TMPGEnc Help with settings

[marclile]

I'm sure that I'm just doing something wrong but I was wondering if someone could help me out. I have some dv footage from my digital camcorder on my pc and i'm just wanting to encode it to mpeg2.

I'm not really needing to burn it to dvd yet but I want to encode it so it's not taking up so much space. I'm trying to use TMPGEnc Plus because people here have had pretty good things to say about the quality it produces.

My problem is, no matter what settings I try to use, the resulting mpeg looks like crap. Any time anything moves in the video, I see interlace scan lines or whatever all over the place.

Does anyone know if I'm just not choosing the correct settings in TMPGEnc? What setting should I use to avoid this?

Thanks.

Marc

[daamon]

Hi marclile,

Are you using a default template or the wizard? Providing you're using the right one (NTSC vs PAL), the output will be fine.

Chances are, the end MPEG file is perfectly OK - it's just that PC monitors display images "progressively", whereas your MPEG file will be "interlaced". Therefore, the interlace lines will show up and make the video look crap.

There are articles that explain the difference between progressive and interlaced displays. I won't go into it here.

Play the MPEG with something like WinDVD or PowerDVD - they adjust for interlace and display progressively.

The best test is to author and burn to a rewriteable DVD and play on your TV - if the picture's good there, then the source file is OK.

Hope that helps.

[marclile]

daamon... Thank you very much. I wasn't using the wizard i was usually just picking the ntsc dvd template.

You were right. when i played it in power dvd, it looked fine. i just thought something was going wrong because the original avi looked fine when played in windows media player but the mpg didn't.

i figured it was just me not knowing what i was doing

thanks again.

[daamon]

No problem - I went through the same thing until I discovered progressive vs interlaced displays.

Glad I could help.