Encoding made simple, please

[ladubois]

I've noticed the guides on this site, and tried read through them and follow their instructions, but they aren't very newbie friendly.

[slight rant]IMHO, a newbie guide doesn't need all of the history of the different codecs and containers, or even the mechanics behind how each one differs. I'd wager that most people just getting into AMV making probably wouldn't understand it anyway, let alone care. Beginner guides should be short, sweet, and to the point. Explain the bare minimum of a handful of formats' differences, which ones are useful in which situations, and maybe why if you really had to technical at some point, but any explanations of new terms should be concise or footnoted rather than woven into the how-to so that the reader can't tell what's relevant to what they are trying to do, and what's just background info that they don't need to worry about.
Think about it this way: does a book on drawing go into how the molecular structure of graphite differ between 2B and 4H? No. It'll say that 2B is soft and useful for making dark marks, while 4H is hard and good for making lighter ones. Because that's really all you need to know to use them.[/slight rant]

So basically, in the simplest, shortest way possible, what's a quick explanation of how to encode a high quality video, and perhaps how to encode one for making a smaller file, or a couple of other useful purposes. Short list of pros and cons of certain methods could also be welcome.


And if someone wouldn't mind terribly, specifically how to do these things with PiTiVi Video Editor on Ubuntu would be nice... But I'll certainly settle for just knowing my main request.

[ladubois]

Or simply, on pretty much any open source program that I can easily acquire/run on Ubuntu.

[Zarxrax]

Unfortunately, this stuff is not simple.
Everytime I see someone suggest an alternative "Hey guys, just do this, its way easier", it is almost always something really stupid which can have bad implications to either quality or stability.

http://libav.org/ is an opensource program which runs on linux which can handle your encoding needs.

[Mister Hatt]

If your footage is in a format that "just works" in your media player and you want to encode it, either use avconv (part of libav and rather difficult to use) or grab x264.exe directly from x264.fushizen.eu

As much as everyone is going to spout that CLI is hard to use, x264.exe video.avi --profile veryslow --tune animation --crf 18 --output video.mkv is a lot easier than figuring out howto use some graphical program. It can do audio with very little effort, or use mkvtoolnix.

The reason the guides are so detailed (although imo still quite poor) is that encoding is NOT EASY OR SIMPLE. You need to have a proper understanding of your content as just throwing it at a program will not give you a good let alone high quality result. You really only should encode to h264 and whatever audio format, but the processing is what the guides address. Things like telecine and VFR and filtering (srsly amvers stop overfiltering jesus fucking christ) are not easy concepts but they are critical to getting a result that doesn't hurt your eyes.

tl;dr if it's too hard for you, then don't do it. There are no simple or easy guides because there isn't a simple or easy way to do it in the first place. Harden up princess.

[ladubois]

Well, after some experimenting, I found that using FFmpeg MPEG-2 PS format (DVD VOB) muxer for the container, FFmpeg ATSCA A/52A (AC-3) encoder for the audio codec with the bit rate set to 128000, and FFmpeg MPEG-2 video encoder with a 300000 bit rate and all other options set to their defaults for the video codec gives me a suitably good quality video that is of decent size.

I don't know what almost any of that means, but it works, and for now I don't <i>need</i> to know what it means. I'm sure that I c/should probably mess around a little more to get a better quality video or smaller file size or something, but for now it's perfectly fine.

[ladubois]

The snippiness was aimed at comments that it isn't simple. It might not be, but I just made it simple. "This works quite well in this situation." is all that a newbie needs to know. Not why, not how, not when did this come about - what works in situation X, what doesn't work in situation Z. No Y is needed (sorry, bad pun :p). They can look up the mechanics behind it or the history of it on their own if they so desire.

@Mister Hatt: The trouble is that the video isn't in any format. I only had a project file and was trying to figure out how to render it into a decent looking video.

[ladubois]

Also @ Mister Hatt: I'm a stubborn mule. I'm not going to give up on this no matter how hard it is. If I end up breaking 30 computers trying to figure out how, the oh well. I'm almost beginning to suspect that you guys simply want to make it seem that AMV making is this oh-so-god-like talent people have, when really it's just like drawing - as long as you keep trying, you'll get the hang of it eventually.
I really don't want to think that, but that's what its been looking like for awhile to me.

[BasharOfTheAges]

how very anti-learning.

[ladubois]

I'm a stubborn mule. I'm not going to give up on this no matter how hard it is.

Anti-learning?

[ladubois]

...Okay, after rereading my posts, I guess I can see how I might be coming off as a bit of a jerk... (...understatement...)
My apologies. I'm just a little frustrated because the way I learn how to do things is by doing them, then taking apart what I did and examining it. Not by examining what I'm doing while I do it. So hunting through the mountains of text in these guides to find what I'm looking for is particularly time consuming, and difficult.
Sure, this strategy usually means that my first go at something is total crap, but until I have a reference point (my screw-up first project), I can't see or understand what I did wrong or how I could do it better.