Tmpgenc is very slow at encoding...

[thermie]

Hey there! I am trying to author a program to DVD.

I've captured my source (an old 90 minute movie I taped on VHS a few years back).

I'm using tmpegenc to convert it to mpeg dvd format.

I'm using an external audio source (cleaned up version of the audio)

At 2-pass VBR, high quality motion search precision, noise (50/1/30) reduction, and cropping the edges and adjusting brightness/contrast, it takes over 70 hours to do. That seems to be a lot of time.

Is my system really that slow? Or what am I doing wrong?

WinXP SP1
1GB RAM
350GB combined disk space
Athlon XP 2400
Asus mobo
tmpgenc v 2.54

Any help would be appreciated!

[thecoalman]

Seems like a lot but your going through a lot of steps there. Adding filters, cropping etc add a lot of processing time. Plus your doing 2 passes. Try a regular single pass encode without any filters, etc. My guess is it should take about 2 to 3 hours for 1 hour of video with your specs.

[alsyed]

i would tone donw your high quality motion search to motion estimate search. Keep all other setting the same. In most cases, there is not much noticable difference with these settings.

I'd do all my resizing and noise cleanup in something like virtual dub or avisynth, and only use tmpgenc to encode. Have you tried half horizontal resolutions 352 x 480/576?

[alsyed]

extension

i did a similar vhs rip, i have lower spec'd setup, and i did similar filtering, 2 pass vbr for a 90 minutes vid, it took a little over 4 hours to encode to mpeg2 352 x 576.

[thermie]

Thanks for the reply; I'll change the mpeg encoding setting accordingly...

I've tried virtualdub. While good for many things, it's noise removal isn't as good as tmpgenc's (I've observed tmpgenc's being much better) and, worse, my Pinnacle codec makes virtualdub crash at inconsistent and random times, making it utterly worthless for me. (as no other video editing program (Premiere, tmpgenc, etc) crashes, that the error given is a nonstandard one, happens randomly, and I get no errors if I re-save using uncompressed frames (but who has 180GB to spare?) that is why virtualdub crashes. It doesn't like the Pinncale codec. and I've yet to find any that keeps file size low yet doesn't harshly impact visual quality. Unless there's a good codec out there that doesn't mash video quality like xvid or divx...

Could the fact that I'm also upsampling audio (from 44100 to 48000) and converting that into mp2 audio be an issue? (my ulead dvd creator program only takes mpg files; and I'd rather prefer using elementary streams, but oh well. I have Pinnacle Impression, but that program is a joke - even needs Adobe Photoshop to make any useful menus (in other words, I got ripped off...))

i would tone donw your high quality motion search to motion estimate search. Keep all other setting the same. In most cases, there is not much noticable difference with these settings.

I'd do all my resizing and noise cleanup in something like virtual dub or avisynth, and only use tmpgenc to encode. Have you tried half horizontal resolutions 352 x 480/576?

[alsyed]

i frameserve out of vegas with no problem. I can't remember a time that i had to save out to unocompressed. YOu can pick up some good de noising filters out for virtual dub.

The fact you are upsampling your audio to 48Khz is a non issue. You have to anyway for it to be dvd compliant.

[thermie]

Frameserving might just be the answer... I'll look into Vegas and VirtualDub's own...

Are there any good noise filters you could recommend?

Thanks for your help!

i frameserve out of vegas with no problem. I can't remember a time that i had to save out to unocompressed. YOu can pick up some good de noising filters out for virtual dub.

The fact you are upsampling your audio to 48Khz is a non issue. You have to anyway for it to be dvd compliant.

[jimmalenko]

A couple of things I've learnt over the years with TMPGEnc:

• 2-Pass VBR takes twice as long as CBR
  
• Motion Estimate Search (fast) is sufficient for motion search precision unless you have a really crap source, and can improve encoding times up to 3X
  
• TMPGEnc's Noise Removal filter is good, very good in fact, but can lengthen encoding time by 6X-12X depending on settings. It might be an idea to try Convolution3D via AVISynth, amongst other AVISynth filters.
  
• Instead of using 2-Pass VBR for 720 X 480/576, try dropping down to 352 x 480/576 and doing a CBR, especially for VHS source. You may find you can ease back the noise filter settings by doing this also.
  
• Make sure you set TMPGenc's active and non-active priorities to high
  
• Don't do anything else on your PC while TMPGEnc does it's thing
  
• If you are a perfectionist, expect it to take time