Saturday, August 14, 2010

A guide to encoding, part four (dealing with .ISOs continued)

You will see three tabs in the Avisynth Creator - "I/O", "Filters", and "Script". Starting in the first tab, I/O, I will explain most of the settings.



Skip down to the middle, where it says "Crop & Resize".  



Cropping is a pet peeve of mine, so please get this right!

Look closely at the left side of this picture where the red arrows are pointing.



See the thin black line running vertically along the video? It is also present on the right side of this particular video. You want to remove those. If you click the "Auto Crop" button, MeGUI does a pretty good job of removing them, but it is NOT perfect. Always, always skip through the video (using the slider on the video preview) to make sure the black bars have been removed. If they are still there, click up or down on the cropping arrows until the black bars are completely gone.

Next, right under "Crop" is "Resize". This determines what size your video will be.
  • NOTE: 720x480 is the default size for standard DVDs. Encoding a video to 720x480 and uploading to Youtube will get you the 480p button. 720p HD video needs a size of 1280x720 and will get you the 720p button. 1080p HD video needs a size of 1920x1080 and will get you the 1080p button.  Notice a pattern with all of those "p"s? Yep, the last number determines what "p" the video size is called. 720x404 is 404p, 132x40 is 40p, etc..

Leaving it at 720x480 is a good idea. If you are encoding for yourself (i.e. you are encoding a video for your PC so you can delete the .ISO), changing the width (the second number) is a good way to make the finished file size a bit smaller. I prefer 720x404 most times.

  • NOTE: Not all videos are widescreen. If you take a look at older H!P DVDs (pre-2004), you will see that the video screen is sort of a square (as opposed to widescreen videos which are rectangular). For square videos like that, a good size is 640x480.

IMPORTANT: If you do leave the video as 720x480, make sure "Clever anamorphic encoding: resize to mod16" is checked! Otherwise your encoded video will come out looking squished together.

Now we can move on to the "Filters" tab, which is quite possibly the most important tab.



Again, skipping to the middle where it says "Deinterlacing", click "Analyze". MeGUI will begin to detect what type of interlacing is present in your video.

Interlacing is a bit difficult to explain, so I will just show you what it is instead.

(thanks to 100fps for the image)


That is a very extreme example, but it is perfect for illustrating interlacing. The wavy lines are a lot less noticeable in most H!P ISOs, but it does not mean that they aren't there. You want to remove interlacing, or else your video may turn out horrible.

After MeGUI is done analyzing, a couple of settings should be filled in for you. If you are using an .ISO and the MeGUI says it's progessive, then it's probably wrong. Here's a quick shortcut/tip: 99% of H!P ISOs are "Interlacted" and have a field order of "Top Field First".

So, for H!P videos you can skip the "Analyze" step and select "Interlaced" from the "Source Type" drop down menu, "Top Field First" from the "Field Order" drop down menu, and "Yadif" from the "Deinterlace" drop down menu.

  • NOTE: For the "Deinterlace" drop down menu, you will notice a couple other deinterlacers. I always use Yadif when I'm encoding for Youtube because it gives the best compromise between quality and speed. For most people and for most instances, Yadif is good enough. However, feel free to experiment with the other deinterlacers and use whatever you feel comfortable with.

Finally on the "Filters" tab is "Resize Filter". Again, run tests and use whichever you like, but I almost always use "Spline36 (Neutral)".

(What my "Filters" tab looks like most of the time)


And that's it for the Avisynth Creator! You can click on the last tab, "Script" to see your finished script (and see what you would have had to type by hand if you didn't use MeGUI).

Click save and the Avisynth Creator will close and another video preview window will open. MeGUI will auto load the created .avs file as well as the audio. You can close the video preview if you want.


IMPORTANT: Please be SURE to read (and not skip) part five, like right now. I made it a separate part to not make this part any longer than it already is.

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