Reducing blockiness - TMPGEnc

[Gavin19]

I'm very familiar with the old adage 'crap in, crap out' but here goes..

Usual avi source is 480x480 or 480x576, div3 low/fast motion, with the film being split over 2 files averaging 200MB per avi. Also these are dvd rips not screeners etc.
I usually use TMPGEnc plus and more recently xpress, but I have have always been plagued with a certain degree of blockiness in the outputted mpeg file. The source avis usually have very little blockiness when compared to the end product, so I was wondering was there an ideal set of output options to at least reduce this blockiness?
For example is there an ideal resolution to output these avis, considering the source resolutions I mentioned, as I have always used 720x576 as standard?
Also are there any other settings (in xpress preferably) that I can tweak to improve the overall quality? Seems no matter how high the bitrate I use it does little to improve the quality.
Encoding time isn't really a big deal and specs-wise I use a P4 3.2HT with 512MB RAM.

Thanks.

[ZippyP.]

You're upsizing your video, that's the problem. You cannot "create" a higher resolution without causing problems. You should be encoding to 352x480/576. Try it, I think you'll notice a difference.

[monzie]

I'm very familiar with the old adage 'crap in, crap out' but here goes..

Usual avi source is 480x480 or 480x576, div3 low/fast motion

Funny resolutions for avi encodings.....they look like mpeg2 (svcd) resolutions that some idiot has directly converted to avi (divx3).........not surprising that you get blockiness the avi's are way off to start (you aint got any horizontal res).

[Gavin19]

Funny resolutions for avi encodings.....they look like mpeg2 (svcd) resolutions that some idiot has directly converted to avi (divx3).........not surprising that you get blockiness the avi's are way off to start (you aint got any horizontal res).

As u noticed, the avis use the svcd resolutions but, if this makes any difference, they were intended for svcd output, it's just I prefer DVD. Mainly due to quality, but also I can't be bothered with the extra hassle of splitting films across 2-3 discs when 1 DVD will do the job.
I tried dropping the resolution to 352x480/576, and it made a slight improvement, but the real difference came when i started using noise removal, to differing degrees. Only downside is that it takes 4-5 times as long to encode with TMPGEnc using these filters.
Also you said the avis were 'way off', so is there anything I can do to correct them or is the damage done? If poss could u explain what u meant by 'you aint got any horizontal res'?
ps - Source avi is always NTSC but I output to PAL as my DVD player doesnt accept anything but 25fps (and i live in a PAL region)