TMPGEnc Use of Motion Search and Block Noise Reduction

[jdub13]

I am using High or Very High setting for Motion Search and Block Noice ni the advanced settings of TMPGEnc. I am winding up with encoding times of up to 20 hours for 75 minutes of movie. I have an Intel Celeron 500 MHZ with 127MB of RAM.

Is there any setting I should be using to speed this up? 20 hrs per disk or 40 hrs for 1 movie seems a bit excessive.

Also, I have not altered many of the setting of either my computer of TMPGEnc.

Any and all responses would be appreciated.

[Sartori]

The times you have seem about right .

In all the guides I`ve read , it has said there is no advantage in increasing Reducing Block Noise setting above 35 , in fact it makes it worse apparently . The figures should both be the same as well .

For the motion settings , the Motion Search Position gives practically the same result on High Q and Higher Q BUT massively increased encoding times . Try High Q instead .


N.B.
For both pieces of advice above , what I personally would try is trying a test piece in all variants and checking the end results . This is the only way to optimise your encoding .

[loseyourself]

what are you trying to create??? a VCD, CVD, SVCD, DVD?!?!? more info......and i think you have some of the settings wrond because 40 hours for a movie seems way to long....i used to have a 700Mhz Duron and it took me 10 hours for a whole movie....

[loseyourself]

....thats 10 hours for a full XVCD (Increased bit rate) and with the quality settings all on full....and i set the block noise on 100....i can see a big difference in quality with it on....better that is

[jdub13]

Thanks lose, I am trying to encode to make a VCD. 1 movie split to 2 CDRs.

[jdub13]

Also, does task priority have anything to do with speed?

Does it have anything to do with my virtual memory settings or my windows swap file, etc?

Can someone who encodes a complete movie to VCD in 10-15 hrs please tell me what their settings are? (incluing gmotion search and block noise)

THANKS!

[MpegEncoder]

Your times do seem to be in the normal order of things. Your biggest problem it that a 500MHz Celeron is a dog (mines a 500MHz Athlon and it's a dog too). Your best bet is a CPU upgrade.

[jdub13]

Thanks MPEG,

Have you had any luck with the task priority setting in TMPGenc?

Have you altered your virtual memory settings or windows swap file?

Basically what I want to do is encode a 2 hour movie to MPEG for a VCD with high quality motion search and block noise reduction in 17-18 hours. That way, I can set it to go at 12AM the night before and it will be done when I get home from work the next day (at 5:30 - 6PM).

[Gazorgan]

40 hours is right. I typically take 8-12 hours on an Athlon 2000+ doing 4 pass VBR with High Quality setting for converting a DVD to SVCD. Since encoding 'roughly' follows CPU speed, 40 hours is not excessive.

[Sartori]

You`re asking for other peoples settings and you need a like for like set of settings really . People giving you generic settings isn`t going to help really . You can make the encoding go very quickly BUT you`ll just end up with a shit mpg .


I would advise firstly reading guides on TMPGenc and how its features work and what they do (print it out , take it to work and read it there and in effect get paid to learn )

Secondly you need to give your exact settings you have on it - all of them (see later on for details ).

Thirdly you need to state your source ie TV cap , dvd rip , reencoding divx files , digital camcorder capture , cartoons caps or whatever . Are you using VBR encoding ? (This will read through the file more than once to decide where to allocate bits and hence more time )


More details are required , do you have Noise Reduction on (this increases time massively) , Sharpness turned on , Deinterlacing , Ghost Reduction ? Higher settings of Soften Block Noise blur the movie more .

If you have Noise Reduction turned on high or VBR encoding , then the time is correct . My Pentium II 450 would take 20 hours for a 1/2 hour TV show that needed processing with noise reduction .

Task priority does have a biggish relation to speed , mine is set to When Active High Priority .

But please don`t ignore the point from my previous post , you really need to do some test encodings (you only need to do a minute of encoding at say a high action scene ) - once you have done these you then have have some datum points to base subsequent encodings on , I now know from looking at a capture whether I need to reduce macro noise , noise reduce it or frameserve from vdub or whatever . I looked through my guides and found this bit below , to give a few tips .


BELOW IS AN EXTRACT OF A GUIDE ON THIS SITE ABOUT THE SETTINGS

Filters and TMPGEnc

OK, I have recieved a lot of email asking about this, so although i will try to keep this as brief and to the point as possible, in the end it will still be up to you as to what to set the filters to and what works best for you.
The main filter i use in Tmpg is the noise filter, as this can virtually wipe out any video noise you may encounter, making your clip look that much better. Although be warned using the filter on too high a setting can cause your picture to get blurry and may add noise to the picture instead.
Here is the settings i generally use, as i have done quite a bit of testing clips over and over with filters. My main PC was destroyed so i have not made anything in a while. The last version of Tmpg i had, had the noise filter broken into 3 small sections (still, range, and time axis). I am assuming they are still going by these names, if not then the "still" was the top setting, "range" was the middle setting, and "time-axis" was the bottom setting. Whatever number i made the "still" setting, i kept the "time axis" setting the same, with the range being the variable. Also their is a "high quality" box just under the 3 settings-- make sure you check this off to give it that extra boost for your picture. AND make sure the "enable filter" box is checked as well
OK, Breaking this down a little more--
1: if your clip is extremely good quality(aka dvd rip or somewhere in that area--NO filters are needed
2: if your clip looks pretty good-very good, i would set the filters to the following: STILL-between 1-8, RANGE-1, TIME AXIS-between 1-8
3: if your clip looks half way good-decent, i would set the filters to the following: STILL- between 1-8, RANGE-2, TIME AXIS- 1-8
4: if your clip looks ok-poor: STILL 1-4, RANGE-3, TIME AXIS -1-4
5: if your clip looks fair-below: STILL 1-3, RANGE 3-4, TIME AXIS -1-3

Again that is pretty much how i set the filters in a nutshell. What i noticed happens when you make the filters too high(lets say for still/time and making them 20 or higher) It caused more noise in my picture and it can "soften" the pic too much that it will make it look worse. Also in darker lit scenes when the filter is sometimes too high it will show up highly in the background and this is something you do not want. The RANGE pretty much is the main setting. If you set that high, you will not need to use a high number for the other filters as the "range" will now cover more of the area using a stronger filter.



THE TMPGENC MACRO BRICK NOISE SETTING(aka soften block noise setting)

This setting on the TMPG(and it is found under the "quantize matrix" tab of tmpg) will and can reduce the "block noise" commonly associated with video cds(mainly at normal rate, but not all the time).
Again i have found with a lot of testing that if you have this feature on, i keep the intra and non intra blocks the same number. Older versions of TMPG kept the setting at 35 for both. This is a good rate to use, actually 35-40 was ok. Going higher (at least from what i found) resulted in extra block noise that i did not want.
ALSO while under the "quantize matrix" tab, click on the "floating point dct" box, this will help produce a better picture for you.
FOR HIGRATES/XVCDS/SVCDS - i never really use the soften macro noise filter, as the bitrate is high enough to compensate for any brick noise that would have been made using the normal rate vcd setting.
ALSO i did not use this filter for anything with the quality of a dvd rip.



TMPCENC AND ANIMATED FEATURES

This is pretty interesting, for this section take everything i have mentioned above and throw it out of the window!!! For some odd reason on more bland drawn cartoons with not many details(ex GI.JOE, The Simpsons,
the older Transformers cartoons, etc) if you come close to blasting each of the noise filters, it actually made the picture look 100 times better then what i ran in!!! I could not believe it. I would set the STILL and TIME settings anywhere from 80-100, and the range 3-4. Macro blocknoise close to 100(but its still ok to leave this at 35, as i found out later the close to 100 setting isnt needed for it). My clips became very vibrant and rich in color, some minor detail was lost, but it made the picture look as if i just taped it from a high source and not taken from 14-16 year old Beta/ex rental tape--to put it simply, it looked better then the original!!! Again blasting the filters like this only seems to benefit older cartoons.
ANIMATED features with a lot of detail (ex Akira, ghost in the shell, heavy metal,etc) i would follow the settings i mentioned above that i use for movies, as blasting the filters with these types of animated cartoons will cause it to look like havoc.
Have fun!!! Hope this helps some of you out, remember despite it being a hassle, constant testing will let you know what settings are right for you. thanks again!! "
this extract written by Doug Manzin .

I found this bit on a guide on capturing . Once you start reading the guides you start seeing how you can get away with various settings or tricks like using the sharpen filter to blur and stuff like that .
The most common fault of encodng IMO is forgetting that you watch the picture from 10 feet away on your sofa and even on my 28" widescreen tv it is still very flattering to some average encodings , take some of your test caps and write them to vcd and try them out on your TV - this is the real acid test .
And I echo the above guide writers statement of Have Fun .