Panasonic MPEG encoder washout

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I have been using the panasonic encorder for the past 6 months and I have been unable to adjust for tendency to washout/lighten the colors. Although, its output is very good, I do not get the vivid colors that I want. I have adjusted my capture card (BUZ - yes my card performs perfectly using a Iwill motherboard with the ALI chipset and I can capture full frames at 6 meg/sec with no dropped frames - must turn off preview and use a TV monitor for the preview but at less demanding captures, can use preview or overlay (ATI rage card) without any drops). I have increased my contrast, saturation and the brightness without much improvement. I have tried to change the hue but I get better flesh tones but other colors are not as accurate. Does anyone have any other thoughts how to improve the vividness of the colors. The other question I would to ask is using the panasonic to resize images. I previously would capture at 352x240 at 29.97 frames/sec and then convert it to VCD. I have also captures at full frames 720 or 704 x 480 and then allow panasonic to make VCD compliant files. I do not choose the interlace option ( allows panasonic to only look at the odd or even field) and allow the encoder to look at both fields. To me the resultant mpeg file plays even smoother. Does any one know if the encoder will combine both fields and then encode to obtain smoother movement. Doing this increases the time of encoding from 6 times RT to about 12 time RT. I am using a K2-500 processor with 128 RAM. Thank you.

-- klebsiella (klebsiella@visto.com), May 08, 2000

Answers

Use VirtualDub ( http://www.geocities.com/virtualdub/ ). Open the mpeg in virtualdub, then use the hue/level/contrast/brightness/noise reduction filters. Then either save the avi out and encode it, or throw vdub into frameserver mode ( proxy avi ) and feed the placeholder avi to panasonic encoder. Vdub will basicly feed frames into the encoder as needed.

Good Luck encoding

-- Eric (eric@snowmoon.com), May 08, 2000.


You basically have to try a range of different capture applications for producing AVIs that can be fed to the Panasonic and get worthwhile results, color saturation-wise. It's true that you can fine tune, say, Virtual Dub more minutely than Matrox PC-VCR. The latter introduces a slight yellow tinge on blue-white areas of the picture. But in both apps, I set color saturation between 90% and 100%. This produces heavily color saturated AVIs, but after encoding with Panasonic is finished, the results, for me, are okay; those that have seen the created VCD play on a TV with color set to mid say the saturation levels are acceptable.

-- EMartinez (epmartinez@yahoo.com), May 09, 2000.

I will try to increase the saturation more than 70% which I am using with my buz. This setting of 70% gives me nice vivid colors on my AVIs when I play them on the computer. I have written to panasonic mpeg technical support and awaiting their answer to see if they will fix their encoder. I found out the freeware TNPGencoder now has a patch to convert the japanese to english. Has anyone tried this encoder. I tried the new AVIVCD encoder (updated AVIMPEG freeware encoder)- it has nice color output has significant blockiness but is very quick as compared to the panasonic. Also would anyone know about BBMPEG output quality or the go motion (from ligos) found in videowave or videostudio newest versions. Thanks

-- klebsiella (klebsiella@visto.com), May 09, 2000.

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