logo Sign In

.: Citizen's NTSC DVD / PAL DVD / XviD project :. (Released) — Page 2

Author
Time
Post link
Just noticed there's a sort of blue matte around the logo on the French version. (This appears on my copy, too.)

Guidelines for post content and general behaviour: read announcement here

Max. allowable image sizes in signatures: reminder here

Author
Time
Post link
pupil, I know DV has high chroma compression but I am finding that it doesn't appear to be much of a problem. Usually when I'm capturing NTSC laserdiscs I've had to use VirtualDub's internal chromasmoother filter because of the blocky reds etc. but because I'm capturing the PAL set it doesn't seem to suffer as much, I've noticed that the colours on my NTSC definitive LDs are often slightly over-saturated compared to my German THX LDs. Here's a couple of R2 pics in anamorphic PAL:

http://www.haku.co.uk/pics/StarWarsLDtest8.jpg
http://www.haku.co.uk/pics/StarWarsLDtest9.jpg
http://www.haku.co.uk/pics/LukeCruise.gif http://www.haku.co.uk/pics/dontcare.gif
***Citizen's NTSC DVD/PAL DVD/XviD Info and Feedback Thread***
Author
Time
Post link
Excellent citizen, thanks for easing my mind, those pics are completely block free! Any idea why it makes such a difference between NTSC and PAL laserdisc material? I've captured PAL VHS tapes before using the Canopus ADVC-100 and ended up with horrible chroma sampling blockiness, I'm a bit confused.

Your set is looking like an incredible capture so far, keep up the good work.

www.bardothodol.net

Author
Time
Post link
Thanks for the compliement, I've spent over £200 on Star Wars laserdisc sets alone and am not intending to waste a single penny of it

I don't know why there's a difference between NTSC & PAL captures (how the DV is compressed? I never really looked into it that deeply), one thing I do know for sure is that the DV codec you use to decode the captured footage makes a helluva lot of difference on what quality you get out of your captures, Panasonic DV codec & especially the MainConcept DV codec add fake sharpness to their outputs, the Sony one ain't too hot either on retaining colours, the best one of the lot is Canopus' own one but there's a bug in the luma, reading a DV file directly into VirtualDub gives an incorrect contrast, blacks aren't true black and whites aren't true white.
There's a way round this by using AviSynth and using avisource() or directshowsource() to read the DV and then load the .avs into VirtualDub, however I'm using the luma 'bug' to my advantage by reading the DV files directly in and then altering the brightness/contrast afterwards so that way the black level isn't crushed as it seems to be with reading the DV through AviSynth.

How you read in the DV avi into VirtualDub also affects chroma blockiness, for example a still from a NTSC laserdisc:


Directly read into VirtualDub using the Canopus DV codec:
http://www.haku.co.uk/pics/WarningDV2.gif


Again using the Canopus DV codec, AviSynth script reading the file with DirectShowSource() and then VirtualDub reading that in:
http://www.haku.co.uk/pics/WarningDV3.gif


Again using the Canopus DV codec, AviSynth script reading the file with DirectShowSource(), VirtualDub reading that in, using internal chroma smoother filter on NTSC DV setting, then shifting the chroma 2 pixels to the left with another filter:
http://www.haku.co.uk/pics/WarningDV4.gif



Oh and lastly, directly read into VirtualDub using the Panasonic DV codec:
http://www.haku.co.uk/pics/WarningDV1.gif
http://www.haku.co.uk/pics/LukeCruise.gif http://www.haku.co.uk/pics/dontcare.gif
***Citizen's NTSC DVD/PAL DVD/XviD Info and Feedback Thread***
Author
Time
Post link
Originally posted by: Citizen
...I've spent over £200 on Star Wars laserdisc sets alone...


Amateur!

Seriously, I don't know exactly what I've spent -- and I don't want to know, so I don't have a figure to give my wife -- but it's a lot. You're doing the right thing by getting lots of discs. I edited between French and German discs sometime last year, and can confirm it's possible to put together a version with no missing frames at any transitions.

Still working on getting a better PAL LD player, though. I've got a 925 and access to a 2950, but I want something better...

Author
Time
Post link
Big difference between both PAL DV and NTSC DV and PAL laserdisc and NTSC laserdisc when it comes to colour handling.

PAL DV is 4:2:0 whereas NTSC DV is 4:1:1, unless you use DVCPRO which uses 4:1:1 for both. D1 (or digital Betacam used in most TV studios etc.) uses 4:2:2 whereas the ATSC MPEG-2 standard for digital TV and HDTV uses 4:2:0.

So what does this mean? It means that NTSC DV and PAL DV handles colour (i.e. Chroma plus Luma) differently.
NTSC DV samples Chroma only once for every 4 luma samples. i.e. the horizontal chroma resolution is one quarter of the luma resolution.
The PAL system delivers a better colour result especially since it is coupled with the increase in resolution. It theory both NTSC and PAL DV end up with the same chroma bandwidth, but the different methodology gives a noticably different result.
Author
Time
Post link
Re the stars on the NTSC/X0 version, we have been working on algorithms to process the stars in a better way, so no it doesn't suffer from missing stars like othe NTSC projects have, but it isn't anywhere near as easy to get them to appear as is is with the PAL version of the laserdiscs.
If we applied the same routines to a PAL capture they would probably massively increas it's starfields as well.

I think I spent around 200 quid on postage and customs duties alone last year, you are right Citizen and Karyudo, it is an expensive hobby - especially if you live in the Southern Hemisphere - We need some connecting tunnels to the countries where the laserdiscs are....
Author
Time
Post link
Originally posted by: Citizen
I don't know why there's a difference between NTSC & PAL captures (how the DV is compressed? I never really looked into it that deeply.)


PAL DV is 4:2:0 and NTSC DV is 4:1:1. DVD is 4:2:0 in both systems (at least I'm very sure it is).

You can read up on chroma subsampling differences here: http://www.mir.com/DMG/chroma.html

Edit: Damn you, Laserman! Don't you ever go to sleep and let any of the rest of us get to a technical answer first?!? As usual, you've covered more than what just about any other human alive could rattle off on the fly...
Author
Time
Post link
Imagine being married to me!

(You can send flowers and sympathy cards to my wife via the x0project website)
Author
Time
Post link
Great link Karyudo, covers the vertical/horizontal issue as well, which I was not really clear on.
Another note, you never want to convert between DV PAL and DV NTSC without doing your homework, the standard method leaves you with 4:1:0 blecccch!

Edit:This might be why some DV projects in the US look awful by the time they make it onto a DVD - I'd never really thought about that aspect before, at least with PAL you would be staying in the 4:2:0 arena.
Author
Time
Post link
Originally posted by: Karyudo
Originally posted by: Citizen
...I've spent over £200 on Star Wars laserdisc sets alone...
Amateur!

Seriously, I don't know exactly what I've spent -- and I don't want to know, so I don't have a figure to give my wife -- but it's a lot.
...
Just to redress the balance - I wouldn't want the idea that you need to spend a lot of cash putting people off starting their own projects - I spent in total less that £150. That's for player, discs and capture card.

I'll probably re-sell the player - but if I do, it'd only be to buy a 2950!

Guidelines for post content and general behaviour: read announcement here

Max. allowable image sizes in signatures: reminder here

Author
Time
Post link
Thanks for the explanations and link about the chroma subsampling in DV, I couldn't fully get my head round the difference between 4:2:0 and 4:1:1 etc. though.

£210 for the 3 different SW LD sets is a lot for me as I don't have any real income, my CLD-D515 LD player cost £80 and the Canopus ADVC-100 was bought new at £275 a few years ago but now they're going pretty cheap on eBay. But anyway this is fun


I tried doing a comparison between a single capture and a 5x merged capture, one half of the screen single cap the other 5x cap, visually I couldn't see any difference until I threw in a couple of sharpen filters at maximum and the single cap footage came out worse. When compressed with huffy, the 5x merged capture footage is almost 10% smaller than a single capture which also tells me the grain/inteference is being reduced throug multiple capturing, even if I can't see it
http://www.haku.co.uk/pics/LukeCruise.gif http://www.haku.co.uk/pics/dontcare.gif
***Citizen's NTSC DVD/PAL DVD/XviD Info and Feedback Thread***
Author
Time
Post link
My French THX LD's arrived today! http://www.haku.co.uk/b3ta/ThisIsNotAnAvatarSoFuckOffHotlinkers.gif



I got the whole of ANH captured from my German set so now I can go and replace the German text with the English from the French LDs. I won't be going through the film scene-by-scene to see what colour/contrast levels need altering but will be using a single setting over the whole film and then watching it to see if there are any scenes that stand out too much and then fix those (I know there are a few).
http://www.haku.co.uk/pics/LukeCruise.gif http://www.haku.co.uk/pics/dontcare.gif
***Citizen's NTSC DVD/PAL DVD/XviD Info and Feedback Thread***
Author
Time
Post link
[OT] Citizen, I love your animated gifs. [/OT]

Guidelines for post content and general behaviour: read announcement here

Max. allowable image sizes in signatures: reminder here

Author
Time
Post link
Originally posted by: Karyudo
Still working on getting a better PAL LD player, though. I've got a 925 and access to a 2950, but I want something better...
What could be better than a 2950? As you probably know, Laserman is working on the same thing (see my post earlier today in the X0 project thread). Why don't you guys collaborate?

Guidelines for post content and general behaviour: read announcement here

Max. allowable image sizes in signatures: reminder here

Author
Time
Post link
Hehe...

Well I was wondering who the mysterious "4th member" was...

Guidelines for post content and general behaviour: read announcement here

Max. allowable image sizes in signatures: reminder here

Author
Time
Post link
Weird thing, I posted in the 2.35:1 black bars thread about how when viewing some of my 2.35:1 DVDs on a 4:3 screen there are grey bars, well my latest test there wasn't any grey bars it was all black, which is cool! I think I know why, what I was testing on was encoded to mpeg2 from DV, this time I'm encoding from mpeg2 from huffy...

As I'll be doing 3 flavours of the trilogy from my captured source, XviD, PAL and now NTSC I tried an anamorphic NTSC clip and it's looking very good (apart from the horrible 3:2 pulldown needed to view on an NTSC screen):

http://www.haku.co.uk/pics/StarWarsLDtest10.jpg


edit: playing back cleaned up clips I've been noticing something's not quite right, the aspect ratio wasn't spot on, doing some measuring of pixels on the captured source it turns out I'm working with 2.293:1 footage not 2.35:1, just needed to increase the PAL anamorphic image by 10 pixels (NTSC by 8 pixels) and it now looks right
http://www.haku.co.uk/pics/LukeCruise.gif http://www.haku.co.uk/pics/dontcare.gif
***Citizen's NTSC DVD/PAL DVD/XviD Info and Feedback Thread***
Author
Time
Post link
After 34 hours of processing I finally have my first full film in 1024x446 res XviD format, looks amazing but has a couple of drawbacks; the file is 4.5gb so won't fit on a DVD-R and there's no audio... going to borrow the audio from Dr_Gonzo's ANH so I can watch the film with audio and then set the computer to re-code the video at a size that will fit on a DVD-R (another 34 hours processing...)
http://www.haku.co.uk/pics/LukeCruise.gif http://www.haku.co.uk/pics/dontcare.gif
***Citizen's NTSC DVD/PAL DVD/XviD Info and Feedback Thread***
Author
Time
Post link
Two comments/suggestions:

1. Dr. Gonzo is from NTSC, which is maybe a dozen or so frames longer than the video you've got, so you may have audio sync problems.

2. Instead of 34 hours, why not give DVDShrink a shot at it? It'd be quite a bit faster. As for quality? Since you'd only be dropping from 4.5GB to maybe 4.2, I'm guessing it'd be pretty good. Of course, when you reply and say it's better to re-render from the source, you're right. And it's your project. I'd do the same, actually.
Author
Time
Post link
P.S. Shouldn't the text be in Aurebesh? Or is it like machines here that ask if you want to use English, French or Chinese?
Author
Time
Post link
1. Keeping audio sync is not a problem, just a little time consuming as I have to load up two VirtualDub's, one with the source audio+video and the other with the destination video, then check every few thousand frames that the frames of the two VirtualDub's are aligned and add/remove frames from the source as necessary then save the wav which will then fit perfectly to the destination video.
A process I've done before for putting audio from VHS to the video of a DVD (the '89 film The Wizard) and the CGI cartoon ReBoot (I have 9 high quality Russian DVDs that are dubbed in Russian so synched the video to the VHS audio I have)

2. DVDShrink can't deal with XviD avis, I knew the first encode wouldn't be on-the-mark as I had to give a rough guess at what quality setting to encode it to, the next encode should be very close to the mark but I can't decide what audio to put with the XviD (AC3,PCM or the standard mp3)

I did a 30 min PAL DVD test and it's looking amazing, you start noticing more of the details in the film such as Darth's helmet isn't very shiny when you first see him but I can't do a full DVD yet until I free up more space or get a bigger harddrive, I could do with replacing the two 120gb's with 250gb's.


Aurebesh? I never was any good at languages, oh er I mean I translated it for us lesser mortals who only speak one language
http://www.haku.co.uk/pics/LukeCruise.gif http://www.haku.co.uk/pics/dontcare.gif
***Citizen's NTSC DVD/PAL DVD/XviD Info and Feedback Thread***
Author
Time
Post link
"Well I was wondering who the mysterious "4th member" was..."

With all due respect, we are collaborating with a LOT of different people.

It's like the Sith - many people are made to serve them, but there are still only 2 Sith.

<span class=“Italics”>MeBeJedi: Sadly, I believe the prequels are beyond repair.
<span class=“Bold”>JediRandy: They’re certainly beyond any repair you’re capable of making.</span></span>

<span class=“Italics”>MeBeJedi: You aren’t one of us.
<span class=“Bold”>Go-Mer-Tonic: I can’t say I find that very disappointing.</span></span>

<span class=“Italics”>JediRandy: I won’t suck as much as a fan edit.</span>

Author
Time
Post link
Originally posted by: Citizen
1. Keeping audio sync is not a problem, [... a] process I've done before [...]
Oh, good. The way you wrote it sounded like you might be ready to just slap Dr. G's audio in there and be done. Glad to hear you're aware of the sync issues. Carry on...

2. DVDShrink can't deal with XviD avis

Oh, yeah. You're the one guy not working on a DVD! My apologies -- of course DVDShrink can't help you. In the grand scheme of things, 34 hours isn't that long, anyway.

Aurebesh? I never was any good at languages, oh er I mean I translated it for us lesser mortals who only speak one language

In 20 years, you can go back and fix it in the Avatar Special Edition...

Author
Time
Post link
Only using Dr_Gonzo's audio for testing because I haven't captured the audio off my own definitive LDs yet, got to drag the player round to my friends place to capture it at 96khz on his decent PC audio kit.

The DVD thing, well the XviD version is just 1/3 of the set, I'm going to be doing PAL and NTSC DVDs too I thought that I've spent so much time & money on this project so far I might as well go the whole hog and produce a trilogy of formats of the trilogy (pun intended) because I know there are some people who would prefer the NTSC version despite living in PAL land because of the 4% audio pitch difference.

Edited Special Edition avatar?! *does an impression of Donald Sutherland hissing at the end of Invasion of the Bodysnatchers*
http://www.haku.co.uk/pics/LukeCruise.gif http://www.haku.co.uk/pics/dontcare.gif
***Citizen's NTSC DVD/PAL DVD/XviD Info and Feedback Thread***