Zarx264gui 1.31 - April 11, 2010

[mirkosp]

I mean we're working with footage in the NTSC standard which hasn't been actively developed since the 1950s and was recently replaced with ATSC. Clearly our entire operation is flawed on a fundamental level.

To be honest, NTSC really was fucked up to begin with when they came up with it... stupid 1% slowdown... made EVERYTHING more complex in the long run, especially since FILM already was 24.00 fps.

[outlawed]

To be honest, NTSC really was fucked up to begin with when they came up with it... stupid 1% slowdown... made EVERYTHING more complex in the long run, especially since FILM already was 24.00 fps.

Did you mean to say the 0.1% adjustment to fields to compensate for the dot pattern issue (which is why we have 29.97 drop frame timecode)? I must say though the engineering to keep color NTSC backwards compatible with the 40s B&W standard was very elegant.

[mirkosp]

Yeah, meant 0.1%, sorry. =_=

[Mister Hatt]

They should have just given up on backwards compatibility, but you know how Americans are. If there wasn't the need to keep the entire signal at 60Hz, there wouldn't really be a problem. You'd think that in the digital age people could at least go back to integer framerates but it seems not :/

[kickass331]

yes, capture quality matters, the chroma for colors and luma for black levels, but as i've never used a capture card i'm unexperienced and in over my head

[LittleAtari]

Zarx, what happened to the image sequence importer? I thought it'd be fixed in this version, but it's gone =(

[Zarxrax]

Zarx, what happened to the image sequence importer? I thought it'd be fixed in this version, but it's gone =(

I realized it was actually a lot more difficult to automate it. Unless I'm missing something, it seems that avisynth can't automatically determine how many frames are in the sequence. So you need to just manually create an avisynth script to load your images.

[Phantasmagoriat]

Zarx, what happened to the image sequence importer? I thought it'd be fixed in this version, but it's gone =(

I realized it was actually a lot more difficult to automate it. Unless I'm missing something, it seems that avisynth can't automatically determine how many frames are in the sequence. So you need to just manually create an avisynth script to load your images.

could always run a .bat file in the directory holding the images:

Code: Select all

SET TYPE=bmp
SET FPS=29.97
SET LENGTH=1
SET WIDTH=848
SET HEIGHT=480

for %%f in (*.%TYPE%) do echo imagesource("%%f", fps=%FPS%, start=1, end=%LENGTH%)++\ >> "sequence.avs"
echo BlankClip(length=0, width=%WIDTH%, height=%HEIGHT%, fps=%FPS%).killaudio()>> "sequence.avs"

You have to make sure all the images are the same height and width, but the nice thing is it doesn't matter how the files are named. I'm actually working on a function called BestFit() to do this regardless of height and width... so that way, you can make a sequence of any set of images you like.

[Bauzi]

Is ZarxGUI/x264 capable of compressing 16 bit color channel videos? I work on a 1080p AMV and 8 bpc look like shit for gradients.

[mirkosp]

x264 recently introduced 10bit capability, but isn't 16bit capable yet (from my understanding, apparently 16bit would need a somewhat major rewrite of parts of the code, whereas 10bit only had minimal differences, so that's why). If you're fine with the improvement from 8bit to 10bit, you can get a build from here:
http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?p ... ost1414996
However a warning: that's r1666, we're now on r1680. No one bothered making 9bit and 10bit builds after r1666. And there is a reason: there aren't enough decoders that can support those bitdepths. DivX7 seems to be the only H.264 decoder that can support it, and you can't quite count on people to have it. Also, keep in mind that the higher bitdepths takes more processing power both during encoding and decoding.
So imho, if you really want to make an 10bit encode, then you should probably also offer an 8bit encode too regardless. I don't think it's quite the time for this step yet.
I guess having a dithered encode is the best way if the gradients can't hold up and become a banded mess.
EDIT: BTW, might I ask which source are you working with? Most anime is only worthy of 720p at most as far as actual detail goes, despite the m2ts being 1080p (or 1080i)... so chances are you could just edit at 720p and not mind.