Problems with Xvid First Pass

Hellmaster Inu · Post by **Hellmaster Inu** » Tue Jul 04, 2006 6:33 am

So I'm just about finished making an AMV and I'm following A & E's Technical Guides to All Things Video and Audio mk 2. Now when I do my first pass, it's over 200 MBs, which I was quite surprised at. Here are the settings for my video that I've encoded as a Huffyuv AVI from Premiere Pro.

Width & Height: 640x480
Duration: 0:04:52
Frame Rate: 24 fps
Video Sample Size: 24 bit
Video Compression: Huffyuv

Also here is the Avisynth script I'm using for my exported project.

ConvertToYUV12()
deen("a3d",4,18,20)
temporalcleaner()
Crop(2,2,-2,-0)
LanczosResize(640,480)

Now after that I figured that I could probably get it lower by dropping the resolution down and I dropped it down to 512x384. However, the file size for the first pass was around 150 MBs if I remember correctly. It might had been a bit more than that. Anyways, is the first pass suppossed to be that big for a near five minute video at 640x480 resolution? Am I doing something wrong here that I'm not aware of? I'm pretty sure I'm following the guide I'm using correctly. I get the feeling that because the first pass is so big, no matter what I do to get it under 100 MBs, the video quality is going to end up looking like crap, and I would really like to keep the resolution at 640x480.

Jnzk · Post by **Jnzk** » Tue Jul 04, 2006 6:36 am

What did you use for audio compression?

Hellmaster Inu · Post by **Hellmaster Inu** » Tue Jul 04, 2006 6:37 am

Janzki wrote:What did you use for audio compression?

I haven't added my audio yet.

Melanchthon · Post by **Melanchthon** » Tue Jul 04, 2006 8:30 am

How fast are the cuts, how much action is there, are there any fancy effects, stuff like that...

Also, that's a heck of a lot of smoothing you're doing there. Is it really necessary to have deen that strong?

sayde · Post by **sayde** » Tue Jul 04, 2006 12:27 pm

I'm not sure whether your working with an actual cartoon anime, or a cg rendered anime (such as final fantasy). But if your working with CG, those can tend to become quite large very quickly since there's so many different color pixels that have to be utilized in each frame. So if you are working with CG footage, you might have to give yourself a little slack. But of course, if this just a standard anime, then by all means, completely ignore what I've just said.

Also, forget using an avisynth script for now. Load your amv into Virtualdubmod without it and see how large your 1st pass ends up being using Xvid. (It'd be interesting to find out whether it's the video that's giving you the problem, or the script.)

Hellmaster Inu · Post by **Hellmaster Inu** » Tue Jul 04, 2006 3:46 pm

Melanchthon wrote: Also, that's a heck of a lot of smoothing you're doing there. Is it really necessary to have deen that strong?

Well I'm using the R1 DVD footage of Dragonball Z, which is somewhat on the grainy side, so I had to use those settings to get it to look smooth. I thought that was suppossed to make it easier to compress the video.

sayde wrote: Also, forget using an avisynth script for now. Load your amv into Virtualdubmod without it and see how large your 1st pass ends up being using Xvid. (It'd be interesting to find out whether it's the video that's giving you the problem, or the script.)

Ok. I'll try that later tonight then.

Melanchthon · Post by **Melanchthon** » Tue Jul 04, 2006 4:02 pm

Hellmaster Inu wrote:Well I'm using the R1 DVD footage of Dragonball Z, which is somewhat on the grainy side, so I had to use those settings to get it to look smooth. I thought that was suppossed to make it easier to compress the video.

There are better ways of dealing with grain than smoothing it into submission. Got a screenshot of the original source? I'm not familiar with DBZ footage.

Hellmaster Inu · Post by **Hellmaster Inu** » Tue Jul 04, 2006 4:32 pm

Melanchthon wrote: There are better ways of dealing with grain than smoothing it into submission. Got a screenshot of the original source? I'm not familiar with DBZ footage.

In that case, do tell. I just wish it would have mentioned something about that in the guide I used.

Anyways, here's a screencap.

Melanchthon · Post by **Melanchthon** » Tue Jul 04, 2006 5:27 pm

I was expecting something atrocious from your deen settings, but that doesn't need much work doing do it. Next time though, please post pics in a lossless format.

Couple of suggestions:

RemoveGrain
DeGrainMedian
FRFun

FRFun is pretty effective, and easy to configure. Try that one for a start.