I am amazed and impressed at the effort some of you put into MPEG encoding- you obviously have a critical eye. Question for you who fit the hardcore category:

Typically, what is your destination format- VCD? SVCD? DVD? Other?

What is your most commonly used source material- ripped movies (my lips are sealed; if movies, what capture process), DV, VHS, betacam, other?

ps: kolbo- what is the trick to keep joined files from glitching at the cut point- happens at least 50% of the time no matter what I've tried.

Yea, me too. I'm amazing I never tire of knob twisting.

Funny sidebar. Couple years ago I was into web page creation big time. So I picked up a copy of Dreamweaver, a very cool HTML editor with a lot of bells and whistles. To make a long story short the application is open so a lot of guys wrote goodies you could hook directly into the program. Well, one guy must have spent months searching the web looking for all the goodies guys wrote and he put it into a self extracting little applet. So of course I had to try it. It ended up with the tool bar having literally HUNDREDS of options. Pig heaven for a knob twister like me, but not very practical.

More on point, I started making VCD's, didn't like the limited bitrate, moved up to SVCD, better, then played with XVCD because what knob twister wants to be boxed in my "standards", and now I'm into DVD's. I think I'm finally happy with the quality.

Still working my way though a giant backlog of mpeg source files from my save my memories project. You mean people actually rip off copywrited DVD's and videos?

I'm shocked. <big wink>

BillyBoy,

Nifty way to automate those tedious trial-and-error tests. I'll definitely use this.

John

"Choose Join. List the encoded files in order. Press go and come back later."

I always get an audio glitch, and sometimes a video glitch, at the points where TMPGEnc joins. I have not been checking "Output bitstream for Edit (Closed GOP)" in TMPGEnc. Could this be my problem?

Reading these I guess I just have the luck of the Irish, but I am Norweigien ...
I have not had a problem with pop or glitches and I haven't done anything to it. I have not done it tons of times so maybe it is just waiting for me?

K

Excuse me for jumping into this very informative thread. I also downloaded the Mpeg guide and read it. I use Video Factory and have purchased the MPEG encoding codec. I have learned a lot reading your posts. I am simply trying to encode to SVCD a few video clips that I have on VHS tape. I accept that is not the best source. I have tried capturing with virtualdub creating 480 x 480 avi files. I then dragged and dropped them into VF and did a bit of clipping and added some music.

After reading all of your posts I am beginning to think that instead of capturing the clips from my VCR using my WINTV card I should get a DV Camcorder and use it to digitize the clips as a pass through process.

I also believe you lean slightly towards using TMPGenc to encode to Mpeg 2 rather than the SF MPEG encoders?

Sorry if this is off topic. If it is perhaps you could direct me to the right place. I found less helpful discussions over on the VF forum.

I have had a chance to play with the CinemaCraft Encoder for the past few months, and have discovered a site that looks into a little-known feature of the encoder. Basically, once the file is encoded into the MPEG2 format, one can get a visual look at the size and quality of portions of the file, and for those few areas where quality is lower (because of high motion) then one can manually allocate more bits. In this manner, the quality of the finished MPEG2 encoding is increased without much of an increase of the file size.

I admit this is at the edge of the envelope for most users, but it sounds like there are folks here in this forum who enjoy the challenge of getting a beautiful rendering at a very low bitrate. The web site is http://www.doom9.net/, and click on "The Guides", then "DVD and MiniDVD Guide", then "Getting the best out of CCE." Much of the discussion is related to ripping and then repacking commercial DVDs, which is irrelevant to our topic here.

The article refers to an original discussion published at www.robshot.com, but that site was down when I tried returning to it just a few minutes ago.

It appears that the default NTSC DVD settings in the template were not set as high as the recommendations in the encoding guide. After modifying the settings as mentioned in the guide, the encoding from VV was MUCH improved. For a 1 hr 35 min video I could tell no difference from what I have been getting from TMPGenc.

I guess this issue is never going away. <wink>

Are you referring to the max bitrate setting, another or all of them?

As I understand it, any variable bitrate rendering engine uses a very complex series of formulas based on the current frame to make what for lack of a better phrase is a "educated guess" as to how the next frames will change. This "guess" will either increase, decrease or leave the current bitrate 'as is' based on this caculation.

If the maximum bitrate is set too high, once it kicks in, I'm assuming the file size is going to grow far out of porportion to any significant improvement except for maybe the 1-3% where very rapidly changing frames may benefit. The net result having less video fit on a DVD disc, if that's what you're making.

I'm also laboring under the assumption that when using the variable bitrate rendering option the bitrate doesn't simply change from high to average to low and back again, but rather is a oscillating wave, constantly undulating back and forth between the set values. If so, would not the rendering engine tend to use higher bitrates if the max value was set higher then the default and in effect 'waste' using higher biterates than were really needed?

As I said several times I think the MC rendering engine makes excellent DVD renders with the default settings. However if you must tinker, would not the greatest benefit come from cranking up the average bitrate since by far that's the range that should be used the most often in most videos unless you have an entire video which has a lot of fast action?

The settings I am specifically referring to are:

1) Bitrate - Naturally the highest possible value the better but the default was about 4,000,000. Since this was a 1.5 hour program, I was able to use a 6,100,000 average and still fit the full video which is just slightly above the book recommendations.

2) Video Quality - The manual recommends 31 (the highest possible value) but the default setting was 15. I believe this may be the setting that affected the final result the most.

3) I did up the minimum bitrate from 192,000 to 2,000,0000 which was different from the book settings.

4) DC Coefficient - I changed this from 9 to 10.