HUMR's LOTR: How do I improve it?

[magus176]

Some of the sultans of free Theater-Screener during-release movies, DALnet's HUMR, have released Lord of the Rings to the public. Since I ADORE this movie and have already seen it twice in the box office (and maybe more soon), I have downloaded it already. Following several conversions, I have discovered that the quality is often hideous, unbearable and BLOCKY (can you say artifacts?) when viewed on VCD. Is there any way to get rid of the pale white, almost "ghostly" tint to the movie? Furthermore, by re-encoding the AVI with higher bitrates will I make the movie look better? I am also looking into color correction. Any advice? I'm already re-encoding it with the new DivX codec's 2-pass.

Thanks
Magus

[setarip]

It sounds like an awful mess to start with. I guess if you're willing to devote a great deal of effort to trying to improve the video's appearance, you could load it into VideoDub and alter numerous aspects in avariety of ways by using some of the many filters available for VirtualDub.

You can download a multitude of different filters from the following sites:

http://sauron.mordor.net/dgraft/

and

http://www186.pair.com/vdub/virtualdub_filters.html

Let us know of your (eventual) success ;>}

[magus176]

Excellent.

Thanks a BILLION. Those filters are life-savers. The only major question that I have is to define Noise Reduction, and if by filtering out noise will I destroy the "Blockiness" of the image? Better yet, by using two-pass with a bitrate of 2000 (give or take a few hundred), will I end most of the blockiness? Or will this do nothing, because my source material is blocky? PLEASE let me know.

Thanks
Magus

[setarip]

My pleasure (and I REALLY wish you the best of luck with this project).

"Or will this do nothing, because my source material is blocky?"

Couldn't have said it better myself ;>}