Crappy MPEG2 quality from TMPGenc

[stankley]

I captured DV home movie into Premiere 6, then frameserved to TMPGenc using NTSC DVD MPEG2 template. The quality of the MPEG2 is quite poor - it suffers badly from quantization effects (a white wall will have a large moving off-white splodge moving about).

Any ideas? Are the TMPGenc templates really accurate? I wonder if the bitrate may be too low

[w00kiee]

mpeg2 is not tmpgencs strong point... use cce and 3-4 pass vbr -


cce - 'it gets the splodge out!'

[stankley]

Thanks for the reply: only problem is it's double-dutch to me. What is "cce" and "3-4 pass vbr"?

If tmpgenc is not up to the job, then what would you recommend? I need something I can frameserve to.

[dphirschler]

I've had no problem with TMPGenc's mpeg-2. I've created some damn impressive SVCD's that rival DVD in appearance.


Darryl

[w00kiee]

CCE = cinema craft encoder... link available in the tools section. 3 - 4 pass vbr is the encoding method... tmpgenc does 2 pass vbr at the most

[salvius]

TMPGEnc mpeg2 is just fine.

[stankley]

OK - so if TMPGenc is basically sound, then why am I getting the "splodginess" problem???

[homerpez]

My 2 cents:

While TMPGEnc is better at MPEG-2 than any competition below it (Ulead, LSX, bbMPEG), CCE is better than all of them for MPEG-2.

First benefit is Multi-pass encoding. CCE can do as many as you like (though beyond 4 is almost useless). TMPGEnc can only do 2-pass, which is really only equal to CCE's single-pass (long story).

Second is superior VBR. It's much MUCH more accurate than TMPGEnc's, or CQ-VBR encoding in general. If you need to cram an AVG of 1500 into an encode, you'll get it within +/- 5 kbps.

Third is how CCE handles quality loss at insufficient bitrates. It makes the video "grainy" first, before it gets "blocky". When you are watching on an analog TV, this can really make all the difference. You can see blocks when they show up, but you have to look pretty hard to find the graniness.