Hardware Upgrade Options

[mark_reid]

Hi,

I have been using TMPGEnc Plus to encode DV material (captured in WMV format) to DVD compliant MPEG 2. I'm using the highest quality settings and it takes an age - 6hours for 40mins of fottage.

The question is:
What would TMPGEnc benefit from most if you had limited budget i.e. extra RAM (I've got 512 PC2700 already), an extra hd (only got 1 80GB drive at present), new processor (currently Athlon XP 2200+).

Any suggestions?

Cheers

[The village idiot]

More processor and a second hard drive.

A question, if you are using DV, why aren't you transfering it as DV and working with that, it would be much better quality as it is much less compressed than the wmv. It will also possibly speed up you encoding.

[The village idiot]

I just reread your post, that seems to be a very long encoding time. Using the main concept encoding engine I would encode 40 minutes of DV to DVD spec mpeg2 in about 40-50 minutes. And forty minutes of DV is only about 9 GB, so you should have room for it. If not, get the second hard drive first and start using DV instead of WMV. Use the new drive for a video work drive, then encode to your old drive.

And unless you are using many multi pass VBR, it shouldn't take that long on your machine. Mine is a P4 2Ghz, so pretty close to yours.

[mark_reid]

Thanks for your reply so far.

In terms of the setting being used in TMPGEnc I am pretty much following those outlined here http://dvd-hq.info/Compression.html

I'm using MM2 to capture and edit and hence could output as either AVI or WMV. I actually tried a couple of examples and only noticed a very slight degradation in quality for the WMV output.

I thought that a second drive might help - and also enables me to ouput in AVI without worrying - just need to convince my wife now!

I'm still curious on thoughts on the processing time mind you.

Cheers

[The village idiot]

I'm afraid I can't help you with the TMPGEnc settings. I could recommend the editor and encoder I use. It is Editstudio and mpegXS from Pure Motion, you'll find that it is linked to the tools section for you. They have a free 30 day demo you might want to try.

[rallynavvie]

I think a lot of it is the processor. A second HDD would be nice to capture or encode to. I just saw a 120GB Maxtor on sale for $90 with no rebates or anything so they're not too pricey. I've also been pushing the Athlon XP 2500 Barton processors as they're nicely priced at $85. Memory won't help you much, and 512MB is a good amount of it anyway so you're pretty well set there. Your TMPGEnc settings are fine, but keep in mind that better quality comes from longer encodes generally so be patient. On my old PC (single 1.6 P4) it used to take 4 hours for a CBR encode of about 2 hours of video. VBR about 6-7 hours.