interlacing artifacts using HUFFYUV

[misery]

Hello!
I am using the YUY2 crack with HUFFYUV and AVI IO to capture video with my Marvel G400. When I try at both 29.976 and 30 fps, I get interlacing artifacts- I see lines whenever there is a sharp movement (AVI IO does not report any dropped frames). When I use another codec, such as Morgan or PICvideo, none of these come up. I have also tried compressing the HUFFYUV video with other codecs and the artifacts remain.
Can anyone help?
Thanks!!

(p.s. what are the correct brightness, etc. input settings)

===============
system:
PIII 733 @ 797
Asus CUSL2
128 MB RAM
20 gig. IBM Deskstar 7200rpm
Creative Soundblaster LIVE
Marvel G400
Vidtools v. 1.52

[cjyo~]

um, video is interlaced...I think there was a thread here about that recently.

You will correctly see interlacing artifacts on all Huffy captures. If the source is film, you can use aviutil and it's IVTC (inverse telecine) function to reconstruct progressive full 24 frames/s. If the source is normal video (most video), you can try using Virtual Dub with the smart deinterlace filter, to blend away much of the nasty interlacing effect, but it won't completely eliminate the effects.

[wkulecz]

You've probably got the field order wrong. I think HuffYUV has a setting to reverse it.

Matrox is the reverse of most cards wrt to "feild order".

--wally

[misery]

May I ask then, if HUFFYUV gives such crappy artifacts, why is it that everyone (Dr. Mordrid SWEARS by the thing?
I thought the ideal for the Marvel was to capture in YUY2 with HUFFYUV (giving you better quality video than the Matrox MJPEG codec) edit and then compress your final cut.
Am I completely WRONG??

Also: Since when do you have to pay for PICVIDEO? I went to the sight today and could find no free version. Instead, I might have to fork out $18! hmmm....

[LvR]

Huff is a "lossless" compressor that will bring down a datarate of around 20M/s in YUY2 704x576 PAL to around 7M/s for instance - thereby saving diskspace.

Once you have captured with the YUY2/Huff or the RGB/Huff combination, you can go and edit the material without any loss of quality or additional artifacts. On completing the editing process, you have to recompress to either Mjpeg/Mpeg/etc before you can output your material to tape - Huff decoder can at best decode at a rate of around 22 frames per second.



------------------
Lawrence

[wkulecz]

Another major reason for HuffYUV is to produce MPEG2 for DVD or SVCD and preserving the interlace is important if the target is to be played back on a TV set instead of a computer.

If your target is a computer then a "deinterlace" filter might help.

I keep everything interlaced and only de-interlace in the final encoding step when making non-interlaced output formats like VCD MPEG1.

I think the fact that HuffYUV can't decode in real time makes motion and interlace artifacts look much worse. But like I said in my first post, try reversing the feild order settings as Matrox is often the reverse of everyone else. You can't really go by the names like Feild Order B, or Lower Feild First because usage is not universially standarized. Try it both ways on a short high motion clip. The "wrong" order setting is obviously worse.

--wally.

[SebastianX]

In the case of the Marvel G400, those artifacts appear when the "Swap fields on decompress" option is enabled.
Although the HuffYUV codec does an admirable job, the inability to play back smoothly is a serious drawback. I personally prefer the Pic Video codec, since it captures at the same quality of HuffYUV, even at higher data rates if wanted, and the captured file can be played back smoothly. For transcoding, frames are extracted from it at the same speed as HuffYUV.
I just don't understand Matrox at all. They sell this card, which is not bad, but instead of offering a way to make use of its best potential, they bundle a horrible propietary mjpeg codec which can't be used for editing, and from which you can extract the frames to another codec at an incredibly slow speed, and you can't encode any movie to that propietary codec because it just renders garbage. On top of that, they make the YUY2 option invisible so that one guy has to write a patch for it. Why didn't they just made the YUY2 option available by default and bundled a good mjpeg codec like the Pic Video one to begin with? It seems to me they have some pretty stupid people making decisions there. I mean, if the hardware's good but the software to make it work sucks it's not a good product, except for those who found out the hidden tricks to make it perform at its best.

------------------
Sebastian

[FM]

That's not a problem, buy another card without h/w mjpeg and use it with yuy2 and huffyuv. :-) Personally I bought Marvel g400 only because of h/w mjpeg. And I use it because it gives excelent quality videos to me. :-)

[Dr Mordrid]

No doubt about it, HuffYUV is NOT for playback. I use it for video where MPEG encoding is the destination so that no DCT to DCT transcoding is done. For playback PICVideo is the better choice.

Dr. Mordrid