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Need video/audio help for a fan-edit, please [SERENITY: EE]

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Well, I'm posting in this forum because I'd like some help on creating an edit. I've already read the guide by ADM, but as it's more directed towards NTSC DVDs, I am having a bit of a problem.

I've assembled a rough edit, something to the effect of a "Serenity: Extended Edition". My source is the R4 PAL Australian 2-Disc set. At the moment this is just a guide for the final version, because the sound changes are harsh, the aspect ratio changes and I've had to re-encode the sound due to having varying sources. Here are the specs for the 3 sources I'm merging to make this edit:

The movie on disc 1 in anamorphic 2.35:1 PAL with Dolby Digital 5.1 at 384kbps.
The deleted/extended scenes on disc 1 in letterboxed 4:3 PAL with Dolby Digital 2.0 at 192kbps.
The deleted/extended scenes on disc 2 in anamorphic 16:9 PAL with Dolby Digital 2.0 at 224kbps.

What I'd like is for someone to explain to me the settings I'd use to deinterlace (if this is even the right thing to do) the deleted/extended scenes. The disc 1 scenes are letterboxed, so I need to deinterlace, crop and resize (to make anamorphic). The disc 2 scenes seem to be in the same aspect ratio as the movie (don't know how to be sure though) and are already anamorphic, however they are also interlaced (I think). Here are 2 screenshots of what I believe to be interlacing evidence from the disc 1 and 2 scenes:

Disc 1 Scene
Disc 2 Scene

I need to remove that from these scenes so they fit into the movie more seamlessly, preferably without changing the playback speed. All of these files are currently on my hard drive as vobs, except the movie which is broken up into an AC3 file and 5 M2V files. Once the video from all 3 sources is anamorphic and at the right aspect ratio, I can then tackle the problem of sound.

Ideally I'd like to keep the 5.1 track, but I'm guessing these extra scenes won't 'upmix' to 5.1 very well, if at all. Would someone explain to me how that's done because I've read numerous articles on the net and had no success thus far. All the files that I get are either silence, or in 1 channel or another form of useless output.

Needless to say I'd appreciate any help on this, and would make this available once it's done, if it's not in violation of the board's new rules. Anyway, please help me out if you can with knowledge, rather than links to other articles, because I've tried several different methods. I think, ADigitalMan in particular may be able to help.

Thanks in advance to anyone/everyone who can guide me. Remember that this is PAL-based!

To contact me outside the forum, for trades and such my email address is my OT.com username @gmail.com

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I'm confused. PAL is not interlaced, it is progressive, so technically you should not be seeing these artifacts.

Are you seeing this in your video editor? What program are you using?

The only way I can imagine this happening is that you are trying to watch the PAL version under NTSC settings, which is causing 2-3 pulldown to run at 30fps.

<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>

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Originally posted by: MeBeJedi
I'm confused. PAL is not interlaced, it is progressive, so technically you should not be seeing these artifacts.

Are you seeing this in your video editor? What program are you using?

The only way I can imagine this happening is that you are trying to watch the PAL version under NTSC settings, which is causing 2-3 pulldown to run at 30fps.


These 'artifacts' are showing up in Virtualdub and Womble. I didn't think that PAL was interlaced, I don't understand why I'm seeing these things. If it's just a problem with these programs not playing the video properly, then I guess I should just skip to the next step. I need to get the scenes from the first disc cropped and resized right. Does anybody know the correct numbers to crop by for PAL? I need the first disc's scenes, to match the 2.35:1 anamorphic video of the movie.

MBJ, I will have another look at the version I have at the moment and see if I get those lines in DVD player software or on my standalone player.

To contact me outside the forum, for trades and such my email address is my OT.com username @gmail.com

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What do you have the framerate set to in VD and Womble? If it's at 23.97 or 29.97, then you are going to get artifacts like this.

<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>

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Just to throw an extra potential spanner in the works, some PAL releases are based on bad NTSC -> PAL bad conversions, which results in that sort of interlacing. Many of Tartan's asian DVDs releases in the UK are shoddy PAL conversions from an interlaced NTSC master, rather than being taken from a true PAL transfer. It means some of the original NTSC interlacing is retained, and can also result in some weird motion/speedup problems where the video appears to be dropping or doubling frames because of it.

Looks like the deleted scenes you're using could be suffering from the same thing.

If this is the case, I'm not sure how fixable it is. Best thing to do would be to post a sample of the video and let one of the technical wizards like MeBeJedi to take alook at it.
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It seems Womble is set to 29.97 and I don't know how to change it. In VirtualDub, which I must now correct myself - it's VirtualDubMod, I cannot work out what it's set to.

To contact me outside the forum, for trades and such my email address is my OT.com username @gmail.com

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first off, I agree that those clips look like a frame rate issue, you shouldn't get this with pal.

first demux all the scenes you want get everything you'll be using into m2v and ac3 files.

the deleted scenes on disc 2 should be the same ratio as the movie, but you can check by either running two scenes together in Vdub or womble and seeing if they look the same, or using a screen capture like you've done and counting how many pixels wide the bars are (simple but effective methods)

to make the letterbox scenes anamorphic open them in vdubmod use the resize filter and resize to 720x428 use the Lanczos3 filter mode, check the box to expand the frame and enter the original size 720x 576 fill color black, the filter line should read:
720x576 720x576 resize(Lanczos3, lbox 720x576 #000000)

the hit the cropping button and set it to crop 125 lines from the top and bottom (Y1 offset, Y2 offset), the line will now read:
720x326 720x576 resize(Lanczos3, lbox 720x576 #000000)

run the filter and save as an AVI and re-encode as anamorphic pal in TMPEGEnc or similar, then you have anamorphic picture and no white text in the bars.
some numbers might need tweaking because the letterbox is not quite central to the screen, but it depends on the main feature, if you post a screenshot from each source where the bars can be clearly made out I will check the maths for you.

Also you said you have the feature as 5 m2v files, this is bad, as when you put the together in womble you will lose frames at the end of each section, you'll have to re demux the video. if you used DVD decrypter go into tool, settings, hit the IFO mode tab and set file splitting to 'none', now when you demux it will result in one file with the whole movie.

all of this info applies to pal and should not effect the play-back speed. I have no idea how to set the frame rate on womble it just set itself on mine based on the first bit of video I loaded, which was PAL and therefore 25fps.

I was going to do this myself but I'd really rather help you and benefit from it with less effort, are the scenes on disc 2 up to much, could you briefly describe them?

Thanks.
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"it's VirtualDubMod, I cannot work out what it's set to."

Makes sense, since you are working with MPEGs.

Go under Video -> Framerate -> Change to _____ frames per second and try it with 25fps. Hopefully this will make a difference. If not, then the artifacts are probably hard-coded into the video (i.e. bad NTSC to PAL conversion in the mastering process).

"if you used DVD decrypter go into tool, settings, hit the IFO mode tab and set file splitting to 'none', now when you demux it will result in one file with the whole movie."

Make sure you are running windows 2000/XP with NTFS. Win 95/98 can't do file sizes over 2Gb.

<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>

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MeBeJedi:
It unfortunately looks like these artifacts are encoded into the video, ie. a bad NTSC->PAL transfer. I know because when I went to change the framerate of the video in VDubMod it was already 25fps. Similarly, with Womble I inserted one of the scenes and it changed to 25fps straight away. I wish that there was some resource that detailed which PAL DVDs were poor NTSC->PAL transfers. I rely on reviews from MichaelDVD, and information from DVDActive and of course, DVDCompare.

Oh, and MeBeJedi, as for my setup:
I'm using an AMD Athlon XP 2600+ (1.92Ghz) with 768MB of RAM, running Windows XP SP2 on a hard drive set to NTFS.

Max_Rebo:
Here are shots from each of the sources to compare the bar sizes:
Scene from the movie
Scene from Disc 1's Deleted Scenes
Scene from Disc 1's Deleted Scenes after being 'anamorphicised' like detailed
Scene from Disc 2's Deleted Scenes

If you could enlighten me Max_Rebo, how can you calculate the correct cropping/resizing numbers for the different aspect ratios? What I mean is, is there a table that tells you the different values you must use when you want to crop/resize letterboxed video to make it anamorphic. I think I've seen something like that before for NTSC format, but never for PAL. For example you said to resize to 720x428, then crop 125 from either side - where did you pull these values from?

I've also reripped the movie to my hard drive with 'no-splitting' enabled. I now have a "Stream Information" text file, a small IFO file, an M2V of the entire movie and an AC3 of the entire movie. Would it be better to re-rip the deleted scenes like this? Should I have them as separate scenes or rip them together as one long M2V & AC3?

Here is some brief info on the scenes from Disc 2 (this is mainly for Max_Rebo):
1. Extended Fanty & Mingo (2:15)
Fanty & Mingo have some more lines. There's a fun one "Me and Fanty is greedy. You could set your watch by our greed, it wavers never".
2. Extended Mal Inara Wave (2:16)
More of the conversation between Mal & Inara over the wave. One noticeable addition is Inara asking if Mal is wearing pants.
3. Extended Mal & Operative in Companion Training House (0:49)
The Operative has a tiny added bit of talk. He tells Mal how River is his 'purpose'. It helps the extended Coda from Disc 1 make more sense/fit better.
4. Mal & Inara Shuttle Improv. (0:50)
Mal talks to Inara on the shuttle flight back to Serenity about the Operative. This mainly shows Mal afraid that Inara will tell the others he was beaten up.

MeBeJedi & Max_Rebo:
I guess, the question now is, is there any way to 'fix' these deleted scenes? It appears that the artifacts are less prominent in the scenes from Disc 2. Would it be better to upconvert the NTSC versions of the disc 1 scenes if there isn't a reasonable way of getting rid of these artifacts?

To contact me outside the forum, for trades and such my email address is my OT.com username @gmail.com

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Originally posted by: klokwerk
MeBeJedi:
It unfortunately looks like these artifacts are encoded into the video, ie. a bad NTSC->PAL transfer. I know because when I went to change the framerate of the video in VDubMod it was already 25fps. Similarly, with Womble I inserted one of the scenes and it changed to 25fps straight away.



Dunno if you need this, but just in case you checked the framerate with properties, but are still wondering how to set it in Womble...
Right-click on Timeline-Window's ruler-looking thingy (it's right above the video track). Highlight "Frame Rate". I imagine that's for the output framerate.


It freakin' figures, if they screwed up those scenes...


For making 5.1 audio, I got results from a trick, at Doom9, that MeBeJedi recommended in an earlier thread, for using WinDvd decoder. WinDvd Dolby decoder trick If that fails (or has already failed) I can help you get it to work. They could've come up a better choice of Hex Decoders, and that text editor they recommended in its place doesn't tell you the hex position. A nice, simple, old Dos-window Hex Editor worked for me. An ancient, free, Dos version of HIEW. HIEW, and others


As for getting the soundtracks to blend well, I'd have to leave that to someone else, because I ain't there, yet. But judging from the miracles we've seen around here, it should be possible.

One day I found... 10 years had got behind me. Next day was worse.

 

Download  shows from Cable DVR (Updated! Yes, it needs a rewrite, but it's worth slogging through, anyway).

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Originally posted by: Jaiman Tuckuh


Dunno if you need this, but just in case you checked the framerate with properties, but are still wondering how to set it in Womble...
Right-click on Timeline-Window's ruler-looking thingy (it's right above the video track). Highlight "Frame Rate". I imagine that's for the output framerate.

For making 5.1 audio, I got results from a trick, at Doom9, that MeBeJedi recommended in an earlier thread, for using WinDvd decoder. WinDvd Dolby decoder trick If that fails (or has already failed) I can help you get it to work. They could've come up a better choice of Hex Decoders, and that text editor they recommended in its place doesn't tell you the hex position. A nice, simple, old Dos-window Hex Editor worked for me. (Haven't found a modern link for it yet - an ancient, free, Dos version of HIEW).

As for getting the soundtracks to blend well, I'd have to leave that to someone else, because I ain't there, yet. But judging from the miracles we've seen around here, it should be possible.


Well, thank you for the Womble setting change. If I understand correctly, now that I've changed that, PAL (25fps) should be the default setting. Thanks.

As for sound, that's the guide I was working from first. I don't want to go ahead and do sound stuff with these videos though if I'm going to have to resort to the NTSC DVD's scenes. It would be a waste of time. However, once the video probs are sorted out I will ask for assistance with the sound side of things. Thanks again.

To contact me outside the forum, for trades and such my email address is my OT.com username @gmail.com

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"I guess, the question now is, is there any way to 'fix' these deleted scenes? It appears that the artifacts are less prominent in the scenes from Disc 2. Would it be better to upconvert the NTSC versions of the disc 1 scenes if there isn't a reasonable way of getting rid of these artifacts?"

Well, I don't work with PAL, but I'm guessing no. The problem is that the fields have apparently been combined in the changeover from NTSC to PAL. It's kinda like working with layers in Photoshop - once you combine the layers and save the pic, you can't go back and separate the layers. They are now one picture. (I could be wrong, but this makes sense to me.)

You are either going to have to go to the original NTSC source and correctly IVTC it and convert to PAL, or just suffer with the current PAL version, problems and all. Sorry.

[EDIT] It just ocurred to me: the scanlines may be merged, but they don't overlap, so it probably is possibly to take those problem frames and remove even- or odd-numbered scanlines. That being said, doing so may create extra frames, changing your fps to something other than 25, creating even more problems. I guess you could remove, say, the odd-numbered lines and delete that field altogether, but you may end up with jerky motion. I don't know if it will be worth the effort or not.

<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>

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right klokwerk, you asked for it, here we go:

'Max_Rebo's guide to resizing lettebox to anamorphic pal', or 'where the values were pulled from'.

lets start by having a look at the sources:
The movie on disc 1 in anamorphic 2.35:1 PAL with Dolby Digital 5.1 at 384kbps.
The deleted/extended scenes on disc 1 in letterboxed 4:3 PAL with Dolby Digital 2.0 at 192kbps.
The deleted/extended scenes on disc 2 in anamorphic 16:9 PAL with Dolby Digital 2.0 at 224kbps.

so lets see, the easiest way is to count pixels as I suggested, for 16:9 anamorphic PAL I believe the standard is to have both black bars at 74-76 pixels e.g. from my current project:
http://freespace.virgin.net/ian.thefraggle/stairs.png
(I hope this also explains why my photoshop font is set the way it is)

so...
Serenity main feature:
http://freespace.virgin.net/ian.thefraggle/cdisc1_scene.png

not quite what I was expecting, is this truely representative of the whole film? i.e. past the openning credits, still it's a good example because the lack of symmetry makes it a challenge.

scene from disc 2
The disc 2 scenes seem to be in the same aspect ratio as the movie (don't know how to be sure though)

http://freespace.virgin.net/ian.thefraggle/cdisc2scene_bars.png
so saddly this is a bit out and will need fixing if there is any hope of it fitting into the main feature else the bars will jump when these scenes begin and end.

so here is how we get the numbers, I hope you like maths!

first the virtical resolution of pal is 576, so deduct what is used by the bars in the main film (our reference)
576-74-66 = 436

do the same for the disc 2 scene: 576-80-75 = 421

so we need to stretch 421 to become 436, the ratio of these values is 436/421 = 1.036

we need to know how many pixels will, when stretched by this amount, make up the full resolution of pal so devide 576 by the ratio: 576/1.036 = 556

so the amount of pixels that need to be cropped before resizing is 576-556 = 20.
now if we were dealing with symmetric bar it's easy crop 10 off the top 10 off the bottom and resize to 576, but they're not symmetrc so it's not that easy!

now the fun begins, the ratio of the bars in the main film is 74/66 = 1.12121212
so we need the same ratio in our stretched frame, so we set up some simmultaneous equations

80-x = 1.12121212
75-y

where x is the pixel to be cropped from the top and y is the pixels to be cropped from the bottom so we know x+y = 20 the total number that need cropping.

to solve this substitute y=20-x into the first equation giving:

80-x =1.12121212
75-20+x

multiply across to give:

80-x = 1.1212(75-20+x) then rearrange:
80-x = 1.12(55) +1.12*x
80 = 1.12(55) +2.12*x
80-1.12(55) = 2.12*x

solving this for x gives x = 8.64 and since y=20-x y=11.36,

so rounding the numbers we now know we have to crop 9 pixels from the top, and 11 from the bottom, so using vdubmod resize to the same size then set these crop values so the filter line reads:
720x556 720x576 resize(lanczos3)

and the result will be:
http://freespace.virgin.net/ian.thefraggle/fdisc2scene_bars.png
save this as an avi and then encode as anaorphic pal this scene should now fit nicely into the main film without any change in aspect ratio.

part 2, 'letterbox to anamorphic' comming soon.
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Part 2:

now lets look at the letterbox deleted scene:

http://freespace.virgin.net/ian.thefraggle/cdisc1scene_bars.png

you can now see where I pulled 125 from in the previous method, and it worked fairly well:
http://freespace.virgin.net/ian.thefraggle/cdisc1scene_anamorphic.jpg

if we had been aiming for symmetric bars we would nearly of hit it first time, but we are not and we did not, so we employ the same method as before.
so 576 minus the bars gives:
576-125-127 = 324

the ratio of this to the main film is 436/324 = 1.346

so to get a full frame we need to start with 576/1.346 = 428 pixels. (this number was also in the previous method)

576-428 = 148, this is the amount of pixels that need to be cropped before resizing to 720x576

use the same simultaneous equations:
127-x =1.12121212
125-y

but this time x+y = 148 so y = 148-x

solving in the same way gets us to:
127 +1.12(23) = 2.12*x

which gives x=72 so y=76.

use this in the same way, resizing to 720x576 but cropping 72 from the top and 76 from the bottom to give:
http://freespace.virgin.net/ian.thefraggle/ndisc1scene_bars.png
so we're almost there but there is atill some annoying white text at the bottom (this didn't happen in our previous attempt because I had assumed the bars were symmetric which allow you to do things a bit quicker.
the filter line should read: 720x428 720x576 resize(lanczos3)

now save this as an AVI and the reload it into vdubmod we now need to get rid of that text (i don't think there is an eay way to do it all in one step when it's not symmetric)

all you need to do is resize to 720x536 (40 pixels less) but expand the frame to 720 x576, then crop 20 from top and bottom which is more than enough to cover the text, and because the changes are symmentric it wont effect the aspect ratio. the filter will read: 720x536 720x576 resize(nearest neighbor, lbox 720x576 #000000)
you should now have this:
http://freespace.virgin.net/ian.thefraggle/fdisc1scene_bars.png
save as avi, encode as anamorphic pal and this should look great.

of course it would be worth checking that all the deleted/extended scenes are framed in exactly the same way before using these number on all of them, I might write simple program to work these out for future projects.

Thats the guide finnished.


now I've been thinking about these lines, and I seem to recall getting a similar problem once but at the moment I can't remember what caused it, either way I'm sure there is a way around it, I assume the line appear when you play this in powerDVD (or similar) and in a set-top player?
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Max_Rebo:
Thank you so much for that guide. I've saved it to my computer for future reference. However, having just started university life I have immediately found myself with far less time to spend on my pet projects. I'm afraid with the transfer problems inherent in the deleted/extended scenes from disc 1 and 2 of the Australian PAL DVD... I'm going to have to can this project.

To contact me outside the forum, for trades and such my email address is my OT.com username @gmail.com