Any TMPGEnc expert here? Questions about encoding AVI's.

[edumakation]

My first attempt to encode a 165MB avi movie clip to an mpg format was fairly successful. I got all the codecs and read through the tutorial. The end quality was pretty indistinguishable from the source file. Here are my settings for this first attempt using TMPGEnc Plus v2.58.44.152. My comp is a 500Mhz Celeron with 327MB SDRAM and 8MB on-board graphics.

First Attempt Settings
===============
Video-CD NTSC 352x240
29.97fps (I didn't calculate this, just took a chance)
CBR 1150/kbps
Non-Interlaced
1:1 (VGA) Aspect Ratio

Now, I want to fine tune this process with a second try. Only this time, I'm paying more attention to the details.

Second Attempt Settings
=================
Stream Type: MPEG-1 Video
Aspect Ratio: 4:3 525 line NTSC
Frame Rate: 29.97fps (still not calculating this number)
Rate Control Mode: 2-pass VBR
Bitrate: 1150/kbits/sec
Motion Search Precision: Highest Quality (very slow)


The most confusing settings at this point are:
1) Noise Reduction
2) Sharpen Edge
3) Custom Color Correction
4) Clip Frame

I don't know how to set these settings. Can someone help explain these to me? I know that both the avi and the mpg have parts that have this horizontal distorted color bar at the bottom of the screen, and I want to make it go away, but how?

Quality is very important to me, and this second attempt will take about 10 hours to process, so I'll have to leave it running overnight. I'm looking for any advice from experienced TMPGEnc users who have gone through confusing situations like mine.

[BJ_M]

1) Noise Reduction - not required unless source was from a vhs or very noisy video -- start adding (if required) noise reduction in small steps preview each change.

2) Sharpen Edge - generally not suggested
3) Custom Color Correction - generally not needed but you can adjust brightness and contrast here (simple color correction also is where you can adjust - i often increase contrast 2 points in tmpgenc if the source was yuv)

4) Clip Frame - use mask bottom and increase number untill it cuts out the part you want cropped .. next tab select full screen display..

[TX_BADBOY]

What I do to get a good vcd with tmpeg is this. First I use virtual dub to extract the audio to a .wav file, then I choose the ntscfilm option to encode the video to. I choose my .avi for the video and the .wav for the audio. Then just let it encode using the defaults for everything else. This worked really well with the spiderman vcd I made. hope this helps. Also look into encoding it into a xvcd. Thats what I'm going to try next. It's supposed to give you better quality.

[KingJohn]

.

Have you loaded any of the default templates ?

Load > START, nothing to change, unless things don't look right !

The VCD template will set it up for everything, the rest are all defaults, full screen > keep aspect ratio a default.

Unless its dark, needs cropping you don't need to change anything

[edumakation]

Thanks for all the replies. My second attempt was pretty terrific, slow but worth the time, I think.

After reading through many of the threads on this board, I've decided that TMPGEnc was the best software to encode movie files, so I'm going to invest more time to learn it. My initial perception was that making a decent avi to mpg conversion was too difficult, but having done it twice, it's not hard at all.

[KingJohn]

That's the trouble around here, people come here for help and they start throwing "Yer make it a SVCD" or change this or change that use a 3:1 pull down, select a template to match the source. So much BS

A newbie don't want this first time around

Once you have made a few VCD's with the simple steps, you may wish to try other things. By that time at you will have something to compare it to.

[BKL]

checkout www.kvcd.net for some great TMPGenc templates.