mpeg 2 encoding

[coops75]

I have purchased tempgnc and was wondering what the best setting is for encoding. Time is not a factor. It seems that this has 2 pass vbr. Is this the way to go for max. quality or do I stay with cbr. I understand the difference between them (I think) but don't know if there is a big difference in the quality. Thanks I should have mentioned that I am encoding a 54 min movie to dvd

[tenders]

personally i think cbr is just as good as vbr plus its faster!

[coops75]

Thanks

[kinneera]

For 54 min. to a DVD, it probably doesn't matter. But generally VBR is much better, especially multi-pass.

[Cyrl]

Well really CBR or VBR would depend on what your settings are which is better...

For example.

say you don't care about size and want the best quality, you'd be setting the bitrate to maximum allowed under SVCD specs (or higher even if your player can do it) or the highets allowed for DVD specs. In this case since size is not an issue you'd go for CBR since that would encode much faster and be great quality throughout the clip.

If you are concerned about size what you need to do is figure out what the max bitrate you'd find acceptable is for the clip. If your max bitrate is anywhere in the 90-100% of what a standard CBR is I'd just say go for the CBR but say your only going to be able to have 1900 as your average bitrate for variable, as long as time is not a problem I'd go with settings similar to max BR of 2500 Min of 1300 Min Average 1800 Max Average 1900. (That is how *I* would do it, I'm sure a lot of the really experienced people have better calculations etc) but I've done it that way personally and I find the results to be of quite good quality, the major drawback is the long time this will take compared to CBR (espeically with TMPGenc, great program great quality, slow as hell in the scheme of things, It takes roughly 15 hours from start to finish for me to do a 2 hour DVD but when it's done I have a hard time telling it apart from the original.)

ANYWAY, if you can try to encode a small portion of a scene or two each way, and see which you like best, try to find something that starts off relatively still and moves into some action.