What is frame serving?

[rastoma]

I can't find a concise post that explains exactly what frame serving is. I've been told you supposed to frame serve when converting from one resolution to another. For example if a video file is 480x480 and you're encoding to a DVD 720x480 then you frame serve it. But why? I see no distortion when just doing a simple encode from 480x480 to 720x480 using mpegencoder... everything looks exactly as it should.

[Tommyknocker]

Frameserving becomes advantageous when you want to run a file through two programs and only want to encode once. For instance, let's say you want to put your camcorder DV footage onto a DVD with subtitles and logos. The problem is Virtual Dub is great for AVIs, subtitles, and logos, but TMPGEnc can convert AVI to DVD-MPEG-2 before authoring to DVD.

The solution? Frameserving, of course. Load you DV in Virtual Dub, add the subtitles, logos and any other filters you need. Frameserve it to TMPGEnc for conversion to MPEG-2. You just ran one video file through two application and only had to encode only once. There are many other ways frameservice can come in handy, but this is a good example.