I'm trying to find the best TMPGEnc settings for MPEG-2 using a short AVI sample of 10 seconds. There is a lot of details in this scene and also strong movement. In certain frames I just can't get rid of block noise and some artefacts neither with 2-pass VBR nor with CBR (both set to maximum SVCD bitrates). Bitrate viewers show that even with constant bitrate encoding the bitrate isn't really constant. Does it make sense to use a longer sample for such tests? Is there any kind of buffering so that the bitrate for a scene with lots of details can have a higher effective bitrate than the specified SVCD maximum bitrate?

Thanks.

Mr. Pickert