Encoding Help! Please!

[Vega Sailor]

My biggest porblem with my videos is the image quality. Now I see videos out there that 40mb-50mb mpegs, but the image quality is near perfect. Fluxmeister's "Eternal Damnation" is an example. What encoder do I use to get it that way, so my videos can be seen with excellent quality on the net?

I tried TMPEG encoder, but the video quality came out really crappy.

Please help?

[Zarxrax]

Check out the GUIDES.
It explains how to encode properly there.

[squall1986]

Wow a member for almost two years, and you haven't consulted the guides???

Whatever

[Vega Sailor]

I did read the guides. But they are extrememly complicated for me. There's a lot of stuff to sort through and put, and I have to I will, but I just wanted to make sure that there wasn't a single special encoder out the that everyone was using, that I didn't know about.

Oh and Squall1986, you have a really bad attitude. I have done nothing to you, yet you come down here and insult me. That was really rude and inconsiderate.

[TaranT]

...I tried TMPEG encoder, but the video quality came out really crappy.

If that's the case, it's because the file you gave it was poor ("garbage in, garbage out"). TMPGEnc is the recommended encoder for AWA and several other contests.

Try rendering your video to a high quality AVI file (e.g. DV NTSC). Then run it through TMPGEnc with the default "Video-CD NTSC" profile. That's usually good enough for online viewing. If you want more-and-better, the guides will show you how to get it.

[)v(ajin Koji]

x2

The guides ARE simple once you sit down and read them carefully.

[Arigatomina]

x2

The guides ARE simple once you sit down and read them carefully.

Have they updated the section of the guides that tells how to compress with TMPGEnc? The last 4 times I looked through them the only thing they say about using tmpgenc is to use the pre-written settings files. It doesn't say anything about how to change settings, or what the various settings mean or do - just to raise the maximum or minimum if the Constant Quality setting isn't good enough.
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Then again, I still can't get 2 pass to work on Vdub, so it could just be me.

[AbsoluteDestiny]

The TMPG seciton of the guides was actually simplified. The old version is much much much more complicated and goes into all the settings but really there wasn't that much of a appreciable difference in quality so we just made some profiles for people to use.

[Arigatomina]

The TMPG seciton of the guides was actually simplified. The old version is much much much more complicated and goes into all the settings but really there wasn't that much of a appreciable difference in quality so we just made some profiles for people to use.

Heh, funny - the one time I'd want the guides in more depth they were already simplified for being *too* indepth. The profiles are nice - playing with them did teach me about some of the settings. They just don't work for 'every' vid - so knowing how to decide settings (and what they do/mean/result in) would be useful. That's about the only part in the guide where it didn't teach me anything - except to load a pre-made file.

[Qyot27]

What encoder do I use to get it that way, so my videos can be seen with excellent quality on the net?

I tried TMPEG encoder, but the video quality came out really crappy.

While I would say that TMPG's settings are not up to DVD crispness unless you're using Modified-SVCD or DVD encoding functions with it, the Video-CD output is the best for anything standard-VCD related, without boosting the bitrate or using VBR with the MPEG-1 stream (those deviations from the VCD standard may not play on VCD-compatible DVD-players, however).

If you want higher res, lower bitrate, crisp quality output, use TaranT's suggestion for high-quality AVI output from your editing program. HuffYUV or DV are probably the two best options in that field, for either editing or exporting (just make sure you edit in 720x480 resolution without dropping the size and then resizing back up). Then just run it through VirtualDub and use DivX or XviD to encode, after dropping the res of the file so that the encoder can maximize its usefulness. BTW, DivX 5.0.5 has the most stabile bitrate encoder that I've seen, thanks to it's Original 1-pass mode. Unfortunately, that function has been taken out of later releases. Try to find 5.0.5, it still shows up quite a bit on some websites. The best settings I've found for what I've just told you are:

Resize to 480x352, 480x360, or 480x320 (that's a matter of preference, really) using Precise Bicubic or Lanczos

DivX 5.0.5, Original 1-pass 3500kbps (even though this bitrate seems high, the encoder probably won't need half of the bits, so it usually hovers around 1800 or so, with crystal-clear video). The thing to remember is that the higher the amount of motion in the video, the higher the bitrate DivX needs; adjust accordingly (but 3500kbps should be able to handle it).

MP3 Audio, 160kbps or 192kbps

I've encoded several of my later videos with these settings or slight variations of them, and they look excellent while still retaining a filesize close to what you'd get if you'd encoded to VCD.