Does anyone know where I can track down 300dpi images of the original posters for my cover art?

Hey thanks for the tip. I haven't really explored the forum yet other that your thread.

I haven't read enough on how cinema craft handles the average when the range is so great. I really want to constrain the average bitrate to the haighest possible value. I may try to lower my min and raise my average. I noticed on the new set, they average 8 to 8.5 with the occasional 11.3.

Once again these are value I will play with with the goal being the highest possible average & the least amount of artifacts. The artifacts showing up in the new set sets me off. I know this software compression won't be better but I'll try to let the problems reside in my image quality not me compression methods.

On another note:
I will admit that I need to become educated on non-interlace video and the animorphic stuff. All I have ever done has been NTSC /interlaced/4:3

Did you capture the video in 4:3 and cropped it in another program?
Also, how does the dvd standard handle non-interlaced video?
Oh are these laserdisc player video at a film or standard video(29.97) frame rate?


Thanks & I look forward to reading over all of you posts. I've seen your capture card specs and the mpeg 2 compressor you are using & am very impressd with the stills you have posted. You should look into getting Cinema Craft to get a bit more quality out of your compression. They have a free trail version you can download for testing purposes. Also if you google pdf files you can find a user manual online. There are a ton of settings to play with including the handling of the conversion of film frame rate to video.

Thanks again & take care,

So you encoded at 29.97 intially then used a IVTC program to alter the frame rate. Are you editing at 29.97 and coverting right before compression? I noticed that cinema craft has a feature to handle this conversion during it's 9 pass compression sequence.

I haven't digitized the first frame yet. I really want to make sure I have the intial setting correct for all the post capture tweaking. I plan on reviewing what corrections everyone else has made and implementing them as needed

So far: (please correct me if needed)

I'm captureing at 4:3 at 29.97fps
Capture size 720 X 486
Lossless quality (roughly 300+k per frame)
Will try s-video & composite to determine best quality (I have noticed everyone saying composite is better)

On the audio side:
Does anyone have any suggestions.
All I want is that doly 2.0 track with basic surround.
I have an optical in & rca ins.
Once captured does the audio maintain it's surround features or is there somthing extra that needs doing?

Thanks

IVTC should be one of the first thing to do, because applying filters to interlaced (or partly interlaced = telecined) footage might mess up your fields, which would make it impossible to IVTC afterwards.

Do you know which codec you will use? HuffyUV has been great for me (thanks again, laserman. )

Media 100 has its own codec that requires their board for playback and editing.

Media 100 also forces interlacing so I guess the first thing I need to do is get the raw footage edited and output it to some uncompressed lossless file type either QT or AVI. Then go from there.

Also, when I capture video and audio separately, there's less CPU overhead, so I won't drop frames while capturing video. This is important, because if you drop a frame, it will ruin the IVTC process (or, at the very least, force you to do it manually, which is a slow pain-in-the-ass.).

This will not be an issue becuase our media 100 does not allow frames to be dropped.

Your captured audio track will maintain the original dolby pro-logic information to make it surround. Unless you employ some filters that mess with this, your matrixed surround channel should stay intact, and should play back the same way it does off the LD.

This is good news. What kind of filtering will mess up this info. (Hi-pass low-pass , general EQing)?

Please advise:

Here is what I'm thinking the order of events will be for this process:

Capture video with media 100.
Media 100 will allow me to bounce back & forth to AE.
In AE (as of right now) I plan on replacing the captured little black bars with 1-color black boxes to help the bit-rate issues they present.
Also, I plan on re-titling everything on top of those new black bars for the same reason mentioned above.

Once everything is edited (video/audio) and I've done all of the color correction that Media 100 & AE can, I'll output a monster interlaced 29.97 fps video.
This raw video will probably be 1 gig per minute if it is a lossless QT video using the component codec.

The reason I want to keep everything in a media 100 format for as long as possible is because although it is lossless the file sizes of the actual media 100 files are small.
Their compression scheme for lossless is awesome. This will allow me to easily archive all of my footage. Each movie should end up being roughly
60 gigs in the media 100 format. The downside to this is that this footage will require their card to be edited in the future.

OK so here I sit with this best possible footage. Now, I've been combing through the Cinema Craft manual and it will handle the de-interlacing as well as the frame rate conversion during its 9-pass compression sequence. So I take care of those issues when compressing it to an mpeg 2.

Here is one of many (to come) of my questions. If I need to use some of the filtering you guys are using to remove halo/ghosting etc can those filters be ran on QT files?

Welp, before I start I have a cover & a new name for my "Backups"
Dark Empire Collection ( big fan of the dark horse books)

Anyway, here is a link to a very low quality jpg of the cover I'm going to use on a 3-disc case.
Next while I'm awaiting my laser-disc player maybe I'll knock out the disc covers & start storyboarding a menu for Empire, Since it has
to be first . .

Fun while at work...

Low Quality First attempt at a cover