I've never been a big fan of the standard MPEG-2 add-in offered by VF. Most of my editing is video of my son's high school football games, and because of the amount of fast motion, the hardcoded rendering settings, in my opinion, produce noticeable and unacceptable pixelation and artifacts. However, if you want to include MPEG-2 files in your VF project (which is not recommended) you have no choice but to purchase the add-in.

I use TMPGEnc ($48 downloadable from www.tmpgenc.com), which I have found to produce excellent results. It is completely customizeable. I like the constant-quality (CQ) setting, which can be easily changed depending on the amount of motion, quality of original footage and desired file size (amount of video that fits on a DVD). The default value of 65%, produces excellent results of DV .AVI files with a lot of fast motion. For original analog footage, which I digitize using a Canopus ADVC-50 card, I have found I can lower the CQ setting to around 45% without significant loss in final DVD quality because of the reduced quality of the original video. With a CQ setting of 65%, I can get about 70 minutes of video on a DVD. With a CQ setting of 45%, I can get about 100 minutes of video.

Another nice feature of TMPGEnc is that you can setting up batch rendings. Converting DV .AVI files to MPEG-2 can be quite time consuming. If you have multiple files to render, it can be tedious to sit around and wait for each to be individually rendered. With batch rendering, you can set up multiple files to be rendered automatically. For example, if I do one of my son's football games, I'll have a separate AVI file for each quarter, which results in 4 files. I set up the batch rendering to run overnight. 1.5 hours of video takes a total of about 6 hours to render -- perfect for this to be done while you sleep.

You might also want to look at Ulead's DVD Movie Factory 2. It has MPEG-2 conversion capabilities as well as being DVD authoring package. Furthermore, like TMPGEnc, it's MPEG-2 rendering settings are quite customizeable, but not to the extent of TMPGEnc. A fully functional 30-day trial version is available for download from Ulead's web site at www.ulead.com. For $45, I've found it to be a good value for the DVD authoring capabilites alone.

Depending on your DVD authoring brand you may need to go to the
optional version to set bitrates for optimum results. The standard version
has limitations and possibly the authoring system may re-encode your
video which is a no-no. The authoring software determines if the MPEG2
NTSC DVD file is compliant and if it doesn't think so it re-encodes.
This is a real head-banger problem for some.

James J. Kizak

So Pro is better. At $100. For just another $100 or $200 total, I can upgrade to Vegas. Does Vegas have Mpeg2 built in or do you have to pay extra for it?

-Tim

Hiyah Tim! - Just upgraded to VV. You get MPEG 1 and 2. These are Mainconcepts which you need to register the first time you use it - yes? The registration took me two attempts, but was successful on the second attempt. No, you don't pay extra, it's part of the VV 3.0c package

As to the camparative virtues of MC and TG, go to the VV Forum and do a search. I can't offer any feedback as I've yet to get my head around TG!

Cheers

Grazie

> For just another $100 or $200 total, I can upgrade to Vegas. Does Vegas have Mpeg2 built in or do you have to pay extra for it?

Ahhh... A man after my own logic. ;-) That’s exactly how I got Vegas. I figured if I’m going to pay $100 for the pro encoder, I might as well kick in another $100 and go for Vegas, which includes the pro encoder and a ton of more features. I actually like the pro encoder better than TMPEnc and I had been using TMPEnc since the beta12 days. Take the plunge. Vegas is awesome and you’ll wonder how you ever got along with just 2 video tracks for all that time. :)

~jr

Soooo... JohnnyRoy . . . how does TMPEnc compare to MC's MPEG2 within VV3.0c?

Grazie

Grazie,

At DVD bitrates of 6000-8000/kbps you can’t really tell the difference. But I was amazed at how well the MainConcept encoder did the anemic VCD bitrate of 1150/kbps. I was encoding a VHS tape of TV shows to VCD and the MainConcept encoder had noticeably less compression artifacts than TMPEnc. They were still very close and if you weren’t looking for it you probably wouldn’t notice it.

Of course, the nice thing about using MC in VV3 is that you don’t have to make a big AVI file. You can just generate the MPEG right from the timeline. Since my target is usually a DVD these days, this streamlines things for me a lot.

~jr