Avi to MPEG-2 quality encoding mission

[Canon GL-2 Guy]

Here is what I’d like to do:

Improve my .avi encoding capability to the fullest extent possible.

I have Premiere Pro 3.0 which does an ok job… not great. What do you gents think about the quality or lack thereof with this program?

The stand alone encoders (or encoders within others programs) are almost a complete unknown to me.

Unfortunately, CCE basic (which was reasonably priced) was fairly recently discontinued

“SP2” costs almost 2 grand.

I know nothing about scripts, programming and Avisynth.

I’ve read threads that TmPENC has supposively over time has gotten “faster” at the expense of quality in some users opinion/experience. Don’t know what to believe.

I put out a program which is aired on local access tv and want to make sure I’m giving them the finest MPEG-2 dvd compliant file possible.

Extremely long rendering times… read that overnight (5-12 hours) for a 45 minute project are not attractive either!

What should I do to solve the above and get an improved quality MPEG- 2 file over Premiere?

Is it worth the time and the effort?

Thank you gents!

[jagabo]

hcenc, hcgui

[Canon GL-2 Guy]

WOW !

Are there few quality alternatives?

Don't want to be stuck with Premiere Pro indefinitely.

[guns1inger]

You can always use Premiere Pro for editing, and use the DebugMode frameserver to serve to an external encoder.

There are only a few solid mpeg-2 encoders :

Mainconcept - well regarded by some, and the base encoder for most editing suites (Premiere, Vegas, VideoStudio etc). Comes in a standalone version as well, giving more options. LordSmurf likes this one.

ProCoder 3 - standalone (may have a Premiere plugin). Seemed to dip after 1.5, and is certainly no better than version 2 quality wise. Lots of settings, but not the most intuitive interface. Tends toward the softer image output.

CCE - insanely expensive for the full version, and overly limited in the very cheap version. Tends to be a noisy encoder, although it liked by some.

Tnpgenc - the old standalone encoder was reasonable in quality, but incredibly slow to encode because of it's RGB colourspace limitation. Newer versions are faster and offer a wider range of output types. Uses Mainconcept for H264 encoding and possibly other formats as well. Not a huge fan as it is still far slower than the competitions, and produces inferior output.

HCEnc - free, fast (not CCE fast, but faster than most), produces high quality output and is very good at lower bitrates. Let down by being limited to Avisynth (AVS) and DGIndex (D2V) only, which either turns people off, or sends them scurrying to other front ends (the most flexible of which is AVStoDVD). Very good encoder, and doubly so for the price.

Quenc - free, slower than HCEnc (quite a bit slower), and not as good with lower bitrates. Has it's fans though, and also does AC3 encoding.

There are others out there, but these are the main players around here. There is a GPU based encoder recently discussed ( http://www.gputech.com/gpeg2/ ), and there are free options like bbmpeg.

There are few things you need to consider when looking at you options.

1. Have you really spent the time learning how to get the best out your current workflow and encoder ? It is amazing the number of people who bad mouth some piece of kit as being useless and substandard, when others are producing very high quality from the same kit. Learning how to work with the video all the way through the workflow, and how to properly configure the encoder, can make all the difference in the world to your output.

2. Do you want integration with your editor - this usually adds to the cost, and reduces your options. If not, do you have the space to work with lossless compression - 30 GB or more and hour of footage ?

3. Are your computer specs in your profile correct ? If so, don't expect miracles, expect long encodes. As a general rule, quality and speed do not go together in an encoder. While speed is relative, and some encoders are better than others, the very fast encoders (WinAVI and other toys) produce substantially lower quality output than the encoders listed above. The only way to get a faster encode is to put more raw power behind the encoder - this means as fast a multi-core CPU as you can afford.