Personally, I would probably try not to use
both STMedianFilter
AND SpaceDust because, at least to me, it just smoothes the picture a bit too much using both of them (making it blurry). Also, Kwag recently dropped STMedianFilter from his recommended Optimal Script because some people were saying they thought it decreased the visual quality too much. In my opinion however, I think it should be left there and used by people only when necessary (on longer movies or when you need to raise your CQ level a bit more). Using ANY kind of filters usually diminishes the quality to
some degree...but it's the price you hafta pay sometimes to fit a long movie onto one disc.
Again, this is only
my opinion, but to me the
best usage of kwag's optimal script (for clean dvd sources) would be something like this (keep in mind that with the unfilter over-sharpening and subsequent mergeluma/chroma blurring methods used by kwag's current script, you can get away with using a pretty low CQ level, possibly in the range of mid-to-high-50's in
my experience, and it should still look pretty good on standard TVs, because the noise looks more natural than it used to in his older recommended scripts that used lots of filtering):
Code:
mpeg2source("C:\movie.d2v")
LegalClip()
GripCrop(width=544, height=480, overscan=2) #use x3 if/when possible
GripSize(resizer="BicubicResize")
#STMedianFilter(10, 50, 0, 0, 10, 50) #1st choice for more compression
#SpaceDust() #Optional on "unclean" DVDs. try not to use w/ STMedian
unfilter(50,50)
temporalsmoother(1,2)
mergechroma(blur(1.58))
mergeluma(blur(0.3)) #use lower values for a less blurry image
# Convolution3d or DCTFilter for extreme worse cases.
GripBorders()
LegalClip()
#sampler()
Using the above script as is, trying to use as few extra filters as possible, looks the best
to me (but this is usually only possible with short movies). If I'm encoding a longer movie and need more compression so I can hit my target CQ level during filesize prediction, then the first filter
I would turn to (other people's opinion may differ) is STMedianFilter. I think the picture looks
slightly better with STMedianFilter than it does using a similar smoother like SpaceDust to gain compression (like I said, I try to only use 1 or the other of those 2 filters because using both just doesn't look as pleasing to me...too much smoothing...but if I'm really desperate, I'll use both).
Anyways, hope you find something useful in all of that. You can always give it a try and see if you agree or not
. Let us all know how everything works out for ya now that you're using prediction and have figured out your avisynth woes and are well on your way!
-d&c
p.s. if your friend's dvd player will handle the x3 template resolution, you should try to use that one..it will look much better than 352x576. It will give you the best compromise between picture quality and the amount of minutes you can fit onto one disc.
