DV to DivX ;-) using MSPro 6???

[nic]

Hello,

I have been trying to get reasonably good quality out of a DV to something else conversion for the past month with not much luck. I had a much better experience with my Marvel using S-Video from the camcorder.

It looks like DV is too noisy to convert nicely to MPEG variants.
I had to try out a few filters with no real experience with them. I use "blur" at level 2 followed by "sharpen"at level 1. Anybody has good idea on how to remove noise?

Using MPEG2, even at 4Mb/s, the quality is so-so.
Using MPEG4 (DivX ;-) actually), I get a much better quality whil still keeping a reasonable 1.5Mb/s datarate but encounter numerous problems like loss of audio-video sync, frame freeze once in a while.

For info, my camcorder here is a Sony TR7000 DV (D8 actuallY) with a Pyro board on Win2K using MSPro 6.

Anyway, any experience out there?

Thanks in advance.

Nic

[Dr Mordrid]

The problem is the reduced colorspace of DV: 4:1:1 for NTSC, 4:2:0 for PAL vs. 4:2:2 for analog video.

A reduced colorspace can and will cause block and other artifacts in color fields when transcoding to other codecs.

Unfortunately the only real semi-solution I've found is when encoding to MPEG using TMPGEnc. It has a 4:1:1 to 4:4:4 interpolation it can do before MPEG encoding DV files. This isn't perfect, but it does help with many sources.

For the other codecs, DivX among them, I'm afraid you're S.O.L. unless you can find s/w that can do such an interpolation and use vfw codecs.

Dr. Mordrid

[nic]

Thanks a lot.

A quick newbie questions: I have read everywhere that 4:x:x stands for some kind of color space. Do you know where I can find the info on what stands for what (and maybe why it is that way)?

Also, since new products like MSPro, VS, Adobe Premiere... are said to support DV, then why would they not do colorspace conversion since it would be the only way to get a quality output????

Nic

[This_Idiot]

For ages folks have been extolling the virtues of DV, and to some degree it serves the accolade. Direct transfer to/from the PC without frame drop and generation loss is the main one.

But if you consider video in terms of datarate, a constant DV stream equates to a hardware assisted analog capture card capturing full frame/full rate with something in the order of 7:1 MJPEG compression, which is something that the Rainbow Runners have been able to turn out for over 3 years. The problem with RR was that it was (is) difficult to "guarantee" results between PC setups.

Personally I have successfully run the original Rainbow Runner, the G-Series and both G200 and G400 Marvels with few problems across a variety of systems (although they frequently gave me plenty of scope for lateral thinking). This isn't specific to Matrox kit, I've also had the priviledge of using Miro/Pinnacles DC10+ and DC30+ cards which certainly didn't present LESS problems than Matrox.

DV is much easier to set up, much easier to capture, and gives the bonus of device control too. The captured footage doesn't seem much better than compressed analogue though.

[nic]

Well, I have indeed better luck with the Marvel board than starting from DV.

However, i would like to get the most of the camcorder's capability, especially in scanlines. If I use the S-video connector, would I not be limited to 280 lines or so?

DV is indeed a lossy compression with the same result as MJPEG compression once you want to recompress into MPEG. Since it is also the native format on tape, I assume that we basically have to live with it. Ideally, I would just be writing DV to a DVD-RAM, but one hour of DV is still around 12GB which the drives don't reach yet (9.7 double-side).

After all, I JUST want to store home family movies in the best possible quality and on a media that does not degrade. Well, of course, I do not want a CD to hold a single minute of video...

There is another bonus to DV: you do not need to adjust your capture card color (etc...) settings as it is in the DV stream.

I guess that the ideal would be a camcorder writing megapixel video directly to DVD in a lossless format... (5 years from now?)

Nicolas.