Hey gang,

I was running some tests of a MPEG-2 capture of Temple of Doom. I trying to pick a rez that DVD WorkShop won't spit back out at me. I chose D1 and another test on Half D1. Well, I am having the darnest time getting to my target file size (1.37Gb) and having it look good. How do you know what filters to use in MovieStacker on a VHS Interlaced MPEG-2 capture?

Any help would be hot.

__________________
'Indeed, you are powerful..."

Hi SodGawd,

As your VHS is a movie, not a home video, it's was probably shot FILM. If that is the case, you need to add Telecide() and Decimate() after your source line in your script. This way you can encode at 23.976fps and not at 29.97fps. As you're converting a VHS, I would use PixieDust() and C3D or NoMoSmooth.

-kwag

I'd also use CNR2 as it's definitely a must for any analog captures and especially VHS ones.

You can get it here:

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=44308

You can also try a comb filter like GuavaComb (you can find a link in Avisynth.orgt).

@Kwag -- Yes, Temple of Doom is a movie. (It is the 2nd Indiana Jones movie.) It is currently available only on VHS so I wanted to convert all 3 movies until I can get em on DVD.

@Boulder -- What is CNR2? I dl's none the less to try it out.

@GFR - If I use a comb filter, won't I lose some quality of the image (making it slightly blury)?

Thanks for the replies guys.

__________________
'Indeed, you are powerful..."

CNR2 is a Chroma Noise Reduction filter, that is, it gets rid of variations in chroma (colors information).

A Comb filter is good to get rid of specific kinds of noise like "rainbow"-like noise, it shouldn't make your image blury.

How would this compare to the "Flaxen VHS" filter

-kwag

Hmm, I dunno. I don't have much experience with VDub filters, but I'd suppose that FlaxenVHS is something like CNR2+GuavaComb? The problem with analog captures is that chroma noise can be really annoying. I've got one TV capture encoded as SVCD which suffers from horrible chroma noise in the black border area. If I re-encoded that with your templates and used CNR2, I'm sure the result would be better than the source

Flaxen VHS is like a 4 in 1 filter (you can use only the ones you want):

The 1st filter ids Chroma Temporal Smoothing + Luma Temporal Smoothing, Chroma and Luma have separate thresholds.

The 2nd filter is "Chroma Shifting" (what's that?).

The 3rd filter is Noise reduction (spatial smoothing) that can be pre, post or both pre and post temporal smoothing.

The 4th filter is a sharpener.

CNR2 is just the Chroma temporal smoothing.

I've done no direct comparison, but I've got the impression that CNR2 is faster than Flaxen set to just Chroma smoothing.

Anyway, with CNR2 plus GuavaComb plus any Dust plus TemporalCleaner or C3D and a KVCD template set with enough CQ your captures will look really nice.

If only Lindsey ported GuavaComb to AVS2.5.. I haven't tried that filter for a while. I recall it was quite difficult to get the correct parameters as Lindsey developed it mainly for NTSC material and I use PAL