can happen with tape because of print-through, but that shouldn't be an issue with optical.

My way of grabbing the audio is a bit crude... I have an Elmo 16CL projector, and I simply take the 1/4" speaker output and route it into my DAT deck, adjusting the projector's output and tone levels by ear, and the record level on the DAT.  The digital out of that goes straight into the computer (I have a nice RNE sound card).  The only thing I adjusted on that file was to cutoff the very low end, and fix a few waves that clipped. There is probably a way of getting a better quality sound out of the optical pickup, but I've been reasonably satisfied with what I've gotten this way.

thorr said:

Also, you can change the frame rate using xvid4psp.  There are several options, but I think the "Assume" is the correct one as mentioned (not 100% sure).

Can I merge a separate audio file in xvid4psp?

Also, what audio settings should I use?  I just used default settings for everything... any suggestions you have for tweaking it would be appreciated.

Harmy said:

I would recommend using 23.976fps instead of 24fps, because 24fps can cause playback problems. Ady made his EpIV AVCHD 24fps and I know there were people who had to remux it to 23,976 in order to play it.

Very good to know, thanks!

hairy_hen said:

It's my understanding that you really shouldn't do actual pulldown to film sources--just leave the real film frames alone and tell it to run at the proper speed, adding pulldown flags during the encoding stage if need be.  Hard-interlaced material wastes space and bandwidth by having to encode duplicate fields, and is just that much more difficult for de-interlacing to sort out during progressive playback.

Absolutely... PG was made with a pulldown flag.  But my understanding is that HD doesn't have pulldown flags.  I did the hard pulldown this time for the PSB demo because I didn't know the right way to handle it in HD... now that I'm armed with the correct method(s), the next one will be better! (and smaller).

MKV and MP4 don't have pulldown flags, but they don't need it - their framerate system is more flexible, even allowing multiple framerates in the same file which is more flexible than only 23.976 and 29.97, or 23.976 or 29.97 or 25, in the same file as vob only permits.

how are people playing this in windows media player?  I checked to make sure mine's current but it still won't play the sample.  I don't really want to dl yet another player just to see it.

canofhumdingers said:

how are people playing this in windows media player?  I checked to make sure mine's current but it still won't play the sample.  I don't really want to dl yet another player just to see it.

Do you have Windows 7?  I think that only the version of WMP under Windows 7 will play dimensions larger than 1080.

VLC is a very lightweight viewer.  Another very nice one is GOM.  Between the two of them, you can play just about anything.

There's a couple plugins for Windows that support MKV and the other formats.  I want to say Haali?