Adjusting TMPGEnc Plus 2.5 for optimal results

[EdgarT]

Hello All,

I am working on taking several years of old 8MM analog videos and creating a DVD of the highlights. I have a Sony DCR-TRV33 which I am using to convert the analog signal and import it into my PC. The video quality looks great.

I edited the raw source, adjusted the audio, added still pictures, etc. using Screenblast Movie Studio and output the results to a DV AVI file and rendered it in the myDVD package that was included. The results looked ok on a laptop with an LC screen, but on a regular TV, it was dissapointing.

I switched to TMPGEnc Plus 2.5 to do the encoding following some of the instructions found on this site (I followed LordSmurf's conversion guide for the most part, though I changed the bitrate mode from CQ to two pass VBR... I really don't care how long it takes as long as I get the best quality possible!) The results were MUCH better than from myDVD!

I noticed that the resulting file was about 3GB for an hour of video.

There where several places where the resulting video was not ideal:

1. I have scrolling credits over a still image at the end of the video. The letters are almost unreadable (much worse than static text used elsewhere).

2. 95% of the still images look great, a few of them have a shimmering around some patterns. The most noticable one is a picture with a horizontal fence line on the background. There is a lot of video distortion on the fence.

I would appreciate any ideas on how to clean up these problems. I have a lot of extra space on the DVD-R so I could change TMPGEnc to create a bigger file if I knew what to change.

Finally, I noticed that the MovieStudio software seemed to detect that the interlace was "lower field first" and TMPGEnc seemed to pick the same value when I imported the DV file. I left it alone but I noticed that LordSmurf has this as "top field first" in his example.

Sorry for the length of this post. I have not learned enough about digital video to know what is important yet...

[reboot]

Using 2 pass VBR, set min to 2000, average to 2250 and max to 2520.
You're going to get a bigger file, but better quality.
If you want to max it out, set min/avg/max all at 2520, which is pretty much the same as CBR 100.

[Baldrick]

what bitrate are you using(i would guess around 6 mbit)? try the maximum(8mbit in tmpgenc but you can increase it to around 9 mbit depending what audio bitrate you have) if you have dvd space over.
http://dvd-hq.info/Compression.html

reboot: DVD, not svcd.

[EdgarT]

Thanks for the quick reply.

I will need to check out the bitrate tonight. My newbie face is going to show here, but I guess I'll ask the question anyway.. :P

Doesn't 2 pass VBR stand for variable bitrate which I would guess means that encoder adjusts the bitrate according to what is sees during the first pass?

If I set the bitrate to 8mbps do I need to change the mode to CQ or something like that?

[yamato72]

You don't need anywhere near 8k for 8mm. I use vbr with 2k min 5k avg 7k max for Hi8 and that's still overkill. I can get 80-90 mins on a DVD with PCM audio and bit more if I convert the audio to AC3.

Use CBR if you want quick encodes or don't need to fit alot on the disk since vbr looks better at lower bitrates.

If you're not filtering your video in VDub to feed TMPGEnc a clean signal, I recommend that as your next step.

[reboot]

Sorry, ignore the numbers I posted above, those are for SVCD, not DVD.
(open mouth, change feet)

[8trackkid]

To EdgarT,
You are correct in using Lower Field First (B) for DV, as this is what DV requires. Lordsmurf is probably capturing raw or compressed AVI, so this is why he uses Top Field First (A). Look in the DVDRHELP Glossary for DV, and it will give you some good info on it.
Umm, the only thing I can guess for the problems reading the credits is either too low a bitrate, or that you have used too much filter or softened the block noise in TMPGEnc. This can sometimes give video a "too smooth" appearance.
I'm sure there are people here with more experience that can give you some more ideas.

[EdgarT]

You don't need anywhere near 8k for 8mm. I use vbr with 2k min 5k avg 7k max for Hi8 and that's still overkill. I can get 80-90 mins on a DVD with PCM audio and bit more if I convert the audio to AC3.

My converted analog video looks fine. The problems are still images I added in Movie Studio and the scrolling credits. The still images problems (shimmering) are only noticable in about 5% of the pictures and then only when displayed on a interlaced TV. The still images look perfect on my laptop with a Liquid crystal display.

The scrolling text is definately blury in the mpg file (output of TmpGEnc Plus) and not so on the avi file.[/quote]

[dafreak]

Doesn't 2 pass VBR stand for variable bitrate which I would guess means that encoder adjusts the bitrate according to what is sees during the first pass?

answer taken from http://dvd-hq.info/Compression.html
In 2-pass VBR mode, the compressor will make two passes. In the first pass, it will compress the footage while trying to keep a constant quality, regardless of bitrate. It will then use the resulting bitrate (scaled to fit within the user-selected values) to do the final encoding. This results in the best relationship between compression and quality. It is, however, rather slow. If you use CBR at 8 Mb/s, you will end up with more or less the same quality, but the compression will not be as efficient. This means that the resulting file will be bigger, and you will not be able to fit as much video into one disc. If your movie has less than 1 hour, and you don't have any use for the extra space on the disc, you should use CBR to save on the encoding time.

[EdgarT]

Well, it looks like my original was at about 7000 KBPS. I boosted it up to 8750 KBPS (CBR) on a sample of the credits scroll and it was no better. I also tried several of the filters without any better results. I guess if I really wanted to kill myself on this, I could split the credits into a differentTMPGEnc track and encode it seperately.

As far as the shimmering in a few of the still pictures, I will try a higher bitrate and see what happens. If anybody has any other ideas on getting rid of this, let me know.

Thanks everyone for your help!

[EdgarT]

I discovered what most of my problem was. The color my 3 year old son had chosen RGB values (255, 21, 27) is not a legal NTSC color. I was digging through some old messages and found reference that each RGB value should be between 16 and 235 with a maximum difference between any two of 191. I changed the color to (235, 44, 44) and most of the blur on the scrolling credits was fixed.

My second problem was in several still photographs that had a “shimmering” noise where it looks like the interlace is bouncing around. I tried just about every setting on TEMPGEnc Plus without any luck on getting rid of it. I looked at one problem picture in Photoshop elements and noticed that the color of the white fence where I notice most of the shimmering was RGB (238, 254, 255).

Photoshop elements has an NTSC filter that I assume is suppose to fix the colors for NTSC use. I tried an experiment where I painted stripes in primary colors (255, 0, 0), (0, 255, 0), (0, 0, 255), (0, 255, 255) and the filter modified these stripes to values that are within the NTSC rules listed above.

When I used this filter on the photograph with the fence line in the distance, and probed the colors afterwards, the color was still (238, 254,255) at the location I tested before I applied the filter.

Is this filter working correctly? The area in question is very small on the photograph, but I was under the impression that “illegal NTSC colors” should not be present at all. I tried using the “filtered” picture and I still see the same noise in the mpg file.