Re: Encoding Videos

["Marcus Warrington" <marcusw@xxxxxxx>]

Doogie.

Interesting post. I too have been "playing" with archiving my
tapes to disc
(although I started with SVCD's about 2 years ago) like most things the
project went very slowly. Having recently bought a SONY DRU500AX my
interest
in this has been re-ignited.

You machine puts mine to shame :( I used to do capture and encoding on a
little
466 celeron but it would take days !! An upgrade to an Athlon 1.4 made
things a bit
quicker. My capture card is a DC10+ from pinnacle and once got working is
great. It
uses hardware (MJPEG) compression so it doesn't require a lot of processor
power.

Your selection of software is exactly what I've used myself, VirtualDub is
a
great little free program :) If you have the disc space I would definitely
recommend
using a lossless CODEC like Huffyuv for capture, remember that you are
going to be
recompressing the captured video to MPEG2 and recompressing an already
compressed
video or image always gives a worse result.

I'm extremely interested in your filter chain.. all the videos I'm
archiving are
>from
the same thing. At the moment I just use TV filter (whose name escapes me)
to
clean it up a little , a field filter to nudge the things into better
registration
and a slight amount of blur to help with compression.

What filters are you using ?

Marcus

Original Message-----------------------------------------------------
Date: Thu, 03 Apr 2003 11:24:17 +0100
From: Doogie Brodie <ukhad@xxxxxxx>
Subject: Re: Encoding Videos

Frost Neil wrote:

> I think I remember someone saying that they had copied videos (not
DVD's,
> the old fashioned things with tape and stuff) to their servers.
>
> What encoding process did you use, and what software?

I've been doing a reasonable amount of VHS capturing to put onto DVD,
but you can encode in something to keep on the server if you want.

Hardware:-

ATI Radeon 8500DV
Athlon 2000 XP
1GB RAM
4 120GB drives (2 RAID 0 arrays) - you don't need this much space, I
just need to have things at a variety of stages... :-)

Software:-

VirtualDub - Required
PicVideo MPEG codec - Depends on your processing
Various VirtualDub filters - Depends on video
Goldwave - Depends on video
TMPGEnc - Depends on your output

Process:-

Capture mode in VirtualDub, using PicVideo as the encoder - you can use
Huffyuv but it gives even bigger files..... pretty sure it'll encode
direct to DivX for you though if you've got enough grunt under the hood.

Due to quality of my video sources, a long filter chain in VirtualDub to
cleanup the source (15 year old cartoons) - you may find not necessary

Due to quality of my video sources, audio de-hiss in Goldwave, saving
the audio track as a WAV file

Encoding the processed AVI and the processed WAV file into MPEG-2 for DVD

Obviously depending on the quality of your source, and how you want to
store them (Mpeg, DivX, PicVideo, Huffyuv) will depend on exactly what
you do where.

I messed around for _ages_ to get the process right from VHS to a pretty
DVD all menu'd up etc, including buying a standards converting time base
corrector, due to the poor quality of some of the tapes, reading up on
filter chains, experimenting with various combinations etc. It's now in
a state where SWMBO does the processing herself and only asks me for
help if she gets _really_ stuck.....! :-)

Best place to read up on stuff is www.dvdrhelp.com, loads of articles
about different sorts of capturing, processing etc.

Let me know if I can be of any more help... :D

--

Doogie