It's not me, it's the DVD! (...right?)

punistation · Post by **punistation** » Sat Aug 23, 2003 10:12 pm

Alrighty, I've been gathering my Armitage III footage all nice n' happily, but I've come across a rather icky problem: it looks crap.

The main problem? The cells seem to be jumping n' vibrating all over the place whenever there's movement, and there's a real annoying rainbow-like effect of Red & Greens. I'm sure there's a name for that.

I've seen a couple've Armitage III AMV's, but they didn't seem to have this problem. Of course, they could all have been using the Movie DVD, not the OVA DVD. Where Armitage II is concerned, the movie and OVA's are pretty much the same thing, with maybe one or two scenes added or removed. The Movie DVD came out long ago, and the OVA's only recently, so it is possible, ne?

Anyway, here's a sample AVI I made, using just a couple've seconds of footage. Quite unimpressive (no S&M jailbait), but it does show the problem in all it's glory. Vibrating video and funky rainbow effects.

CLICK ME! (3MB)

So is the problem my encoding, or is this a crappy DVD? I played the DVD itself using PowerDVD, and the problem was still there. That means it's the DVD, right?

Any help is really REALLY appreciated.

Kisses XXOOXX
Jen

Zarxrax · Post by **Zarxrax** » Sat Aug 23, 2003 10:52 pm

Yep, thats the dvd.
The good news is that it can be fixed with some avisynth filters. I'll get back to this in a minute and list a few, if someone doesnt beat me to it.

jonmartensen · Post by **jonmartensen** » Sat Aug 23, 2003 11:02 pm

Type in your avs file

MakeVidLessCrap(5)

That should produce a wonderfull unrecognized exception

Zarxrax · Post by **Zarxrax** » Sat Aug 23, 2003 11:15 pm

2 filters you can try are Guavacomb and AntiBlink. www.avisynth.org
These are designed for removing these types of artifacts, but I've found that in practice, whether they actually work or not is kinda random.

Another filter you can use, that wil give you definate results, but at a cost, is Deen. Use the a2d mode on it and set a large radius and a large chroma threshold. Set the luma threshold small, or it will smear the video a lot. By smearing the chroma plane of the video, it will make the rainbows less visible, but it will also make the color less saturated. I highly doubt you could completely get rid of the rainbows while keeping good color, but you can probably diminish them a good bit.

punistation · Post by **punistation** » Sun Aug 24, 2003 8:08 am

Woooo! Quick replies. Thankee kindly, guys!

Well, after doing some research on AntiBlink, I've sure been bombarded with articles/posts/indecipherable techie discussions on how to get rid of this horrible rainbow effect. At least it's comforting to know it's a widespread problem. (wait... that doesn't sound right)

It seems the one way that's guarenteed to work gloriously is by using the SmartSmoother-IQ filter (11-200) in VirtualDub. Sadly, that results in 1fps encoding... which sucks. You can try using the filter in AviSynth instead, but the settings work differently, so what works in VirtualDub will give you a yucky blurry mess using AviSynth. I tried different settings, but I could never find a good equivilent. Too many rainbows got through.

AntiBlink was meant to fix that by doing the job by itself, but it's also a slowpoke when encoding. That, and I could never get the settings right for that one either. Still too many rainbows got through.

...so then I thought: "Hey! Why not use both?"

And I did. Here's my AVS Script:

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Import("C:\DVD\AviSynth-Plugins\vdub_filters.avs")
mpeg2source("C:\DVD\DVD\ARM.d2v")
BicubicResize(640,480,0,0.5)

Antiblink(15,20,false)
ConvertToRGB()
VD_SmartSmoothIQ(11, 80, true)
ConvertToYUY2()

Telecide(chroma=true,gthresh=50,guide=1,threshold=30)
Decimate(5)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

I had to copy n' paste those settings back and forth numerous times, putting one in front of the other, one after the other, etc, etc, until I found a sequence that worked (AntiBlink after SmartSmoother has rainbows, Telecide before Resize gives rainbows, etc) . The one above worked the best, and the result is pretty darn spiffy. Check it out:

CLICK ME! (2.5MB)

Compared to the earlier one up top, I think the results pretty good. Sadly, while encoding with both SmartSmoother-IQ and AntiBlink may remove all rainbows, it also results with an encoding rate of 1fps.

With that in mind, you may ask "Why not just dump both and use SmartSmoother-IQ in VirtualDub?" Well, because using both in AviSynth gives a much better video. Trust me, I tried both ways, and my AviSynth combo looks much much better in comparison.

Thanks guys! I got my nice Armitage III footage, plus one more AVS template if I ever come across the problem again!

Kisses XXOOXX
Jen

Zarxrax · Post by **Zarxrax** » Sun Aug 24, 2003 11:30 am

Deen does exact same thing as smart smoother iq, only it is like 100x faster ;p