Vidding 101

[thuviaptarth]

I should probably post this to vidder, but I am too embarrassed, because I feel like I should have figured it out already fter reading the A&E Guide five zillion times. I am hoping one of you will take pity on me and answer here anyway.

The problem is (I mean, the problem apart from not being able to tell where the beat is, and Premiere crashing on me like a really bad pun, and ...), it feels like I'm doing a lot of processing on the files I rip from DVDs and I can't shake the feeling that I really shouldn't have to do so much to recent footage to get it viddable. If I do, that's cool -- I'm doing it, I've done it. I'm just terrified I'm doing extra and unnecessary processing and degrading visual quality because I don't know what I'm doing and am too freaked out to be able to tell anymore whether one picture is better than another.

So, I'm ripping the Supernatural DVDs (I know you're shocked), and this is what I'm doing:

1. I rip VOB files from the DVDs.
   
2. I run the VOBs through DGIndex (usually I create one index for each DVD) to get D2V indices.
   
3. I create AVS files for the indices which look roughly like this:
   
   

   MPEG2Source("C:/Thuvia Ptarth/spn2.1.d2v",cpu=4,upconv=true)
   Telecide(order=1, post=4,show=false) 
   Decimate(mode=1, threshold=1.0)
   ConvertToRGB32()
   

   
   
   --except for when, just to make me extra crazy, the DVDs switch from Top Field First to Bottom Field First for a disc or two in Season Two, completely destroying the false sense of confidence I gained from anticipating the Pilot and first disc might be in a different frame rate than the other discs, but. Anyway.
   

So, um. Is that right? Should I be doing something different? Should I be doing less? Should I be doing more? Should I be going for a particular frame rate or just converting the odd files to whatever frame rate most of the files are in?

Help?

Comments

[heresluck]

...you left in the deinterlacing, just took out the color corrections.

Yes, because taking out the deinterlacing changes the number of frames; if you comment out the deinterlacing (or forget to put it in) and then put it in later, your edits are no longer in the right place (because Premiere counts by frames). Sadly, I know this from personal experience.

(Can't you combine all the ColorYUV and Tweak arguments into one line per command? Or were you just playing around with how different combinations looked?)

I assume they can all go on one line, but it's easier for me to think about them as independent variables, and separate lines helps me keep track of what I'm doing; and yes, there's the additional plus of being able to comment out individual lines to see the change more clearly.

As for the number of .avs files, 8-10 seems to be about the limit for my system (and that's my new souped-up system); the one time I tried more, Premiere crashed constantly. On the other hand, it doesn't seem to care much about the SIZE of the .avs files; my most recent vid had 11-12 eps per .d2v, and Premiere only choked a few times when I'd been rendering on the fly with more abandon than usual. I can't speak to the effects of Vista, however.

I do quite a bit of processing for some vids and almost none for others; I did much less processing in the Due South scripts for "In the Mirror," for instance, and Serenity needed some resizing but almost no other processing because it's so insanely pretty already. I'm not planning to do much filtering of BtVS, either, because I'd rather tweak levels on a clip-by-clip basis within Premiere.