Wednesday, March 24, 2004

VirtualDub Filter Tests

Testing out some more filtering per a discussion over on the DVDRHelp forums.

On a side note, I've gone back to only putting (3) hour-long TV episodes on a DVD (roughly 133 minutes once commercials are removed). The 2900kbps video rate seemed to be too noisy. Doing a VBR average rate of 3750kbps, the disc only came out to 3.78Gb, leaving a goodish amount free. Allowing for 45min per ep (135min total), that should work out to 3.84Gb. My goal is to fill the disc up to the 4.2Gb point (leaving 0.17Gb free for QuickPar PAR2 recovery data). So I have room to bump my average bitrate up by 9% to 4100kbps.

I still might try out the lower bitrate again in order to fit (4) on each disc - now that I've tweaked TMPGEnc to give better results. (That bitrate will probably be 3100kbps.)

FYI, I found a good scene that illustrates (somewhat) what happens when you have too low of a bitrate or the motion search precision (MSP) is off. This is from the start of a Law & Order episode and is a shot of the river with lots of little ripples reflecting the blue sky against the dark water. The effect is much easier to see when watching the clip, which was encoded at 2900kbps using an MSP setting of "Motion Estimate (fast)". Still, if you look closely, you'll see the blockiness around the highlights where the macro blocks weren't able to flesh in the details.


(right side shows a little of the artifacting)


(look left and below the dark bump in the upper left to see some blocky areas)

Labels: VideoEncoding

posted by Wuphon's at 1:38 PM