Help with cleaning up footage

[Jade Aislin]

I am very new to this and I’ve got a few questions. I’m trying to clean up some Gundam Wing footage I ripped from my DVDs. I have each episode as its own m2v file.

First, I used Force FILM in DGIndex twice. Do I need to de-interlace?

Second, I’ve poured over the guides on cleaning the footage and have been playing with the different filters. But now I am very confused and half the time I looked at the examples I either couldn’t see what they were trying to show or couldn’t see a difference with the filter. How many smoothers should I use? How many sharpeners? Which ones?

I want to make clips from the footage, but I need to be able to compress it as much as possible. What’s the best combination?

Here are some pics with my current script:

Code: Select all

mpeg2source("D:\DVD clips\GW ep 1.d2v",cpu=6)
Crop(8,0,-8,-0)
LanczosResize(640,480) 
ConvertToRGB32()

Also there were a few times that there was a strange white/black line in the frame. It only lasted for one frame, but I caught at least three different instances.

Here's one, under Heero's eye:



and across the man's face:



I’ve also noticed some random black/white spots appearing in different frames. It’s there for one frame and then gone much like those lines.

Is there a way to get rid of them?

Lastly, do I need to look at each m2v file separately or can I assume what worked for the first episode will work with the rest?

Any help would be appreciated.

- Jade Aislin

[Scintilla]

First, I used Force FILM in DGIndex twice. Do I need to de-interlace?

Twice? How does that work? But if it was Force FILM-able, then you shouldn't need to deinterlace. If you don't see any combing, then you definitely don't need to deinterlace.

Second, I’ve pored over the guides on cleaning the footage and have been playing with the different filters. But now I am very confused and half the time I looked at the examples I either couldn’t see what they were trying to show or couldn’t see a difference with the filter. How many smoothers should I use? How many sharpeners? Which ones?

Simple answer: never use more than you need. And "which ones" depends on what problems you're trying to solve or what you want your footage to look like.

For example, if you've got problems with macroblocking, then you probably want to use something like BlindPP or SmoothD; if you've got film grain, you probably want to use something with "degrain" in the name; and so on. Once you manage to solve the obvious, highly visible problems, any further smoothing would be only for improving the compressibility, which is a matter of taste (how big of a file are you willing to have when you're done?).

Sharpening is a very subjective topic, and people have different opinions on how much (if any) and what kind look best. You really just have to experiment until you find what looks best to your eyes -- and keep in mind that most sharpeners will hurt your compressibility.

You may find it helpful to look over my postprocessing filters guide, which goes into greater detail on each of a number of common filters and provides comparison screenshots for most of them.

I want to make clips from the footage, but I need to be able to compress it as much as possible. What’s the best combination?

Wait, you're still making clips? Then you should not be worried about compressibility at this point in the game. Zarxrax warns "Don't overdo it when preprocessing", and I'd have to agree. What you currently have -- IN YOUR MOUTH -- is ART with just the crop and resize should be fine. Worry about making it look pretty when you're done editing your AMV and you're ready to encode.

THE BIG EXCEPTION TO WHAT I JUST SAID: rainbowing and dot crawl, which should usually be taken care of before you IVTC. It looks like you might have some rainbowing in your source (esp. that last pic), though I can't tell for sure from just these individual screenshots.
If you do have rainbows, then you should try putting a derainbower right after your MPEG2Source call (though you used Force FILM anyway, so it might not even work, but it's worth a shot).

Also there were a few times that there was a strange white/black line in the frame. It only lasted for one frame, but I caught at least three different instances.

Here's one, under Heero's eye:

Quoted Image converted to link:
http://i374.photobucket.com/albums/oo18 ... n/8809.png

and across the man's face:

Quoted Image converted to link:
http://i374.photobucket.com/albums/oo18 ... n/4894.png

Those just look like random dust/dirt on the film to me. It happens with these older sources. There are some plugins like DeSpot that are supposed to be meant specifically for such a purpose, but (in my limited experience) I've had better luck with motion-compensated denoisers. That might be overkill, though, especially if you don't even use the affected frames.
So, this is another case where you're probably better off just worrying about it when you're ready to encode at the end (if any such frames still make it into the AMV).

I’ve also noticed some random black/white spots appearing in different frames. It’s there for one frame and then gone much like those lines.

Is there a way to get rid of them?

See above.

Lastly, do I need to look at each m2v file separately or can I assume what worked for the first episode will work with the rest?

Generally, you can use the same settings for each episode.

[Jade Aislin]

Twice? How does that work?

I ran the footage through once and clipped off the beginning and ending as I was never going to use them. Then ran it again, so I could get rid of the original vob files.

You may find it helpful to look over my postprocessing filters guide

I have looked at your guide and I will look again. Although, I couldn't seem to find any of the dust filters and when I tried to use the fastlinedarken I got an error message saying "there is no function named "expand" (fastlinedarken.avsi, line 49)".

Wait, you're still making clips? Then you should not be worried about compressibility at this point in the game.

Ideally, I want clips because I'm editing in WMM and I didn't want to lose any frames, but as it stands now, I don't have enough space to have the clips of each episode be times five times bigger than the original source.

THE BIG EXCEPTION TO WHAT I JUST SAID: rainbowing and dot crawl, which should usually be taken care of before you IVTC. It looks like you might have some rainbowing in your source (esp. that last pic), though I can't tell for sure from just these individual screenshots.

I couldn't see any in that picture. Maybe it was just that glaring line in the guys face that distracted me.

Those just look like random dust/dirt on the film to me. It happens with these older sources. There are some plugins like DeSpot that are supposed to be meant specifically for such a purpose, but (in my limited experience) I've had better luck with motion-compensated denoisers.

Motion-compensated denoiser? is that like the temporal smoothers in your guide?

- Jade Aislin

[Scintilla]

You may find it helpful to look over my postprocessing filters guide

I have looked at your guide and I will look again. Although, I couldn't seem to find any of the dust filters and when I tried to use the fastlinedarken I got an error message saying "there is no function named "expand" (fastlinedarken.avsi, line 49)".

Wow. What the hell, WarpEnterprises doesn't keep a copy of the Dust package around anymore? All right, I'll throw one up: http://www.aquilinestudios.org/scripts/DustV5.dll
You'll also need to get LoadPluginEx2.dll from the same directory and put it somewhere OTHER THAN your plugins directory (because it breaks autoloading), then load it manually before you can load Dust.

As for Expand, that's included in MaskTools 1.5, which *can* be found at the big plugins repository: http://avisynth.org/warpenterprises/

THE BIG EXCEPTION TO WHAT I JUST SAID: rainbowing and dot crawl, which should usually be taken care of before you IVTC. It looks like you might have some rainbowing in your source (esp. that last pic), though I can't tell for sure from just these individual screenshots.

I couldn't see any in that picture. Maybe it was just that glaring line in the guys face that distracted me.

Check out the lines of the girl's white shirt and the edge where the armrest meets the plane wall. Step through the scene frame by frame and see if those edges have flickering rainbows (since you've already Force FILMed, you may need to go a few frames before you see it).

Those just look like random dust/dirt on the film to me. It happens with these older sources. There are some plugins like DeSpot that are supposed to be meant specifically for such a purpose, but (in my limited experience) I've had better luck with motion-compensated denoisers.

Motion-compensated denoiser? is that like the temporal smoothers in your guide?

By "motion-compensated", I mean a denoiser that specifically uses information about motion vectors in the clip -- by which I basically mean that it attempts to figure out what parts of the image are moving where from frame to frame, in an effort to better differentiate signal (leave it alone) and noise (exterminate).

Specifically, I was thinking of heavy-duty denoising scripts like TemporalDegrain, RemoveNoiseMC, MC_Spuds, MCTemporalDenoise (formerly UDegrain), and the like. I don't go over any of these in my guide because I thought they would be overkill for most readers (they're invariably quite slow due to the mo-comp), plus some of them have a paralyzing panoply of parameters.

The closest thing I cover would be FaeryDust/PixieDust/GoldDust, which are supposed to include motion compensation (the source was never released so we can't verify the claim). You might also be able to remove those spots with FFT3DFilter...?