Help with bitrate settings

[CaptainMaki]

Hi everyone,

I'm trying to get 3 xvid program chapters that were ripped from HDTV to a PAL DVD.

The avi details are:
624x352@23.98 and they are 43 minutes long.

When I try to convert them to MPG I can't get statisfying results. In the last attempt (after bitrate calculations) I've seem some not sharp lines for example when watching close ups of people faces in the film.
I've tried with TMPGENC and Procoder 2 using VBR in both times, and no luck.

since I know it's acceptable to put 120 minutes on a single DVD, it's seems odd to me that the image is not in perfect quality. The source files are great.

Am I missing something here??

Thx

[guns1inger]

2 hours of footage would give you an average bitrate of around 4690 with a single 5.1 AC3 audio track, and around 4890 with a stereo AC3 or mp1-l2 audio track.

Your source footage is not DVD resolution, so you are either upscaling to full-D1, or downscaling to half-D1. I don't know which, but either of these will have an impact on quality. If you scale down, there is a good chance you can get all 3 episodes on a single disk.

If you scale up, you might still get them all on a single disk, but you would need a 2-pass VBR encode with a high/avg/low of 9570/4680/0. this will leave a little space for menus.

If you want top quality, then CBR at the highest rate and put one on a disk.

[monzie]

Try this guide...

https://www.videohelp.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=15

Its a long read but it will explain how RESIZE and how to find the optimal bitrate for encoding and wether or not you CAN fit all 3 on a DVD at their optimal bitrate....by calculating backwards from the expected sizes....oh and it'll probably save you HOURS of work

[monzie]

Oh and I forgot to mention...why are you bothering converting to PAL..theres usually no need. 99.99% of PAL DVD players will play NTSC and most (newer than 10years old) PAL TV's will handle NTSC signals from the DVD player. But you will need to use pulldown.exe after the 23.976 mpeg encoding

[CaptainMaki]

thx for the tips monzie.
I'm trying to get the bitrate right with your guide now.

by the way, I thought this is a newbies forum, isn't there a simpler way for this long process?

[guns1inger]

If all you want is a DVD, and don't care much about the quality, try one of the one-click wonders, such as DVD Santa.

But if you care about the output, then you need to learn the details.

[monzie]

For a simple method frameserve to your encoder with AVISynth (avs files created via FITCD..dead easy) and use a bitrate of 3-4X the bitrate of the xvid.

You can always OPEN the avs files with VirtualDub or a media player and check the quality BEFORE encoding.....that way you know the source going into your encoder is NOT to blame. Zoomplayer will play .avs files.

[CaptainMaki]

Thx for all the help.
I think that after some trying, the real issue was the conversion from NTSC to PAL, this was totally useless and when I've stayed in NTSC, the results were much much better.