Video quality of digital episodes

#MakeMoreMST3K Kickstarter
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This is tremendously useful, thanks for posting it @Hamdinger. Here’s the first image you posted (from the KS digital):

image

These artifacts look like the result of deinterlacing (a necessary evil since the original source was interlaced); the smooth round base of Servo’s neck is a little jaggy. The minutia of deinterlacing is explained in great detail elsewhere online so I won’t rehash it, but the gist is that every other horizontal line of data is removed and the encoder essentially “guesses” to fill in what used to be there. It works for the most part, except for the edges of objects, as seen here.

I use Handbrake to re-encode from the DVD MPEG-2, and I’ve spent hours pulling my hair out over this. I ended up settling for a “decomb” filter instead of “deinterlacing” because it’s not quite as aggressive:

image

The “comb teeth” interlacing artifacts are gone and the smoothness is retained. (I labeled this image “A” for reference.)

Here’s @Hamdinger’s last image with the aspect corrected:

image

@Hamdinger, yours was cropped by a few pixels on all axes, presumably you didn’t like the black strips on either side?

I initially encoded to H265 because it’s a newer, more efficient codec that produces slightly better quality than H264 and in slightly less space than H264, but after lots of side-by-side tests, I found that for MST3K the improvement was negligible and not worth the astronomically increased encoding time. So mine are all encoded to H264 with decomb filter.

Your image overall looks to be just a smidge higher quality than mine, I’m guessing you used higher quality encoding settings. Did you encode to H264 as well?

My final file size for this episode is 1,322,565,239 bytes, what’s yours?

The question that inspired this thread was, “Are the digital episodes better quality than what I get if I re-encode from disc myself?” Assuming all the digital episodes are encoded more or less to this standard, we have our answer and it is “no.” Ripping from disc and re-encoding produces better results.

If anyone else can post stills from other digital episodes, it would help to confirm this. I’ll be anxious to get my hands on a digital episode from this KS and see if it’s indeed similar.

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22

I have been using the Hybrid encoder. QTGMC on the slow preset to deinterlace with vaguedenoiser at the default settings and dehalo_alpha with sensitivity adjusted to 65/85 for filters. H264 at 1400 kbit/s. The overall file size for Alien from LA was .98GB. These settings work pretty good for most episodes. I do crop the black bars. Don’t see the need to waste bits on them when encoding for PC playback.

I gotta say that QTGMC really is the best at deinterlacing I have used. When used with NNEDI3 as a resizer, Hybrid encoder can produce near HD quality upconverts on animated material from DVD sources. I have not seen much advantage upconverting originally interlaced live action material though.

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This is a fascinating conversation about converting video and I am grateful to you guys for knowing H265 exists while most people barely know H264 is the spec for video now. And I’m grateful we are getting so many great video downloads.
However, it seems like it should be more of a communication puzzle than a technological one.

The videos are released at the spec that they are released at, right? Those of us who know what the latest mpeg-4 or H264 spec or H265 you read recently is are sad if the videos are released at an older spec.

Most fans won’t notice and will burn to DVD if at all on default settings. :man_shrugging: :pensive:

It’s not a good idea to upconvert from mpeg-2 to mpeg-4 I think I remember hearing in college for digital art a decade ago. Due to generational loss as mentioned by McCloud above.

So, I think it’s important to communicate clearly the specs of the video wherever a download link is given so that people know if they try to upconvert that that was their own choice.

Sidebar: I’m saving these downloads on my Mimobot drives. I expect USB to outlast DVD as a hardware medium. :wink: :sunny:

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Hi euphoriafish,
I put together a rough edit for the Prom It’s a Pleasure short project on the old Cinematic Titanic forum you worked on.

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I totally appreciate the technical expertise and specialist knowledge in this discussion. It’s very useful stuff, thanks! And yet it still calls this skit to mind. :grin:

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I love that skit! And you’re absolutely right, of course – the vast majority of folks really don’t care about this technical stuff. They download an episode, it’s watchable and enjoyable, end of story. It makes perfect sense. But there are a few of us who are compelled to chase a perfection we will likely never achieve. I can’t speak for others, but for myself I suppose it’s a bit of “grass is greener” syndrome; if I can eek out a smidgen better video quality by jumping through all these hoops, despite the ridiculous amount of time and effort involved, I can’t not do it.

I also agree with @euphoriafish, generational loss is no good so re-encoding something that’s already been encoded is generally not recommended. I pursued it in this case for two reasons: the file size difference between MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 is huge; a 90-minute MST3K episode DVD (MPEG-2) is 4.7GB vs. about 1GB as MPEG-4. Storage is dirt cheap these days but it’s still not free. And because MPEG-2 is so big, seeking within a video takes longer, which bugs me. (@ivan said that the downloads will include at least some specs about the video; probably the codec, maybe the bitrate.)

I’ve been doing this for years, and even had experience in the 90s in broadcast television, where I worked with the same 3/4" video MST3K was shot on, but I’m still learning. @Hamdinger is using even more advanced encoding tools, and I’m probably going to bug him for some tips and advice. :wink:

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I just play with encoding as a hobby. A new thread in the artsy crafty or off topic section to discuss video encoding might be a good idea.

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Great discussion guys. Really hoping these are best quality possible and at least MP4. I grabbed several of the episode bundles as I’ve never been able to find many of the DVDs (mostly relying on second hand shops). My plan is to have them uploaded to my PLEX system (greatest invention Ever!) so they are available for viewing on computer as well as the bigger TV.

I’ve done some reencoding over the years as I rip DVDs I own to the aforementioned PLEX, I’ve found with many discs it’s best to leave the deinterlace stuff alone and play with the decomb settings instead.

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I wonder how they would look deinterlaced, then using AI for the upconvert. In a perfect world, what other improvements would be cool? Not that this is really an option. But I’ve thought a contrast and saturation bump would be neat.

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Off topic but I was just looking at Plex because they are streaming some classic movies for free. I was immediately suspicious but it sounds like they are legit?

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Plex has gotten into free streaming with ads. If that’s what you were looking at, it’s legit.

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Thanks for the info!

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Are you thinking upconverted beyond their original resolution? Like to 1080p or the like? That would be sweet. I’ve heard of AIs that are upconverting other old content to HD (and even 4K), apparently with pretty stunning results. Can you imagine seasons 1-10 on Blu-ray?!

I’ve long been bothered at the little traces of color that sometimes occur in black-and-white video, little sparkles of cyan or magenta. It’s an issue that far predates digital video, but digital also offers the solution: discard all color data when encoding.

So while we’re dreaming here, I’d love to see all the black and white movie episodes remastered with all color data stripped from the movie segments, which would also fix the ghastly blue and green tints that were applied to the silhouettes in some early episodes.

(I could theoretically do it myself, but the bits where the theater hatch opens/closes would require frame-by-frame work, and of course there’d be the generational loss. So let’s dream big!)

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'Nother Plex user here. They’re legit but the bread and butter is in running your own media server. The ad-supported content is relatively new.

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Now that the app is live it looks very similar to the digital episodes. I personally think there is room for improvement quality wise. Hope this won’t be a problem as the whole episode is on you tube already. Please let me know and I will remove them if desired. I uploaded samples from the kickstarter reward and my encode from DVD source of a short section of a host segment from master ninja 2.

kickstarter

DVD source

Not perfect, but I think it is an improvement, and a smaller file than the kickstarter reward. Not trying to be critical. I just want my favorite show to look as good as possible.

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Email this post to me at ivan@mst3k.com and I’ll ask Shout Factory to look into it?

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I myself love the shows in their original I-duped-it-off-my-kid-brother’s-VHS-tapes (recorded at SLP! yup 6 hours crammed onto a tape) quality.

Now if we wanna talk sound quality of digital episodes . . . . am I the only person who wants many eps remixed with the riff volume down a scooch and the movie volume up a tad???

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Yeah I thought it was just me getting old. :slight_smile: The movie volume could come up some and the riffing turned down a smidge.

Though I was watching the Master Ninjas the other day and Joel and the bots seem to have trouble hearing dialog as well.

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I know there’s been talk for years about certain episodes which had volume issues in the movie source itself (and I think there have been a few riffs about that too).

But I’ve been rewatching (my Gizmoplex copies) of the 20 Jonah-era eps these past couple weeks as a buildup to S13 . . . . The volume balance between the movie and riffing is pretty one-sided even in those new experiments. Part of it is age; part of it is me not necessarily having my overall volume up very high; but it’s not completely that.

Luckily the newer episodes have preeeeetty nice! captioning – not PERFECT but not too bad! And I and others still stand ready to help make the Gizmoplex captions the BEST EVER; see above.

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I think that was a problem when they were on NetFlix too. I remember several episodes where the riffs were very loud compared to the movies, so I don’t think it’s just the transfer to Gizmoplex.

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