Harmy's STAR WARS TRILOGY "Partly Despecialized Edition" HD. !!! These version are now obsolete - Look for Despecialized Editions instead!!! — Page 6

Sorry, I'm just a bit frustrated with the situation. And oops, I miss-spelled dumb in "I'm not dumb," so I guess I must be ;-)  :-D

Anyway, every cloud has a silver lining, so I used the opportunity to fix some details I had missed before. I outputed again using the exact same settings (a saved profile) and the file is progressive. Unfortunately, knowing that I'm gonna be reencoding I deleted the original file so there's no way to be 110% sure now. I'm encoding with multiAVCHD now and crossing my fingers for a progressive result :-)

Did you check the properties in MultiAVCHD first before you started the encode?

Yeah, I did :-)

I just noticed you mentioned it took 2 days to encode the video? What specs are your machine because this does seem a very long time if you are using turbo. A 2 hour movie would usually only take me between 1 1/2 to 2 1/2 hours to encode depending on what setting i'm using

Yeah, my computer is a bit on the slow side :-) But it only took two days including the output from PD and and then I encoded once and found out that I set the bitrate unnecessarily low so I decided to encode again. But it does take about 6-8 hrs to encode with one pass turbo. I have Intel Core 2 Duo 2.2 GHz, 2.5 GB RAM, ATI Radeon HD 3470 HyperMemory 256 MB (and up to 1024 with the use of spare RAM memory). Maybe I could somehow get the hardware acceleration to work with encoding but I can't figure it out.

It did it again!!! In the properties in multiAVCHD it definitely says

Video: V_Mpeg2

Resolution: 1920x1080p

and it says Scan type: progressive in MediaInfo in Media Player Classic and then the encoded m2ts file is still 1080i and in MediaInfo in MPC it says Scan type: MBAFF. Now tell me what I'm doing wrong, because I'm getting desperate, I did it exactly the same way with Jedi and it worked OK.

Oh, and the flicker is only there in MPC, it seems it has some trouble playing the interlaced video and it just plays at double framerate and doubles all the odd lines in one frame and all the even lines in the next, thus causing the lines to jump up and down which is most noticable at the edges of the black borders.

Crap!!! I knew it was a stupid idea to delete the file but I'm kind of strugling with disc space now with all the different high bitrate HD files so I had to delete it in order to try encoding again. There's one thing I thought might be a problem. Because Power Director (and yes, I agree it's not very good in terms of video encoding but I payed good money for it and I don't really wanna switch to a different program) only outputs NTSC at 29.97 fps I remuxed the Ady's original AVCHD to 25 fps in TS Muxer, which had the advantage of working with a PAL version in PD and being able to work with my PAL GOUT as it was. Then I ouputed a 37000 Kbps 1080p 25fps Mpeg2 which I reencoded with multi AVCHD still at 25fps and then changed the framerate to 23.976 while making an AVCHD in TS muxer with all the soundtracks. But I did it the exact same way with Jedi and it worked. Anyway, I'm gonna try changing the framerate of the Mpeg file in TS Muxer first and then reencoding with Multi AVCHD at 23.976fps.

OK, I changed the framerate of the Mpeg file in TS Muxer first and then started reencoding with Multi AVCHD at 23.976fps and I put the temporary *****.264 file from the multi AVCHD TEMP folder into TS Muxer right after and it recognised the track as 1920:1080p, so hopefully it will work now :-) I'm not completely convinced that that was the problem, because there was no such problem with Jedi but I'll just be happy if it works.

Yeah, it doesn't export uncompressed AVI in HD, mpeg2 is the only way to output 1080p, also as I mentioned before, I'm already having problems with HDD space as it is, I'm guessing an uncompressed 1080p AVI would be like 300-500GB (just a guess) instead of a 25GB mpeg2, so I couldn't use it even if Power Director could. And I really like working with PD, it is very user friendly, I tried Sony Vegas and I hated it. You'll laugh, but I even really liked Windows Movie Maker, it doesn't have all the functions I need and is REALLY crap for exporting, but the system of how it works with imported clips is just great IMO.

BTW. did you get a chance to watch Jedi yet?

Damn!!! This time it encoded progressive but for some reason when muxed together with the sounds (which for the record are adjusted to 23.976fps) it's out of sync and what's worse it made artifacts like this all over the place:

I think I'll try making the m2ts in RipBot and then creating the AVCHD in TS muxer.

You could use the lagarith codec to produce a lossless avi and the file size would be about 200gb, but if powerdirector won't let you export HD avi then i guess that rules that out.

I would suggest that you can now probably rule out MultiAVCHD as the cause of your problems as this is a completely different problem. Your problem is lying with powerdirector. It's somehow screwing up its encoding. Just because you paid for it don't stay with a piece of software that is causing so many problems. Especially if it will only output NTSC @ 29.97fps. That software is so limited. Even at such a high bitrate powerdirectors mpeg encoding is very soft and not very good. If you are going to work with HD files then you really do need a lot more space.

I'm surprised at just how many people say they hate Vegas, but when they bother to learn how it works they realise just how good it is and the power that this piece of software has. And the output results are far superior than software like powerdirector.

Have you checked the encoded video in a different player to see if the artefacts are still there?

Thanks, I think I will actually give Vegas another shot but not until ESB v2.0 because I'm not redoing SW yet again (unless I just couldn't get the encoding to work, I'm trying multiAVCHD v3.0 now as that's what I used for Jedi. Is there some good tutorial for Vegas that you could recommend Ady (a video tutorial would be best)?

Oh, and the artifacts were there in VLC as well. And I'm hopping to get a new external hard-drive soon, but I just plain can't afford it just now...

Frameserve?

Yeah, that's what I thought. I don't know, I seriously doubt it would be possible but I could try.

I just instaled Vegas Pro 9.0 and it doesn't recognise m2ts files as video... :-(

I finished encoding with multiAVCHD v3.0 and it worked like a charm (I'm not 100% sure there are no artifacts like before but I skimmed through the film and didn't see any). It even went faster than v4.1, it only took just under 5hrs. I think I'm gonna watch it tonight to see if there are any problems and if there aren't I'll start uploading. I'm adding one more sound - the descriptive audio commentary for blind. And I also added English subtitles.