Best format for long-term disk storage

[preston]

I have about 50 hours of DV that I would like to store on hard drives, for use in making DVDs. The native AVI files, at 13GB/hr, are too large, but I would like to preserve DVD quality. My thought was to keep it in MPEG-2 format, so I used ULEAD VideoStudio to import it, but it defaults to frame-based, creating interlacing artifacts when I create DVDs. At a minimum, I want to minimize the processing so that as little information in the original as possible is lost. I would be happy to have up to 4.5 GB per hour, since then I could put each hour on its own DVD for backup.

1. Is the right format MPEG-2 interlaced (bottom field order)?
2. What bitrate is enough to insure that the quality will not be an issue? (Ulead VS defaults to variable 6000 and audio 256k but why not increase these to 8000 and 384?).
3. What is the best reasonably-priced program to do the encoding?

[theReal]

I'd use CCE or TMPEG to convert the DV avi to mpeg2. There's a guide on Doom9's site on how to create DVD mpeg2 with both programs, AFAIK.

To get a grip on the sound you'll need to save the DV files as type 2 first (with PCM audio) - then use avisynth to open the video in the encoder program OR save the type 2 DV with a VFW compatible codec (like the Panasonic or Mainconcept) in the first place.

[preston]

Thanks, theReal. I took your advice and tried TMPEG. The most useful guide seems to be

http://pwp.netcabo.pt/0165394101/TMPGEnc_Template.html

or

http://www.vcdhelp.com/tmpgencexplained.htm

I took a 30 second clip from my DV camcorder in AVI format and converted it to 6000kbps Mpeg2 with both Ulead Videostudio 6 and TMPEG Enc Plus. I also let TMPEG produce the audio; if I go with TMPEG I guess I'll get tooLame to encode the audio in one pass.

My test was inconclusive. TMPEG certainly was at least as good and perhaps slightly better on some frames that were blurry to begin with, but only by looking at the two videos frame by frame could I see a difference.

Ulead converted a 30 second clip in about 3 minutes on my 800Mhz dell and it took TMPEG 22 minutes to process the same clip. Is this normal? At that rate, it could take 44 hours to convert an hour of DV. (I did put TMPEG on highest quality, hoping to really see a difference in the quality over the Ulead VS.)

[atreides93]

Yea I'm not surprised...I have a 1.4 Gig Athlon and it takes me 4-5 hours to convert an hour of DV video to mpeg-2 using tmpeg or the built in encoder in Adobe Premiere 6.5

[theReal]

At least with TMPEG you can encode interlaced (which should be better than to deinterlace and encode in progressive mode). TMPEG is pretty slow, but I don't think you have to set it to highest motion search precision. Try a lower setting - the quality should still be fine but the encoding time will be less.

I don't know how good the VideoStudio mpeg2 encoder is - but when it can't encode interlaced DVD video then I'd rather not use it...

[preston]

Sorry -- VS can encode interlaced MPEG2, but it defaults to noninterlaced. I converted 50 hours of video using their defaults, but when I went to use it, the quality was poor. So I decided to do more research before redoing the whole 50 hours, but what I read was confusing. It was clear that many encoders were poor.

I'll experiment more with TMPEG settings but it may be that encoding with VS is acceptable now that I understand the settings better. TMPEG2 makes it much easier to change the settings (VS lets one set average bitrate but not max and min, for example and lacks all of the advanced settings).

Atreides93: I wouldn't mind 4-5 hours per hour of DV, that's what Ulead takes, but TMPEG seems to be taking ten times as long, at least on my small test. But that may be the highest quality setting.

[ByronE]

I use CCE to convert mine, when you want super high quality, and long multipass encodes, tmpgenc and cce can be very close to which is better, but a single pass on DV with cce for 1 hour of video only takes me 3o minutes to encode on an athlon xp 2000. The main snuff is the interlaceing, I use an avisynth script similar to this

avisource"blah"
assumefieldbased()
complementparity()

in order to make it Top Field first....and set it to a one pass, 900 to 6000 kbps. Turns out excellent! Much quicker than tsunami, of course, I do the audio seperately, depending on the project. Quality has never been an issue yet.

[preston]

I'm trying a full hour of video experiment with my 800Mhz Dell. There is nothing like TMPEG to make me think about a new motherboard - it is estimating 23 hours.

In the event, however, it took 13 hours, about twice as long as Ulead. I'm burning DVDs to compare TMPEG2 and Ulead VS6, although the comparison is already unfair -- Ulead, with an 8000Mb max, came out with a file size about 18% larger than TMPEG2. Ulead doesn't let you set the average in any obvious way -- they have a "quality" setting of 0-50 and a max rate (which I set at 8000). So even if they look the same, TMPEG2 does a better job compressing and took longer. Oh well.