Encoding questions

[helper]

Hi,

I have a question on encoding my videos scripts. I filmed a number of race seqments at night using digital camera, saved in mov format. The original rate was 4000 at 30fps. I then wrote some avisynth scripts to combine the individual takes of the races to make one long race, I then run it through a degrain filter and then smoothd filter to give it a nicer picture. I then use FAVC to encode the video at best quality, but not sure what to set the bit rate and how to get the best results. The last one I did I noticed some blockiness in the night sky and in a few other scenes, I am thinking this is from too low of a bit rate, am I right on this? If not, then what are the best settings using the hc encoder in FAVC? IF I am right what are my options..

Thanks for any advice as I am getting confused on this the more I read...

[Baldrick]

Probably because of bitrate. What hcencoder settings are you using? 2-pass? 1-pass? or constant quality/quantizer moder?

I guess your goal is to make a DVD? Then try use highest possible bitrate((around 8Mbit) or best constant quantizer/quality mode and see how it looks like.

[helper]

Hello,

I am using the default best quality settings, which are 8000 bitrate, 2 pass, quantizer. It had to lower the bit rate down to 6500 to get it to fit onto 1 dvd. Would it be better to have it on 2 dvds or a dvd dual layer burned done at a higher bit rate? Is constant rate better then the best default settings?

Hope to hear from you soon and thanks for the help..

[helper]

Hello,

One mistake on previous message, I am using 2 pass variable rate bitrate and not constant. If I go to Constant, what should I set the constant quantilization to, it goes from 1 to 31.

Thanks again for the help..

[redwudz]

1 is best, 31 is worst with Xvid, not sure about MPEG. But with single pass Quantizer mode, you don't have much control of the encoded filesize, if that's a problem. But it will be much quicker than two pass mode. You could try a representative clip of about 5 minutes long to test different Quantizer numbers to see how it looks. I would start with 2 and you can use that to figure out the total size your files will be from that.