TMPGEnc settings question

[hyena77]

i'm always looking for ways to improve quality, so i'd like to know what you guys set your "Motion search precision" to. so far i've only been using "Normal" and i do notice sometimes the video could be a bit better. from my readings it seems like the general concensus is to keep it at "High quality (slow)". is encoding with "Highest quality (very slow)" worth it for the time it takes? some say that it help for fast sequences? so it'd only be wise to have it on if it were an action movie? no sense if it was a concert or some drama, right? and finally, what is "Motion estimate search (fast)"? any difference to the "Normal" setting?

[jester1x]

I used to use the high quality setting, but now I usually use the "fast" setting. I use this option when encoding VBR mpeg2 with an 8000 max bitrate. It cuts the encoding time in half and I don't notice a difference in quality.

I did a little experimenting (a while ago) backing up Blade 2 using the "fast" setting with an 8000 max bitrate. The numerous action scenes in the movie did not suffer as far as I can tell in my amateur eyes. The results looked quite close to original quality. I used these approximate values: 4500 min, 5500 avg and 8000 max.

I now only use the high quality setting when encoding mpeg1. *On a side note, I noticed that setting your minimum bitrate to a much lower value than your average bitrate does cause the picture to suffer. I use these values for mpeg1 typically: 950 min, 1050 avg and 1150 max.

Yes, the bitrates I use may go against the recommended values, but I like the results I get using them. Also, TMPGEnc is quite good at estimating the final file size, so I typically get a slightly smaller file than predicted despite the values being rather close. TMPGEnc is good at allocating bits when it comes to 2-pass VBR.

Hope this helps you out somewhat.

[leonid_makarovsky]

I'm too interested in knowing the difference between these settings. I normally encode MPEG-2 compliant DVD files from Huffyuv compressed AVI files that I capture with my capture card. I want to get the highest quality possible, but also I'd like to reduce processing time. The setting I have is CBR set to 8000kbs. I was wondering if going from Highest quality (very slow) to Motion estimate search (fast) would reduce the quality?

Thanks.

--Leonid

[daamon]

These 2 guides explain the settings in TMPGEnc in detail, might be of use:

http://dvd-hq.info/Compression.html

http://www.lordsmurf.com/convert/tmpgenc/tmpgencplus.htm

From memory, they may not be in total agreement with each other on some of the settings - but it's still a lot of info (that I, at least, found very useful).

Hope it helps...