Guide for encoding MPG-1? Is VV3's Main Concept inferior to VV2's Ligos?

theigloo wrote on 5/22/2002, 7:03 PM


I'm still a big fan of MPG-1. For the simple reason that everyone's computer can play it.

I had great results with VV2's Ligos encoder. With VV3's Main Concept encoder I get a lot of pixelation in scenes where the camera moves. I have all the slidebars maxed. The file sizes are the same as with the Ligos mpgs but the quality is terible. Everyone I know has noticed the drop in quality of my work.

Am I doing something wrong? Is there a guide? Or is the Main Concept MPG-1 encode inferior to the Ligos one? If so, how can I get the Ligos encoder back?

Matt.

Comments

Thierry wrote on 5/23/2002, 2:55 PM
I, too was not able to render a good looking movie in MC MPEG-1 or MPEG-2 format. I tried several settings but the quality was not good. After several try I render in .avi file and render with TMPGenc. Result? Great looking movies. Of course it's a lot of work (specially with windows 98) my movie is devided in 2 file but the "join" feature in TMPGenc work pretty well (just a drop of the sound in the spot joined). So, I may do something wrong in my settings in VV3.0a but I do not yet.
Thierry
stepfour wrote on 5/23/2002, 7:00 PM
One of the main reasons I bought Vegas was hearing about the MPEG-2 Codec it posseses and the reported quality. I have not gotten far enough into this to try it yet, but surely there must be some setting or tweak you need to do to get great results. Who's doing great quality MPEG-2 with Vegas and MainConcept? Please post. Thanks.
BillyBoy wrote on 5/23/2002, 10:25 PM
My experience is TMPGenc does better MPEG-1 (for VCD's) while MC encoder for MPEG-2 (SVCD or DVD) is equal or superior. Mileage varies depending on source file. There is another long thread discussing "tweaking",

http://www.sonicfoundry.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?ForumID=4&MessageID=104553

Aside from messing a little with DC and bitrates little if anything is gained by trying to "tweak" and leaving the template settings as is should give very good results. The encoder controls are exposed for those needing special adjustments for extraordinary situations. The drift I got was if you can't define what those extraordinary situations would be you'd be foolish messing with settings not knowing what they would do which is likely make things worse, not better.

theigloo wrote on 5/25/2002, 5:24 AM

Thanks for the info guys, but I'm not into mpg-2.

I want my ligos compressor back. It was way better.

Calling tech support...