Getting the highest possible quality out of lower bit rates

[hersh006]

I am interested in a discussion of how to get the highest quality out of low bit rate encodings. I am especially interested in Tmpgenc and cartoons.

Let me give an example. I recently encoded Robin Hood (Disney) to svcd using tmpenc. It was pretty straightforward. I tried to get it down to one CD but at that bitrate, I was not happy with the results. Later I saw a copy of Robin Hood on one SVCD from Walter Dizzy Knees. It looked better than the two CD version I had made! How the hell does they do that?

This may be as simple as "use a commercial encoder instead of Tmpgenc" but I suspect that since this was a cartoon, there are a lot of things that you can do to bring the bitrate down without sacrifying much quality.

Any tips, tricks, suggestions?

Thanks.

[DivXExpert]

The reason their SVCD looks so good is probably because they have a cleaner source than a DVD.

The original film real will be much higher quality than the DVD you ripped it from. The better the source, the better the destination.

And yes, they probably use some really good encoders that cost thousands of dollars.

You can mess around with the quantize matrix, and GOP structure to make it look better, but you do loose compatiblity that way.

[ptcg]

I've been cramming movies onto one XVCD lately, and I've found the best way to save quality is by using VBR encoding.. As stated before, you do lose compatibility.. The movies I've made recently were tried on 7 different stand-alone DVD players and only played on 3 of them.

In TMPGenc, I use 2-pass VBR encoding, with the minimum bitrate set to 0 and the max at 3000.. The average you'll have to set to whatever you need to make the video fit on one cd. (The wizard in TMPGenc will do this for you)

I've fit movies as large as 2 1/2 hrs on 1 CD with marginal quality loss (as compared to the source anyway)

The good thing with VBR is that when there is a lot of action, the bitrate will go up (mine have gone as high as 2700), and during black-outs, credits, and slower scenes where the high bitrate is not needed, it drops down (in some cases I've seen it as low as 15!)

[txpharoah]

Cartoons and low bitrates and perfect quality?
Read the VHS to DVD guide. Link below in my signature.

[vcd4ever]

There are many things that can be done to reduce the bitrate without any quality loss. For information about how to do it, read SatStorms exellent post at https://www.videohelp.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=153301

vcd4ever.

[jbenj01]

vcd4ever,

Can you give examples of "filters"?? Do you mean the actual settings in encoders, i.e., TMPGEnc, CCE, etc.. Or something esle? I mainly backup DVD's and do some AVI to DVD conversions.. thanks.

[vcd4ever]

jbenj01,

For example, using a resize filter in virtualdub and then frameserve it to tmpgenc and using tmpgenc's noisereduction filter. This is a very easy filter example, but to get the best quality by using filters, things get much more complicated.

What a mean with complicated is for example, enhancing the sharpness without producing any artifacts, deinterlacing with blend without loosing any sharpness.

vcd4ever.