Encoding Nightmares!

[mpillit]

Im a 3d animator whos just discovered divx (4.02). So far its been a marvel for short clips with no sound but now Ive got problems. My animation is rendered out at 640x480 with Quicktime Animation (Lossless) compression. Its exactly 10 minutes and 1 second long. When I export it from Premier divx compressed, it runs smoothly and with great quality. I used 1 pass with a 6000 kbit rate and lowest post processing level. The problem is when I add audio. Im using 16 bit 44.1khz wave files. My question is this: What are the best settings to use so it will run smoothly on my machine? I want to keep it at 640x480 if at all possible. I also want the highest quality audio as well. The size of the file is not an issue at this point as it will be dumped to video tape.
Heres my system:
Piii 1ghz
512 mb Ram
geforce 2 ti 64mb graphics card.

Ive asked many people about many different Codecs and the most common response is "Just play around with it." Not much help in that. Any insights would be greatly appreciated.

[-h]

If it's destined for video tape, I'd export from your 3D program to DV-compressed avi's, as it can be losslessly transfered to digital video tape via firewire afterwards. I've never experienced playback problems with 720x576 DV avi's with 48khz stereo sound. The best DV codec around is mainconcept's at the moment, but it's not free.

Failing that, give MJPEG a go - it should also be free of playback issues, and the size will still be smaller than the Quicktime output.

-h

[philippas]

I guess you problem is cpu related. Even thow p3@1Gb is very powerfull a 640x480 @6000kbits is quite a load. Try and compress in lower bitRate or resoloution.

[kblood]

I also think the problem is system performance. Perhaps this sounds twisted, but I believe you are putting too much pressure on your disk bandwidth... From the original post, it looks like you are using UNCOMPRESSED wav audio... I would recommend using some sort of compression on the audio, to reduce the bandwidth needed to read the 6000kbps video AND the full uncompressed 44.1khz audio...

Surely there is some lossless audio codec suitable for this... However, I use mp3 for my AVIs, and don't know about any right now.

[LigH]

For me it looks too like you are pushing too much data through your system; if you want to ensure very good quality, then a quality based VBR encoding shall be the best solution - the codecs use just the data rate they really need to maintain a given quality. In your case, I would recommend the following:

- For video compression, use "1-pass quality based" VBR for the DivX4 codec, Performance/quality to "Slowest", and the Quality to between "90" and "95"% (higher values can raise the risk of "shit" frames). I don't like to recommend using higher default post-processing filter values, I would leave the slider at the leftmost position.

- For audio compression, use the LAME MP3 encoder with the --r3mix setting (this implies VBR with highest quality); you may limit the bitrate range if you think it's necessary, but I think not many people can hear the difference between 192 and 320 kbps.

- Finally, use Nandub to multiplex the MP3 audio into your DivX AVI.