So you are doing a 24fps version for computer owners?
A note to PC owners, set your refresh rate to a multiple of the 24fps rate (e.g. 72Hz) or of 25fps if watching it in PAL (e.g. 75Hz) and you get a much better result.
XviD trilogy, 1024x446 resolution, 23.976fps, not decided on what audio format yet, leaning towards 320kbps mp3 or PCM, no extras, each film will fill a full single layer DVD-R, the drawback of 4.3gb avis is that W95/W98 users won't be able to view the avis, unless I do a version with the films split up into <2gb avis. You won't need a fast machine to play them though, this 900mhz Duron PC has no problems playing XviD files of that resolution.
PAL trilogy, anamorphic widescreen, PCM audio/5.1 DD AC3/2.0 commentary, all the extras off the definitive collection, the discs will be dual-layer in order to accomodate the 3 audio tracks and extras.
The only reason at the moment is that my soundcard & playback software isn't setup to stream out ac3 in avis to my amp, meaning if I were to make an avi with 5.1 from 2.0 source it would follow this line: 2.0 source upmixed to Pro-LogicII 5.1 AC3 during creation, playing the avi back the software would downmix the 5.1 to 2.0, then output that to my amp where it would upmix again to Pro-LogicII 5.1, instead of just sending the unprocessed 2.0 audio to the amp where it would upmix to Pro-LogicII 5.1.
If I can get my soundcard & playback software to stream ac3 to my amp I may go with the ac3 option for the XviD, otherwise I'll stick to mp3 (256kbps as that's the highest bitrate my VirtualDub can encode to)
hey Citizen, no word from you for a few weeks, I have faith in your project being up there with the best (possible THE best) considering the information and screenies you have given so far. How's it all going?
A couple of things have pressed the pause button on my project, firstly the weather, I hate this hot weather because it wipes me out and everything just seems like too much effort (I'd really not cope if I lived in a hot climate), and more importantly I need to scrape up about £150 for a couple of replacement harddrives, the two 120gb's I have just aren't enough and need to replace them with two 250gb's or higher.
As a test I did however re-encode the 4.7gb XviD avi down to a PAL DVD and even though it's from an XviD it still looks great, took it round to a friend's house to see what it was like on his 42" plasma and I'm very happy with the results, another friend who was there commented on how it looked more film-like natural as opposed to the sharpness of a 'proper' DVD which was great to hear because that's what I've been aiming for all along. ***Citizen's NTSC DVD/PAL DVD/XviD Info and Feedback Thread***
Uhh pass, never really keep track of the temp numbers when it gets hot, cursing at the heat and vegatating in front of the tv is how I cope It's cooled down a lot the past few days (raining right now) so I'm starting to be able to think straight and have gotten stuck back into my trilogy.
I've cleared enough off my drives to do ANH PAL DVD, 2.5 hours ago I set my computer to filter the captured footage into a huffy avi (estimated size 35gb) to then mpeg2 encode, just have to wait 30+ hours for the process to complete...
So far I think my ANH test DVD is as good, if not better than Moth3r's ANH. Because I'm not using any temporal smoothing/filtering, the noise/grain in the picture remains fairly constant but also lower than Moth3r's because of the 5x sampling, tried to use as little smoothing as possible because too much removal starts destroying the picture detail. ***Citizen's NTSC DVD/PAL DVD/XviD Info and Feedback Thread***
Hey Citizen, hope your 30 hour encode marathon went ok
Just a couple questions. Firstly how are you addressing the colour saturation? This is probably my only main criticism of Moth3r's ANH as the colour is pretty weak. I know he said this is a problem with the PAL Laserdiscs where there isnt really very good colour to begin with, but are you gonna boost it up to the lovelly colours seen in other people NTSC conversions (the stills of Cowclops v2 look beautiful!)
Also, are you gonna bother making menus and any extra fancy things for you Discs? Im not bothered either way as all I care about is the actual movie being the best it possibly can be, I'm just being curious
Really glad to hear about your success you are having with the 5x averaging technique, glad it means you wont have to use very much (if any) temporal smoothing either, temporal smoothing always looks horrible when over done. Also glad you're getting the audio from the French Discs as well, I have really good studio speakers on my PC so can hear the quality lacking with Moth3rs method of using the VHS audio.
Keep up the excellent work boyo, I'm here patiently but excitedly waiting.
Can't use the audio from the French LDs as it's dubbed in French so will be using the audio from the Definitive collection, starting to think lugging the player+discs over to my friends house to capture at silly high quality is too much hassle so will probably stick to my Canopus ADVC-100 for the audio capture at 48khz, it'll certainly be good enough and there won't be any khz conversion needed at least but will filter out any background inteference noise before upsampling to PAL speed & the 5.1 trick.
Colour, it's been tweaked a little (white balance,hue,saturation) so it looks good I think, I didn't put the saturation as high as the definitive collection because that has too much, nor is it as low as Moth3r's, face colour looks 'right' without them looking like they're badly sunburnt
I don't have the skills or tools to make fancy animated menus so will stick to plain static ones because those I can do, going to keep them simple because I hate DVD menus where it's too cluttered and you can't really work out what option is actually hilited before you select it. I do have some unique SW easter eggs I picked up at a car boot sale, one for each film (not saying what they are ) ***Citizen's NTSC DVD/PAL DVD/XviD Info and Feedback Thread***
Originally posted by: Citizen Can't use the audio from the French LDs as it's dubbed in French so will be using the audio from the Definitive collection, starting to think lugging the player+discs over to my friends house to capture at silly high quality is too much hassle so will probably stick to my Canopus ADVC-100 for the audio capture at 48khz, it'll certainly be good enough and there won't be any khz conversion needed at least but will filter out any background inteference noise before upsampling to PAL speed & the 5.1 trick.
Ahhh, fair play, I took it for granted that the French LaserDiscs you had were the ones discussed in this thread - http://www.originaltrilogy.com/forum/messageview.cfm?catid=9&threadid=2866 , where there is dialogue in English. I hope you can make the NTSC audio fit ok, but I spose you just have to speed it up 4%, so it shouldnt be much hassle.
Good news on the colour, and also I agree with you on the menus. To be fair, menus annoy me anyways, I want to put the disc in the player, press play and start watching the movie, messing around with menus usually just irritates me Maybe I'm just impatient?
Fitting audio from one film source to another film source isn't difficult, just time consuming because you have to scan through both sources at the same time to make sure the frames sync between them, removing or adding frames to the one with the audio so it matches the one you're using the video from, if the playback speeds are different it doesn't matter so long as neither of them have 3:2 pulldown applied (must be removed beforehand).
I keep getting distracted by watching episodes of Lost, The Dead Zone, Battlestar Galactica, Andromeda, Stargate (SG-1 & Atlantis) etc.
Currently at the stage of the 5.1 upmix from 2.0 audio, added an extra sprinkling of surround to it which adds to the feeling of being 'in' the movie instead of watching it, ie most films only use the front three speakers of a 5.1 setup but I like it when the surrounds kick in more, especially the background music which is so important in SW. The 'minor' glitch I'm smoothing over is a problem with too much subbass because the 5.1 upmix method gives you an empty .1 track you have to make yourself, just not sure what crossover hz to use so anything below x hz goes to the .1 and anything above goes to the 5.
ANH will take longer to DVD than the other two because once I've got the procedure nailed I can just repeat it for ESB/ROTJ.
Any AviSynth gurus out there? I've run into a problem trying to overlay subtitles onto my video with AviSynth.
I can't use the built-in Subtitle() function because it outputs text in 1:1 ratio and I'm working with anamorphic footage so the resulting text would be badly squashed when the video is played back, so far I've been able to overlay an image containing the text onto the footage which is ideal because I can make sure the text looks just how I want:
but that overlays the subtitle image over the entire length of the footage, I need to be able to specify the range of frames it overlays the subtitle image onto and I can't figure out how to, help anyone? ***Citizen's NTSC DVD/PAL DVD/XviD Info and Feedback Thread***
# OverPic # # Allows you to overlay an image at specific coordinates over a specific frame range, # suitable for DOGS (Digital Onscreen Graphics, ie horrible tv channel logos) but was # specifically written to overlay a small amount of subtitles in bmp form into the # black border of widescreen video. # # NOTE: # Image masking not currently supported, may add this in the future. # # PARAMETERS: # start, end : The frame range to apply the image to. # thepic : The image filename to overlay. # picx, picy : Where to overlay the image onto the video. # # USAGE: # OverPic(253, 311, "subtitle.bmp", 100, 511) # function OverPic(clip c, int start, int end, string thepic, int picx, int picy) { Assert(start >= 0 && start < c.FrameCount(),"PicSub: start frame out of bounds: " + String(start)) Assert(end >= start && end < c.FrameCount(),"PicSub: end frame out of bounds: " + String(end)) logo=imagesource(thepic) c1 = c.trim(0,start-1) c2 = overlay(c.trim(start,end),logo,picx,picy) c3 = c.trim(end+1,c.framecount()) return c1 + c2 + c3 }
Now currently encoding ANH mv2 file, I've got the audio perfectly synched up and 5.1 upmixing tests have gone well so now it's just a matter of waiting for the PC to do the video encoding and then work on the audio (long process and 6gb+ of harddrive space). I'm half expecting I'll be re-encoding the video all over again as this is still a test run. ***Citizen's NTSC DVD/PAL DVD/XviD Info and Feedback Thread***
Since you're using the audio from the Definitive Collection, I was wondering, what are you planning to get it to fit the PAL version and preserve pitch? Dr. M seemed to have a lot of trouble with it.
I'm not preserving the pitch, I couldn't find any software that was competant enough at time stretching whilst preserving pitch, they all introduced glitches into the audio so I decided I'd rather have undamaged but slightly faster audio than damaged but correct pitch audio.
The wav file I use for the PAL DVD is for 23.976fps footage and I use BeSweet to increase the playback speed for 25fps whilst encoding to AC3, there's zero problems with audio sync by using BeSweet to do the speedup, once you've synced the definitive wav audio to the PAL capture - took me about 3 hours, going through it almost scene by scene... I've now done a test disc of ANH with 2.0 audio, looks and sound great. I'll be doing a 5.1 upmix of the 2.0 audio soon, then work on menus/chapter points etc. (the annoying bit of making DVDs ), it'll have 2.0 and 5.1 on the disc. ***Citizen's NTSC DVD/PAL DVD/XviD Info and Feedback Thread***
It's cooled down a lot the past few days (raining right now) so I'm starting to be able to think straight and have gotten stuck back into my trilogy.
), it'll have 2.0 and 5.1 on the disc.