720p 59.94 to 480p 23.976 in TMPGEnc w/o Using AVISynth

[CubDukat]

For a while I have been using AVISynth along with TMPGEnc 4.0 Xpress to crunch down my OTA HD captures to something more DVD-friendly. Unfortunately, in the case of 1080i material, I no longer have my original script, so I'm forced to use one generated through MeGUI's AVS Script Creator, which makes everything take three times longer than it used to.

Because of this, I will now start loading the original DVR-MS files directly into TMPGEnc, taking out the commercials and rendering them directly as 23.976 MPEG-2 files. Now, as you probably figured, with 1080i shows this is relatively easy, but with 720p shows like "Glee" and "FlashForward," that might be a little harded--especially with "FlashForward," because of ABC's well-known cadence issues.

Right now, for the 1080i conversions, I have TMPGEnc set up with Deinterlace as "24fps (special animation or prioritize motion) and the other control to "Inverse Telecine (reinforced anti-striping), and in the MPEG-2 setting section, I have it set to render as 23.976 progressive. Will these settings also work for 720p, since it's not a source that needs to be deinterlaced? And if not, how would I set it up so that when I take it into TMPGEnc Authoring Works it doesn't decide to re-render it?

If I have to, I can always stay with the 720p script, since that seems to be as fast as it ever was

[jagabo]

If you 720p is film sourced all you need is decimation.

WhateverSource("filename.ext")
TDecimate(mode=2, rate=23.976)
WhateverResize(720, 480)

If it's not film source (real 60 fps) you'll want to make a 29.97 fps interlaced DVD.

WhateverSource("filename.ext")
WhateverResize(720, 480)
SeparateFields()
SelectEvery(4,0,3)
Weave()

[CubDukat]

And I don't have to worry about it taking the wrong frames out with ABC shows? remember, they've been known to have an inconsistent cadence with their shows in order to squeeze more commercials in.

I'll give it a try. I just happen to still have some ABC shows on my hard drive.

[jagabo]

And I don't have to worry about it taking the wrong frames out with ABC shows? remember, they've been known to have an inconsistent cadence with their shows in order to squeeze more commercials in.

TDecimate() will remove duplicate frames whenever it can. The bigger issue you'll have with time compression is the underlying frame rate is no longer 23.976 fps. The film is sped up to a higher frame rate to shorten the running time.

[dannyboy48888]

hmm. tmpeg sux at this kind of work. take the megui generated script (tell it to scan for interlacing first) resize to desired MOD16 deimensions and feed it to HCenc. take the .m2v file and the .(audio) and mux them with your muxer of choice (tmpeg 2.0 and 3.0 has a muxer )

[CubDukat]

I alternate between HCEnc and TMPGEnc quite a bit, and sometimes I'll even have both crunching at the same time.

The only reason I don't use HCEnc all the time is that the HCBatchGUI (?) program is way too fiddly for my liking. Maybe I should play with it a bit more to learn how it works. Also, I'm not sure why, but my results in HCEnc look slightly softer than in TMPGEnc because there's a low pass filter in TMPGEnc that I can disable, but I can't find the switch for that in HCEnc. But yeah, it's crazy fast. However, even if I set things up to be DVD-compliant, TMPGEnc Authoring works still insists on re-rendering the file to its liking. I'll check to see if I can disable that one too...


I'm not at my computer right now, but when I get the chance I'll post the scripts I made last night and you can see if there's anything I can improve on. They both seem reasonably fast and of good quality.

[freebird73717]

The only reason I don't use HCEnc all the time is that the HCBatchGUI (?) program is way too fiddly for my liking. Maybe I should play with it a bit more to learn how it works.

One of the main complaints that I've noticed people having with hcbatchgui is that I made it too complicated...
I am working on adding a simple user interface to hcbatchgui that should make it easier to use. Getting closer to releasing it. If you have any suggestions to for improving it drop a post to the development page.

You can use hanks hcgui directly instead of with my batch gui or you can create a .bat file and batch run hcenc that way. Look here for a couple of methods discussed by me and AlanHK.


Another batch gui you might look at is avstodvd. It also uses hcenc.