Render Times In VirtualDub?

[Walrus]

Prospero, that sounds a LITTLE bit slow, but not by much. The question is are you doing any filtering in virtualdub, and if so what? I know that the unsharp mask filter, and my 2d cleaner slows down Virtualdub a lot. (though I'm working on a possible solution to 2d cleaner, though I will require some time to refine my theory)

[Prospero]

Using the following filters
Smart Deinterlace
TV
Smoother
Sharpen

These were recomended to me by a user on another forum. He is archiving tv shows like I am and has had good luck with these. Am I going a little overkill here? I'm taking a one hour show, editing the commercials out, and then rendering down to mpeg4v2 to fit on a cd. Thanks for any suggestions.

[Aryko]

This may be a bit naive, but wouldn't smoother and sharpen sort of cancel each other work? At the cost of some processing power?

I'll have to try it and see.

- Aryko

[Fred H]

The only filter I am using in VD, is the
2:1 reduction (high quality)
to create MPEG4v2-352x288 PAL files from MJPEG 704x576 PAL.
My poor old AMD K6/2-400 and only 64 Mb RAM are to slow to play back smoothly a 704x576 resolution, but the quality of the video is quite good with 2:1 reduction for burning and showing them from CD-R.
Only with this filter the rendering time for a 10 min video is 1h 26 min for me
Did you try the filter settings in Premiere or XingMPEG? They slown down the rendering, sometimes to the double of the "normal", already long, time.
On the other site, I've learnd that "...if I put in shit, I get only shit..." (or something like this. Sorry for my english ) with or without sharpening.

[Walrus]

Prospero: With those filters, the speed is perfectly normal.
Incidently, I'd recommend the following:
Levels (to fix any contrast issues)
Smart Deinterlace
2d cleaner (with mild threshold, probably 5 or less, and a radius around pixel of 1)
Unsharp Mask Filter (with VERY mild sharpening level of 30, and a radius of 3 and a threshold of 4)
Temporal Cleaner (with default values)
Then a resize if you need it.
I get GREAT results with this combo, though likely it will be even slower to compress using them than what you use now.

[Prospero]

Render Times In VirtualDub?

I'm just wondering if my rendering times are the norm. Starting with MJPEG 704X480, with 8:1 compression, I'm rendering to MPEG4V2 with MP3 audio. It takes about 5 hours to render a 40 minute tv program, with the frame counter reading about 4fps average (1600kbs rate). This seems a little low, any settings I sould be looking at? System info follows.
Athlon 700
384meg ram
Marvel G400
WD 18 gig system drive
Maxtor 40 gig capture drive
Hoontech Digital NX sound card
10/100 NIC

[Prospero]

Thanks Walrus,
I'll give those settings a shot. I'm still figuring out what everything does and what to use. I guess soften and sharpen is a little odd to use together.
Prospero

[Walrus]

Prospero:
In THEORY soften and sharpen works well, though the built-in soften and sharpen don't work too well together. 2d cleaner is an adaptive noise reducer, that gets rid of low-level gamma noise while preserving sharp detail. Use that to make sure that unsharp mask filter (which sharpens despite its misleading title) does not magnify video noise. Temporal cleaner also denoises the signal, and in doing so SEVERELY aids MPEG or MPEG-4 compression since the compressor does not have as much noise in the signal to waste bitrate towards.
Anyways, good luck and let us know how it works out.

[Prospero]

Ok, after playing around for a bit I think I've found a combination that works for me.
Smart Deinterlace (default settings)
Temporal Cleaner (default settings)
Temporal Softner
Mpeg4v2 1800kbs (compression 60)

At least for me, turning up the sharpness just makes it look grainy. These settings seem to blend things together well. I'll continue playing around with things and post any positive results. Oh, I get four to five fps rendering with the above.

[Walrus]

Prospero:
Suggestion: Do not use temporal softener. It's just temporal cleaner without the protections of temporal cleaner. Temporal softener simply blends one frame with another. That includes blending motion. (so you get ghosting artifacts when things move quickly) Temporal cleaner will blend parts of the frame with the previous frame that have little or no motion. (simplified explanation) Using both defeats the purpose of temporal cleaner. If the settings I recommended are too sharp, drop the unsharp mask filter which is the sharpening filter, and/or turn up the threshold on the 2d cleaner.
Anyways, good luck

[Prospero]

Thanks Walrus,
I'll have to try that later. How are the optimisations coming? Thanks for all your help.
Prospero

[Prospero]

Tried it, it almost seems too sharp. Although, my stuff done with my other filter configuration, seems a little soft. Maybe somewhere in the middle. Is there anywhere that explains what all these filter settings mean? If I understood what I was doing a little better I could pick what will work for me. I'll keep playing.

[Walrus]

Well I have an intermediary optimization in the works. Once I work out a bug that shifts the image down by 10 pixels (I'll call it a Matrox bug I'll release it. It's 10 - 20% faster than my old one, and that's mainly due to careful optimizations and cutting out every line of code I could. The new idea I have is promising, though I'm going to have to figure out how to do some complex data sorting very rapidly for it to work. I've been talking with Avery Lee about the new idea, and there are potential problems with the approach, though I think there's real potential if it's done correctly.
Anyways, again, I wish you luck.