Fine tuning
 

Hi again,

I have a few items for discussion... :)

1. What is the loudest that you can set the Amplify command to before the sound starts to get distorted? Recently I used Amplify(8) to watch movies on an airplane, and it worked but I wanted a little more volume.

2. What is the benefit of changing the fps registry setting? (Manually or with jackho's newly released tool) Is this purely to decrease .MQV file size? If the source video is 23.9 fps, do you really want to change the fps to 12? Isn't anything under 15 choppy? Changing fps doesn't seem to change the filesize with the calculator thingy...

3. Is there an AviSynth command that will increase general brightness? I've looked on the site, but I am too much of a NOOB to make much sense out of it... Any help here would be appreciated! :)

@sixseven:
Cool, thx for sharing the info on the autocrop function, I didn't know this existed, I will (soon, not atm) change the whole cropsection to this, as it makes living much easier (for the time I used virtualdub to open the avs and find the right cropping and wanted to add that to the guide, but your solution is much better).

And now to your questions:
1. Regarding avsynth homepage there is a Normalize command you could try to find the max Amplify, but interestingly it normally is around 1.5 for max amplification and I don't have an explanation why it still sounds good in the MQVs when I choose 10 (even if Normalize tells me 1.5 is the right value) as Normalize checks if it will be amplifyable without clipping and gives you the max number.
Personally I most times go with Amplify(10) as only the loudest scenes might get clipping (and I never found any hearable clipping).
With 20 I got some audible clipping and wanted my speaker to live longer, so I changed back to 10 ;)

2. Changing the fps to half the sourcerate does not in any way change the size of the output cause you tell IC to use exactly X kbit/s for video and Y kbit/s for audio, so you always (with these settings) need X+Y kbit/s for your converted video, even if you would choose 1 fps (I am not sure if IC would use this ;) ).
But a) with lower fps you have more videobitrate per frame for IC to use, so your resulting video has less block artefacts
b) Just do a little mindgame.
I) with fullfps for the output IC can take every frame and encode it
II) with half the sourcefps IC takes every second frame of the input and encodes it
III) But what does a videocompression program do with other fps values (in the example I use 25fps source and 15 fps output, so we have a ratio of 1:1.6667)? The program has two options, it takes frame 1, encodes it and next it takes frame 2.6667, ups, that does not exist so here come the choices, it can now either take frame 3, or it uses an interpolation from frame 2 and 3 to calculate frame 2.6667. OK, next is frame 4.3334, again it does not exist, so we take frame 4 or calced frame 4.3334. Next follows frame 6, great, we have that. And so on. So you have two possibilities for a one second frameset, you take frames 1,3,4,6,8,9,11,13,14,16,18,20,21,23,24,26,... Guess how choppy the motion gets if you take these frames as you always switch between advancements of 1 frame and 2 frames of the source.
The other option is like this
1, calced 2.667, caled 4.334, 6, calced 7.667, cakced 9.334, 11 ....
If you use a good algorithm this gives you smooth motion, but unsharp video cause you have to calculate 2 of 3 frames (and afterwards you even have to compress those calced frames ;).

So, no, I wouldn't change fps from 23.9 to 12, I would change it to 11.95 (and that's why I asked jackho to include a textfield where you can manually enter the number)!

3. Yes, there is a function (I never used it and I am sure it takes a little bit of time for conversion ;) ) it's called Tweak, instructions on how to use can be found here: http://www.avisynth.org/index.php?page=Tweak

crop settings?
 

OK, this is going to sound really ignorant, but here goes: we now have two methods for cropping the video, but what do you input if you don't want *any* cropping done? Nothing? A series of zeroes? Please help!

@curtw:
just make the line that before was something like
crop(12,88,-8,-92).Bicubicresize(320,188)
to
Bicubicresize(320,188)
this will only resize, but not crop, but be sure to crop if your source has black borders, as on dvd source invisible, but high bitrate chaning blackvalues in these borders would cost you valuable bitrate in your resulting MQV.

Thanks, Egalus! Now I've got new problems.

1. In Step "B," when I tried playing the avs file in WMP, I get the audio, but no video. I figured this wasn't too important, and kept going.

2. In step "C," VFAPIConvEN won't accept a file with a ".avs" extension. It will only accept a d2v or TMPGEnc project file (.tpr). When I input my "test.d2v" I get an output avi file with no sound (which is ovious, because it didn't have the avs file to associate/mux). Then, of course, this silent avi file drops into Image Converter just fine. Is that why I downloaded tmpegnc-readavs? I'm lost.

What the heck am I doing wrong?

Curt

Reinstalling version 9 helped.  Now I can get audio and video from the .avs file.

But even after the registry edits, IC 1.1 still won't recognize the format. :confused:

@curtw:
Do you get any errormessage in wmp when playing the AVS without getting video in step B?

For step C) please install this patch for vfapiconv (http://www.christian-behrens.de/vid...enc-readavs.zip)
Haven't updated the guide to this point.

Egalus,

No error messages in WMP. I just get a generic musical note icon, and the player says "no album art" as though it were expecting a still instead of a movie.

For the patch (tmpegnc-readavs), are the install instructions somewhere in this thread and I just missed them? I did open that zip file before sending out my 'call for help' last night, but couldn't figure out how/where to put things.

Thanks again!!!!

Curt

Read the readme.txt contained in the patch and everywhere it says tmpegencdir or something like that replace it with vfapiconvdir.

OK, this is starting to drive me insane.

Properly installing the TMPGEnc patch allowed VFAPIConv to open the avs file, but I must have something wrong with the .avs, because the video is not appearing! ("video" box is grayed out in VFAPIConv)

I still get audio only (and no error messages) when playing the avs in Windows Media Player. I know that I have some sort of video content out there, because when I point VFAPIConv at the .d2v file I can get a working (but silent) avi file at the end. Windows media gives an "unrecognized file" error when I try to play the d2v. Should it?

I tried to induce an error by changing the file names in the avs script, and that works. If I point to a non-existant d2v file, I get "MPEG2Source: unable to load file" and a similar error if I mess up the path to the audio.

I have to assume that since I get "recognizable" d2v and ac3 files means that DVD2AVI is working?

Here are the first few lines from the d2v file Is there something wrong here?:

DVD2AVIProjectFile
1
21 C:\MPEG\New\movie.VOB

Stream_Type=1,0,0
iDCT_Algorithm=5 (1:MMX 2:SSEMMX 3:FPU 4:REF 5:SSE2MMX)
YUVRGB_Scale=1 (0:TVScale 1:PCScale)
Luminance_Filter=0,0 (Gamma, Offset)
Picture_Size=0,0,0,0,0,0 (ClipLeft, ClipRight, ClipTop, ClipBottom)
Field_Operation=0 (0:None 1:ForcedFILM 2:SwapOrder)
Frame_Rate=29970
Location=0,0,0,18C46

7 0 0 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2 2

Any advice would be very much appreciated!

Curt

Can you please post your Avisynth version number and your .AVS file?

AVISynth is the latest version at the link you posted. The installer says 2.54, but the folder it's in only says "2.5." I could uninstall and try again?

The avs file:

video = Mpeg2Source("test_none.d2v")
audio = DirectShowSource("test_none AC3 T01 2_0ch 192Kbps DELAY -196ms.ac3").Amplify(8)
AudioDub(video,audio)
DelayAudio(-0.196)
Bicubicresize(320,240)

-----
Tanks so much for your patience and help!

Hm, and again we are in the funny world of computers - everything looks correct but still it's not working ;)

Did you install the MPEG2Dec3dg.dll to the right directory (I guess yes, but I just want to be sure)?
Did you run vifpset.bat in your vfapiconv dir at least once?
What's your directx version?

Egalus,

I will re-confim all of those things tonight. I'm not in front of the machine right now, but I'm pretty sure that I did them. running vifpset.bat multiple times won't hurt, will it?

C.

No, it will not hurt :=)
Except maybe if you break your finger while clicking the mousebutton ;)