Quality Problems

[Poohanky]

I've been haveing problems with the quality of my DVD encodes. During scenes where there is a lot of motion, the picture quality is terrible. I've attached a screen shot so you can see what I mean. Can someone please tell me how to increase the picture quality?
By the way the video that the screen shot is from is encoded using the Divx Pro 5.02 codec, the resolution is 720x480, fps is 29.97 and bitrate is 670. Any help is appreciated.

[UncasMS]

720 x 480

where did you get this resolution from???

crop and resize your source properly!!

for a 1cd trancsoding go for some 608 x XXX or less (592 x XXX) and make sure to use a 2 pass routine!!!

[Poohanky]

What settings should I use if I used the Divx Pro 5.02 2 pass routine? I want the 25 minute video to be around 200 megs...

[Mark Madness]

Your resolution is way too high for a bitrate of 670. Either bump up the bits or shrink the resolution. By the way Uncas, he probably got that resolution because its the default for ripping.

[Poohanky]

Ok thanks!

And would it help if I lowered the framerate as well?

[benedict]

And would it help if I lowered the framerate as well?

It would help the quality of the individual frames, but could introduce "jitter" in movements if you went too far. I've seen videos as low as 15 fps that weren't too bad, but but movements on them were pretty slow. Since you are dealing with a lot of motion in some scenes, I suspect you'd start running into this jitter problem well before that.

Of course, the only way to find out is to try it with various settings. And don't be fooled into thinking that what works for this video will work for others. Every single video has it's own "personality". With some, you can get away with a lot. With others, they'll probably beat you over the head if you try.

[benderman]

DivX is primary designed to compress real-life-video and is not optimized to compress cartoons. cartoons have hard contrasts all over the picture which will produce blocks if they are compressed to much. If you want to use a bitrate of 670 I would reduce the rews to 512x... or 480x...! Setting the framerate to half of the original should work perfect, because most cartoons are painted with 12-15fps, so you wouldn't miss a frame (only in some high-action-scenes where the painters use 25-30fps. I use nandub to encode cartoons, because you can use many powerfull filters like

- dynamic-noise reduction: even well-encoded dvds have a bit of noise in the picture that is produced by the MPEG-2-codec. For low bitrates that is absolutely nessecary.

- resize: if you use a bilinear resizer the picture gets a little bit smoothed. The picture is not exactly as sharp as if you use bicubic resizing, but the DivX-codec will work much better.

-deinterlacer: sometimes absolutely nessecary

- and many, many more ...

[Poohanky]

Ok thanks for the help guys!