Best AVI -> MPEG2 converter? (Freeware??)

[w@ntonsoup]

I'm new to this, and will be transferring a bunch of MiniDV stuff to my PC. (1.5 GHz P4 with 1.5 GB memory).

So I'm going to have a ton of AVI files to deal with. I have VideoReDo ready to go to edit my MPEG files, so what's the best way to convert them in the highest possible quality?

I also want to add that a lot of the AVI files will be of old VHS so if there's a good tool for cleaning them up and dealing with the noise and stuff, that'd be great too.

THANKS!

[manono]

The best free encoder is HCEnc. It requires AviSynth for frameserving. AviSynth also just happens to be the best way to clean up your video while frameserving into HCEnc.

Perhaps the best way to use those 2 tools, if you're not familiar with either, is via FAVC.

[guns1inger]

You can use virtualdub, or even better, avisynth, to clean up your video. The Restoration forum contains hundreds of posts on how best to do this, including scripts and filter settings. Filter and save them using a lossless codec such as lagarith or huffyuv.

Editing is best done before converting to mpeg-2. I would suggest you use something like Premiere Elements or Vegas Movie Studio. Both also have the Mainconcept mpeg-2 encoder built-in, which will give you a good quality video ready for authoring.

If you want something free, then HCEnc is arguably the best freeware mpeg-2 encoder around. FAVC gives it an easy to use front-end.

However, before you get too far down the track, think about how much work you really want to do. To do filtering without damaging the video through repeated re-encoding you need to use lossless codecs, which require a lot of disc space. Expect 90 minutes of video to use 40+ GBs. And you may need multiple copies. You don't seem to have this much HDD available to you.

Filters like this require a lot of time to run. On your system you might be looking at 24 hours for a single pass through the video.

So for a 90 minute movie, you will be looking at

20GB (approx) for the DV transfer
20GB (approx) for the edited DV file
45 GB (approx) for the losslessly compressed filtered version
4.38 GB for the mpeg-2 files
4.38 GB for the authored DVD

And you need to keep all of these files until the process is finished, in case you need to restart the process at any stage.

If your computer specs are correct, then you need to seriously consider purchasing an external HDD to give you capacity to work in.

However, for the same price you could probably buy a DVD Recorder with HDD and get most of this done more easily.

[freebird73717]

The best free encoder is HCEnc. It requires AviSynth for frameserving. AviSynth also just happens to be the best way to clean up your video while frameserving into HCEnc.

Yep. HCenc all the way. 8)