Mpeg2 to Mpeg2?

[The Stinger]

I am new to this board, but not new to the DVD world. But I did come accross a problem that I need some opinions on....

So the past month I have been capturing mpeg2 and then using Vdub to edit out the commercials and then frame serve to TMPGE. But the problem I noticed just yesterday...I decided to see what my mpegs would look like on a final DVD. So I burned them to a DVD+RW just to test it out. And I noticed that it was a bit more blurry during motion frames than others. Then I noticed that my settings in TMPGE were way off.

So, my question is....Should I just redo the encoding part from the bad mpeg, or should I recapture and get it from the original? The problem with this is that I don't have all the originals on my hard drive.

Thanks for your help.

[SaSi]

Once you compress badly, the information is forever gone.There is no good thing that can come out of the blurry MPEGs. Sorry, but you must go back to the originals and re-encode. Since you will be doing this, let me give you some hints.

For DVD level quality don't use CBR compression. Select 2-pass VBR or CQ (Constant Quality). 2-pass VBR is supposed to give you better control over the total size, but I have found this to be far from correct.

For high quality input, I would set quality at 80 and min bitrate at 200 with max bitrate at 8000. If the captured material is of not so high quality, I would select Q=70. (The max bitrate setting at 8000 is just a top-barrier to limit bitrate bursts but with Q<90 this is not likely to happen).

As a last note, the blury picture you notice in high motion content is caused by "bitrate starvation". In high motion, picture content is changing more than in still pictures, therefore high motion scenes require a higher bitrate. VBR ensures that bitrate is used as it should; not wasted in still scenes and not deprived-of in action scenes.