How do I convert uncompressed frames directly to mpeg?

[sneaux]

You can record very high quality video from the Half Life 2 demo recorder. The demo recorder can export frames as TGA image sequences along with the WAV sound. I want to make a DVD of all the game play of HL2 so I need to convert to mpeg2. Virtualdub recognizes frame sequences. I open the pics in virtualdub and can compress them to just about every video format besides mpeg2. Right now I compress to the panasonic DV codec then use tmpg to convert to mpeg2 but I can see the loss in quality from conversion to dv. There's no loss when going uncompressed frames>uncompressed video>mpeg2 but uncompressed video is huge so I was hoping there was a way to convert frame sequences directly to mpeg. Is there?

[guns1inger]

You could try frameserving from virtualdub to tmpgenc - this will pass uncompressed footage across for encoding without the need to compress to DV.

[sneaux]

Cool, thanks. I got it to work with tmpg. Are there many other programs besides virtualdub and tmpg that can use frame servers. I tried premiere and After Effects but those didn't work.

[guns1inger]

You can frameserve from Premiere to an encoder using the Debugmode Frameserver.

I believe that Vegas and perhaps Premiere can read AVS (avisynth) files. Avisynth is a pure frameserver that has no interface and uses script files to work. Complicated at first, but 2 - 3 times faster than vdub.

[manono]

I would also recommend AviSynth. I was trying to access the site to see if the ImageSource command can read TGA, but it's down at the moment. It can read many consecutively numbered pictures in a number of picture formats.

[guns1inger]

I would also recommend AVSEdit, and simple script editor that has all of the built in Avisynth commands covered, with parameter help etc. Handy tool for when you are starting out.