Puggo Strikes Back! (Released) — Page 10

Hi Puggo,

Great and exciting work on the video quality!  We still have some work to do on the cropping and aspect ratio.  I am not at home so I can't check to see if the aspect ratio is correct, but I am guessing not.  I was surprised that your screenshots had a width of 654, because I was expecting it to be 720.  I am glad that the video is 720 wide because that means there is more resolution in there.  I am guessing that doubling 720 to 1440 is not the correct aspect ratio because 720 width is with non-square pixels. (720 / 480 does not equal 4 / 3 which is what the captured aspect ratio should be). 

Also, I highly recommend and request that you crop the video to the edges of the frames rather than having black area on the sides and top/bottom.  These edges will otherwise show up on the screen and not fill the screen all the way to the edges making the picture smaller.  When I crop your video, I am getting 1380x466.  If you take 466 * 4/3 * 2, you get a width of 1242.6.  If I resize the 1380x466 area to 1243x466, the aspect ratio looks more correct to me by eyeballing it.  Then this should be upscaled to 1280x480 and then black bars added to the top and bottom to make it 1280x720.

To make a long story short, I suggest to crop right to the edge of the image area, then resize to 1280x480, then add black bars to the top and bottom to make it 1280x720.  If you can upload a sample 5 second raw avi with preferably a bright scene where it is easy to see the edges, I can work on it and tell you the settings to use to do what I described above and upload the result for you to see.

Thanks!

Mike

Thanks Harmy, you saved me the work of getting it exact.  Glad I was pretty close just by theorizing.  :-)

Puggo, I totally agree that you should keep the curved edge.  Just crop it so the widest part of the picture goes all the way to the edge.

This got me to thinking that maybe the curved edges are inherent in the video capture rather than on the print (barrel distortion).  If so, this can probably be corrected also so the edges are straight without losing any pixels.  This may be possible with Vegas.  Of course now I am getting really picky. :-)  If you can upload a sample raw clip, I could work on it and see what I can do.

Love that sample, Puggo. Your preservations make me want greasy popcorn, flat Coke, and leg and neck cramps from sitting cross-legged on the floor too long. I mean that in a good way!

Thanks Puggo!  I can't wait to start playing with the raw clip (hopefully tonight)!

Ok, here are my current settings:

http://i54.tinypic.com/n6s401.jpg

It is encoding right now so I am not 100% sure the aspect ratio is correct.  I like doing 2-pass encoding.  For the final product I recommend using the highest quality preset for 2P DVD-5 then editing the settings and setting the size to 8100 minus whatever your audio file size is so the final mkv will be around 8100.  This should be small enough so that when it is converted to AVCHD, it will fit on a DVD-DL disc.

Once my encoding is done, I plan to burn it to disc and check it out in my theater.  Can't wait!  I will see if I can upload the final product (probably using sendspace).

When burning to disc, I recommend using Imgburn and you will need to set the disc format to UDF 2.5.

Mike

Edit: Ok it finished (that was quick).  I noticed that Yoda and Bespin aren't cropping properly.

Edit 2:  Here is the file: http://www.sendspace.com/file/ijtzky

Like I said, just use ImgBurn and set it to UDF 2.5.  I just watched it on my 163" screen using my PS3 and it looks great!  Can't wait to see the final product!!!

You can break it into multiple files and adjust the cropping for each file, then at the end, use tsmuxer to append them together.  By the way, I used tsmuxer to convert the .mkv to AVCHD which is what I posted in the link above.

Edit: After thinking about it, I am not sure how stable that break in the encoded files would be.  Two other options would be to crop each file and resize inside of VirtualDub, save as lossless AVI, then join all of them together into one AVI when all the files are the same resolution.  Then use Xvid4PSP to add the black bars and encode.  The other option would be to crop the files in VirtualDub and try to join them in Xvid4PSP.  I am not sure how well it handles files of different sizes though, so using Virtualdub is probably the best option.

I am not sure what CRF is, so you are probably right.  I usually encode the file as big as I can and still have it fit on a disc.  When using that mode, CRF isn't an option (x264 2P DVD-5 Insane Film, size at ~7900 depending on the audio size).

Q is a measure of quality.  CRF is constant rate factor.  The smaller the number, the better the quality, the bigger the filesize. (18 is usually absolutely sufficient to ensure good quality.)

Using CRF means that you are choosing to output a certain quality (in terms of encoding) at the cost of unpredictable filesize.  When you use a two-pass mode, you can select the filesize that you end up with, but the encoder can only deliver the best quality it can for the filesize.  At the sizes that you are talking about, you might not notice much of a difference.

I agree that the screenshots look great! :-)

Thanks.  For clips, I would suggest using CRF 18.  If you try to do it based on a large size for small clips, the bit rate may be way too high.  I tried this last night for the short clip and it made a 400mb file that stuttered and had glitches.  When the clip is much longer, the bit rate is within reasonable limits.

For the whole movie, you could try it both ways or any combination of ways to see what gives the best results.  I am a fan of not filtering out stuff to make the file size smaller.  With the 2 pass size restricted method, it uses a variable bit rate and will use more bandwidth only when needed and probably give you the best overall experience.

Tonight I will re-encode it again with CRF 18 and post it again.

Mike

Holy crap the CRF 18 seemed to make a big difference.  For some reason though when I burned the file to disc, it wouldn't play properly.  Maybe it was the option I chose that was the problem (x264 Q21 Insane Film then modify CRF to 18). 

I went through the process to get the cropping done right for each scene.  What I did was use Virtual Dub to cut out each scene and save as an AVI using direct stream copy and number the scenes in order in the filename.

Then I used Xvid4PSP to crop, resize, and add black bars to each scene so that it was the same as it would be in the final product and save the files individually again.  I used lossless AVI FFV1 to save them.  Then finally after all of the scenes were cropped and resized, I opened the first scene, then joined each scene in order, and encoded the group into the final mkv file.

Here are the settings I used for each of the scenes:

http://i53.tinypic.com/34q21vp.jpg

It is easy to tweak it for each scene (assuming each scene is in a separate AVI file).  Just adjust the numbers and hit Apply and see how it looks.

I didn't check to see if the aspect ratio was correct.  This can be adjusted easily by tweaking the 117 setting.  I chose 117 based on Harmy's findings that the height of the movie should be 486 (486+117+117=720).  The correctness of the aspect ratio may vary slightly from scene to scene depending on how it is cropped in that scene, but I would pick one number like 117 for the whole movie or else the size of the picture will adjust itself and that would be distracting.

Here is the final product that for some reason doesn't work on a blu-ray player, but it looks real nice on a PC. 

http://www.sendspace.com/file/aebelg

Mike

Wow, that preview looks crazy good. I'm sorry I can't contribute anything useful other than my approval. Can't wait for this one guys.

I think that the least amount of processing plus the higher quality / bit rate makes it look the best and most natural.  I am hoping that the fluxsmooth and any sharpening won't be necessary in order for it too look good and fit on a DVD-DL disc.  Using the 2P size method with the variable bit rate should give pretty good results hopefully.  I think the first pass determines where all the peaks and valleys are and the second pass splits up the end result size and adjusts the bit rate throughout the encoding process.