Question about Video Soap in ATI MMC
 

Finally got a chance to experiment with capturing on XP machine I Built with with 9600XT Card and MMC ver. 8.8 (or so)!!!..with recording preset to MPEG 2 (Following DFAQ Guide),..I was wondering what Video Soap "Combo filter" 1 and/or 2 actually do? (The Sharpen,Soften and De-speckle are obvious). Also I found out that the Video soap Preview Window size IS FULLY ADJUSTABLE all the way up to full-screen,during MPEG capture,but I don't think it's adjustable during AVI capture?

The "heavy" filters are a mix of interframe (temporal) NR and intraframe (in-frame) NR.

The side effects are the same as any other intraframe or interframe NR:

• Intraframe artifacts = softening of details, or "plastic look" as gradient tones (including skin) are posterized
• Interframe artifacts = motion blur, aka "mouse trails"

... understanding that artifacts only become an issue when the filtering is turned up too much. :thumb:

All Things in Moderation!!,.. So what (In layman's terms) is Combo filter 1 and 2 a combination of? and what would I need to use them for?...is there any explanation on this site, or in the MMC help files???

It's not something that suggested by members here. And ATI dropped support for it later on. Outside of the "despeckle" (aka "salt and pepper") filter, which is just in-frame NR, the filters are more likely to cause dropped frames than to achieve any degree of significant improvement. The filters also tend to blur, in addition to straight NR, hence the unpopularity.

Better NR is achieved in Avisynth and/or VirtualDub. Even TMPGEnc Plus 2.5 was better!

These are a combination of: in-frame blurring, in-frame NR, and temporal NR. That's it.

The usefulness of the filters faded over time, as other post-processing (post-capture) NR methods improved. When VideoSoap filters came out, it was really quite amazing to have live during-capture filtering, and results were similar to then-current post-processing NR filters.

ATI MMC VideoSoap is still useful, but again, mostly just for the 18% despeckle on DVD-ready MPEG-2 captures.