I've used Vegas Video's MPEG-2 encoder to do the encoding for some home movie DVDs. I used DVD Workshop to do the DVD authoring, but it presumably had no affect on the video quality because I made sure it didn't do any re-encoding.
To get the best possible quality, I encoded at a variable video bit rate with a maximum of 9.8 and and average of about 8.5 to 9.2 Mbps. I'd describe the video quality of the resulting DVDs to be fair, but not particularly good, but I am admittedly fussy. I often see slight to moderate MPEG artifacts, and some parts of the video flicker noticably.
My video is admittedly quite hard to compress, since it is almost all taken with a hand-held mini-DV camera, and has a lot of pans, zooms, and following shots. There are very few scenes where the camera remains static for any length of time.
I'm wondering how the MainConcept encoder compares to other encoders that are available at a realistic price (a few hundred dollars). I tried the latest evaluation version of TMPGEnc Plus, but it didn't look obviously better, even when I set all the quality setting to maximum. It was also many times slower.
I'd be interested to here other opinions.
To get the best possible quality, I encoded at a variable video bit rate with a maximum of 9.8 and and average of about 8.5 to 9.2 Mbps. I'd describe the video quality of the resulting DVDs to be fair, but not particularly good, but I am admittedly fussy. I often see slight to moderate MPEG artifacts, and some parts of the video flicker noticably.
My video is admittedly quite hard to compress, since it is almost all taken with a hand-held mini-DV camera, and has a lot of pans, zooms, and following shots. There are very few scenes where the camera remains static for any length of time.
I'm wondering how the MainConcept encoder compares to other encoders that are available at a realistic price (a few hundred dollars). I tried the latest evaluation version of TMPGEnc Plus, but it didn't look obviously better, even when I set all the quality setting to maximum. It was also many times slower.
I'd be interested to here other opinions.