My Setup - Thoughts/Comments please

[DrRaven]

Hi All,

I’m fairly new to the DVD creation scene so I’m still experimenting and trying out a few things. I like burning documentaries and cartoons from the TV mainly. I have some questions I’m hoping that you all might be able to help me with. First some details;

Hardware:-
-Pentium 4 2.8 GHz
-2 GB memory
-120 GB Hard Disk system & general data
-120 GB Hard Disk for video capture and processing
-Hauppauge PVR-350 TV/Capture Card

Capture Settings:-
-12000 bps CBR
-15 GOPs
-720 x 576 Video Resolution (I’m in Australia so I use PAL)

DVD creation method:-
I’m basically using the ideas and guides from Lordsmurf (www.lordsmurf.com);
-Capture TV/Video to MPEG2 using capture card with the above settings. I use WinTVCap or WinTV2000 as the capture software.
-Process the resulting file using TMPGEnc Plus (Trial version). I use the settings as outlined by Lordsmurf.
-Use TMPGEnc DVD Author (Trial version) to author and burn the DVD. I use the standard menu pages.

Playback:-
-Intervideo WinDVD V3.2 DXVA
-Power DVD V4.0
-Panasonic S75 DVD player

Questions:-
In general the method above works well for me, but I do somtimes end up with a blurred picture especially when there it is fast moving video. I would love to hear any ideas of suggestions for alternatives or improvements. I have these specific questions;

1. If I import the video file straight after capture into TMPGEnc DVD Author the program tells me that my bit rate is to high and that the standard bit rate for DVD’s is no more that 9800 bps. If I were to capture at 9800 bps can I avoid the use of TMPGEnc Plus, and use the authoring package directly?
2. Will I experience a significant loss of quality going from 12000 to 9800 bps?
3. Using TMPGEnc Plus seems to take 5 or so hours to process a 1 hour capture. I do have a few filters switched on to clean up my capture, but for my system specs the process time surprised me. Is this typical?
4. Approximately how many 30 minute/1 hour captures can I fit onto a DVD using my settings or without a noticeable loss of quality?

I think that’s about it. I’m sure I will have other questions. I apologise for the long post, but I wanted to give as many details as I could right at the start.

Thanks in advance….

Brant..

[SaSi]

1. If I import the video file straight after capture into TMPGEnc DVD Author the program tells me that my bit rate is to high and that the standard bit rate for DVD’s is no more that 9800 bps. If I were to capture at 9800 bps can I avoid the use of TMPGEnc Plus, and use the authoring package directly?

This is expected. You can capture at 9800 kbps and import directly. This would save you the Tmpgenc step.

2. Will I experience a significant loss of quality going from 12000 to 9800 bps?

Significant not. Perhaps not even visible. Most specialists agree that with MPEG-2 compression of PAL video at 720x576, the human eye doesn't see any improvement beyond 8000kbps. And that is for high quality material. TV or VHS captures contain much less "information". You could even go way lower than that (e.g. 6000kbps average with 8500kbps max and 0kbps min) and possibly not notice any degradation) but that would defeat the MPEG-2 capture. You would need a two pass encoding and you are already trying to avoid a single pass Tmpgenc step.

3. Using TMPGEnc Plus seems to take 5 or so hours to process a 1 hour capture. I do have a few filters switched on to clean up my capture, but for my system specs the process time surprised me. Is this typical?

This is typical. Tmpgenc is not the fastest encoder and configuring it for max. quality makes it even slower. Using the built in filters (they are so slow) just kills it.

4. Approximately how many 30 minute/1 hour captures can I fit onto a DVD using my settings or without a noticeable loss of quality?

At 8500kbps video and with an audio stream of ~ 224kbps, you can fit an hour's worth of content on a DVD. This is probably where 9800kbps encoding suffers.

May I recommend a different approach?

Capture to AVI using a lossless codec (hufyuv).

Trim out unwanted material with VirtualDUB, while at the same time removing the overscan area that contains noise and (usually) black bars.

Encode in two pass with a 4800kbps VBR setting. Tmpgenc won't be that slow without any filters (cropping, de-noise, etc). You can do all that with VirtualDUB.

If Tmpgenc is still too slow, try Mainconcept. (You can use that to capture to AVI with hufyuv as well).

Author to DVD.

This way you can fit two hours of video and audio and quality should not be bad.

PS. And about your configuration, you seem to have too much RAM (if anyone can have too much of that) and perhaps too little disk space (for editing video at least).

[lordsmurf]

Blurred video sounds like deinterlace is happening. Is the capture interlaced?

Other than that, what SASI said.

Your hardware looks good to me. More than 1GB RAM was not needed, maybe extra HD if you do a lot of video at once.

720x576 VBR 5.5 avg 8.0 max, 0.0 min should look fine
or 352x576 VBR 3.9 avg, 0.0 min, 5.0 max from tv sources

I'd look at the interlace as being the source of the "blurring" ... sounds like blend

Are you capturing AVI or MPEG ?