AVI to DVD in high quality mode (TMPGEnc): HUGE m2v file!!?

[Will Bailey]

I'm trying the "high quality" method for my AVI to DVD conversion, which means encoding video and audio separately.

I'm currently encoding the video file (m2v) and TMPGEnc is about 25% done but I'm really surprised that my m2v file is already HUGE: 2,2 GB and counting...Is that normal? How am I supposed to burn my DVD if the video file is about 9GB and the WAV file is about 500MB (it's a 50 min. movie)?? Do you think I should continue the conversion or should I stop here to try something else?

I've got a last question: is it normal that the conversion is so slooooow? I've got a Pentium 4 2.4 GHz and 512 MB DDR Ram and it takes about 12 hours (!!) to encode a 50 minutes movie...I don't do something else while encoding -- except right now because I'm on this forum.

[SaSi]

You should probably cancel this encode.

Before you do actual encodes with Tmpgenc for full movies, select a nice portion of the movie (best if it is exactly 1 minute long) and try different settings with it. You can (practically) extrapolate time and size from the 1 minute clip without waiting for a day.

On your machine, Tmpgenc should be able to make a good quality encode in less than 5-6 hours, however it all depends on several factors.

Experiment with VBR settings, selecting a very low bitrate (200-300kbps) for min and 8000kbps for max, play around with the motion estimate method (normal is good quality, you don't really need to go to high-quality unless you select a REALLY low bitrate).

Don't use any Tmpgenc filters.

Also, DO a search in VCDHelp.com searching for "Tmpgenc". You will be amazed by the volume of useful info you will find (without waiting for kind souls to respond).

[Will Bailey]

I followed your advice and cancelled the encode...I found out 45 minutes were already done by wacthing the m2v file. So I had a 2.5 GB file for 45 minutes, is that reasonable? I guess TMPGEnc said 25% only because I used this method: http://dvd-hq.info/Compression.html and I used the CBR option instead of the 2-pass VBR.

Btw, I read lots of topics about TMPGEnc and I might use the search engine in a wrong way because I rarely find the answers I need. That's why I created this topic.

When I extract the audio of my AVI file it does something weird: I've got a 1.5 GB WAV file that lasts 2h26 min. with no sound (my movie last 50 min.). When I tried out with VirtualDub I got the right length but a really small file: 45 MB (!)...what's up with that?

[Will Bailey]

I found something that could be of some use for people having the same problem I had: in TMPGEnc, in the Settings tab of your template, select "High quality" instead of "Highest quality" for Motion search precision.

It saved me 6hrs30 of encoding: I first needed 12 hours to encode a 50 min. movie and now I just need 5hrs30...

[SaSi]

I found something that could be of some use for people having the same problem I had: in TMPGEnc, in the Settings tab of your template, select "High quality" instead of "Highest quality" for Motion search precision.

It saved me 6hrs30 of encoding: I first needed 12 hours to encode a 50 min. movie and now I just need 5hrs30...

Every step you make towards "higher" quality in Motion Search Estimate method will probably double the time it takes to encode (roughly). I have done descent encodes even with the lowest quality setting. For a rather short video with generous bitrate, you don't really need too much effort in doing motion estimation (well, not you, the encoder )

I would use the "Normal" setting (even the last setting that is marked fast) is good enough. The trick is selecting a good average bitrate and setting the min bitrate to a very low value and the max bitrate to something like 7Mbps. Then do a two pass VBR so that bitrate is allocated in the best possible way. Make a search in the forum for Tmpgenc and how to set the cache for the VBR pass (it speeds things up by 50% or more - or so they say people that have done this).