Quality lost during AVI and MPEG conversion using TMPG

[bromhead]

Hi all
I'm pretty new to VCD authoring and what I have done so far I have really enjoyed but I have a problem that I just can't solve. I capture using Virtaldub and the picture quality of the AVI is spot on but when I encode using TMPG I start to get noise blocks and slight speckly distortion around objects. I have tried a lot of the filters in TMPG but none seem to work and the noise reduction filter seem to take 40 mins for a 2min clip to encode. I'm sure I'm doing something silly to cause it but I can't seem to find it.
Please help me if you can, I would be in your debt.
Thanks All.

[Majinbu]

The reduce noise filter will sometimes more than double the encoding time of a full movie but it does reduce pixelation from what I have found I do mostly DVD ripps and use TMPG on High Quality but not the slowest setting and noise reduction as a filter and its on point

Majinbu

[Vejita-sama]

What settings are you using in TMPGenc, for best results:

Set motion search to high (or even highest, thou most feel highest takes more time for very small improvement).

Up the resolution from 352x240 to 352x480 or even 480x480 (which is the SVCD standard).

Up the video bitrate. This is a trade off, the higher the bitrate the better the quaility but you can't put as much movie on each CDR. Most DVD players have a max video bitrate of ~2500kbit/s. That's about 40min on an 80min CDR.

Encode with 2pass VBR instead of CBR (note, if you use 2500kbit/s just use CBR, but for bitrates below ~2000kbit/s 2pass VBR will give you a better encode, but take twice as long). Related to that, you can try 2-5pass VBR w/ CCE. CCe is much faster than TMPGenc, such that a 4pass VBR encode w/ CCE takes a little less time than a 2pass encode w/ TMPGenc.

Under Settings | GOP, enable soften block noise with a setting of ~32-40 (play with it). This does what it says, but there's a slight lose of 'sharpness.'

[alucard2050]

does using the filters on TMPGE to sharpen the picture and reduce the noise blocks increase the size of the file or would the file be the same size if you didn't use them?