TMPGenc and smoky scenes.....

[wildcatfan]

Well guys, I am working on a copy of Kelly's Heroes and am encoding to vcd compliant mpeg 1. Now the problem I am having with TMPGenc is that in smoky scenes (the drive through the town if any of you are familiar with the movie) the smoke itself gets really blocky. I am using TMPGenc v 2.50 (have tried 12a with nearly same results however) and wonder if anyone has tried any really smoky scenes and know some good settings for TMPG. I have also tried CCE 2.62 and the smoke is much much better but then I get the "mosquitos" around the edges a bit. I am trying to get the best of both worlds here I know ! Any help tho appreciated.....

[dstar]

you will find the blocks happen with fast motion scenes have had this problem myself.but usually is the source.so you will get his from divx of most pirate films...but not good dvd rips.there is a setting in tmpeg that allows you to soften block noise..in the settings, quantize matrix section
i have also tried decompressing avi files first which seems to help sometime
so get this and try decompresssing then converting
avi audio decompressor v1.0
dstar

[wildcatfan]

I have tried to set up the soften block noise even to 100....little if any effect. The scene doesn't even have to be that fast motion it just seems anything with much fog/smoke in it comes out crappy. I know mpeg isn't good with smoke in general but TMPGenc is coming out way worse than CCE/Panasonic/LSX/BBMpeg in these smoky scenes but looks awesomely crisp other places......

[vhelp]

wildcatfan,

First, dstar is right.
if it's a D/L'ed clips, ie, a divX
or something (anything D/L'ed
basically, then you shoud expect
to find blocks in certain scenes!

However, if its from a DVD (yours)
then you shoud NOT see any blocks
in these smokey scenes! even w/
VCD!!

Question:
* Is this from a DVD that your are
encoding to VCD??
* Or, is it from a D/L area??

I may have a scene that you can
compare (just so happen to be kind
of smoky ) and you can D/L it and
compare with yours if ya like.

-vhelp

[wildcatfan]

sorry for not mentioning....its a dvd source....It is just the smoke that looks bad the rest of the scene looks fine....

[TomSem]

Hi ,

I ve also have those smoky probs and especialy those dark blocks appearing on dark grey walls (on non action scenes) .
After tweaking a while i've found that doing CBR or CQ_VBR
will get rid of them , not always but they look much better w/o 2-pass VBR
So give it a try.

tommy

[wildcatfan]

well i am already doing a vcd compliant (i.e. CBR 1150kbps) and still get the blocks in the smoke....

[vhelp]

wild,

I don't have that dvd movie.

* Any other movies w/ smoke in it that you have problems with??

* can you give me list of some movie(s) with smoke in it.

-vhelp

[SatStorm]

for the creation of a standard VCD from a DVD rip, I suggest always to de-interlace the odd field and set the soft block noise filter between 35 - 45.
Also, you can play with the gop stracture (version 2.02 is good for that).

[kinneera]

This really isn't so surprising...smoke and fog effects are bad cases for MPEG, especially at low bitrates. Such effects aren't necessarily "high motion" in the traditional sense, but from the perspective of the encoder they are. It's because there are a large number of pixels changing position from frame to frame, which requires the encoder to either dedicate a lot of bits to them, or suffer blocks when the bits just aren't available. From the perspective of the encoder, its practically the same as a very noisy video source (such as camcorder in lowlight).