How long should TMPGE take to convert 1 hr of TV?

[mreed80]

I have a 2.0GHz, plenty of HD space and 768 RAM

I captured 1 hour of TV using VirtualDub to an .AVI file.(13 dropped frames, so pretty good quality!)

Anyway, I want to put the file onto a DVD along with other episodes.

In TMPGE, it took about 10 hours to convert to MPEG2.
I set the quality to highest(very slow). Does that quality level make that big of a difference? Especially in a TV capture which already isn't perfect.

Any tips? How long does it take everybody to do this?
I of course would love to hear any alternate methods to help me out.

Thanks

[Gazorgan]

I set the quality to highest(very slow). Does that quality level make that big of a difference? Yes

Don't do that, especially with a TV capture. Drop down 1 setting, maybe 2 for TV (a noisey video source by definition). I do multipass DVD backups (2 hours) in under 10 hours on a 2 GHz machine.

You don't say how it's going onto DVD, the format or any parameters.

[mreed80]

I'm just converting it to a mpeg2 file and was going to burn with probably Ulead.

[Betamax]

You realy should stat with a TMPGE template as base.
Then you'll match the restrictions for the specific purpose.

1 Hour TV is quite 'noisy'. But still can be okay if you managed to capture directly into a DV-codec (in which case it should be interlaced, like the TV-source always is).
Then encoding can be quite fast, even when using 2-pass.
1hour encoding, using 2-pass, of DV-material (having DVD-resolution : 720x576/480) will least for less then 9hours (at an AMD 1.2Ghz).
Just be sure there also is enough space free at the disk where your tempory's are stored (mostly the C:-drive).
Fastest is when you use 3 different disks (not 3partitions at 1disk), source at disk3, destination at disk2, temps at disk1 (also using seperate controllers, so 3 seperate ide-controllers for instance or all at the same scsi-controller is fine too)...

[neomaine]

mreed80,

I do quite alot of TV shows (NTSC) with my AIW Radeon. My process is as follows:

SETTINGS:
- ATI MMC 7.7
- HuffyUV 2.1
- 576x480 (Helps keep the file size down, gotta figure out how to do 352x480 which should be plenty)
- 29.97fps
- 44.1 stereo sound

This gives me a captured file in the 12-14gb per hour range. A one hour show takes about...one hour to capture
NOTE:My sound card sucks (on board AC'97) so what I've found that helps is to make sure that MMC is running and start a 5sec capture to make sure everything is loaded.

TMPGenc with Default VCD template with the following settings.
VIDEO
- Highest Quality
ADVANCED
- Input source, Interlaced
- Source apsect ratio: 4:3 display
- Source range to edit out the commercials
- Simple color correction, I give the contrast, red, green +5 to give the output a little zip
- Sharpen edge to 80. I like sharper vs softer for VCD. Otherwise it seems I need to put my glasses on.
- Deinterlace
- Clip frame if the show is widescreen (gotta save that bitrate...)
- Captures are from satelite so there is virtually no noise to have to worry about. Noise filter will almost double the time if getting over-the-air and you want to clean it up a bit.
A 40-45 minute show (one hour minus commercials) takes no more than 1.5 hrs, so about 2:1 given my hardware setup. My source and output are on the same drive since I get very little <5mins difference from going to another drive.

I'm doing mpeg1, but if you're doing 2 pass VBR for mpeg2 output, this will almost double your encode time.

Hopefully, this helps you out. And of course, if anyone has questions or recommendations I'd be happy to answer or apply them.

[SaSi]

For TV quality video, using Motion Estimate Search is fast and good quality. Also, two pass VBR is a slow process by itself. I have tried all (well almost) possible permutations with a sample video part of 5 minutes and found out that:
Constant Quality mode is the fastest
A quality of 75-80 is more than enough for TV material (giving adequately small video size)
Selecting Normal compression (or Motion Search Estimate if the material has lots of still and high action changes) is the fastest tradeoff between good quality, small size and fast conversion.

On a 3GHz P4, the above translate into a conversion speed of X0.5 or 2 hours for a 1 hour video.

[sonoma]

neomaine, setting mmc to 480x480 (or anything else) is quite simple. I use this setting, capture in huffy avi, edit in vdub, and frame server to tmpgenc SVCD without resizing.
if you would like details, let me know.

[neomaine]

I'll try it on tonights episode of Farscape....thanks