Rate Control Mode

[chipvideo]

Trying to get a movie small enough to get on 1 dvd.

I have been using default settings and it made the whole movie 3 gigs. I could notice a very drastic decline in quality.

I now changed it it VBR and then made the Max=8000 and Min=2000.

I also changed the Quality slider to 70. This is on a 5.5 gig movie and for some reason I end up with 4.9 gigs and it wont fit. What am I doing wrong?

[ulfschack]

Since you specify no average I assume you're using 1 pass VBR, and the boundaries 2-8 mbps is giving the encoder a pretty hefty leeway. Ask yourself how the encoder is supposed to know what average (final size) your aiming for. That's right - It can't know. You end up having to do a run of trials and errors playing with the quality slide, all the while you just as easyly could've done a 2-pass that'll hit spot on. 2-pass will also yield better quality.

cheers

[chipvideo]

Thank you for your reply. Now if i choose the 2 pass I am enterested in knowing what type of settings I should put in the fields. It shows 1150 for average, 3000 max and 300 min. Excuse me for my ignorance I am learning slowely. Is there any rules that you go by on movie lengths that make it easier for you to adjust your settings?

[ulfschack]

Do the math. Theoretically it should be:

rate_in_kbps= (4.37*1024 - Audio_in_MB)*1024^2*8/(60*1000*minutes)

Allthough there is a certain overhead in the muxing process (making of the VOBs) that costs a few percent (2-5%), so stay a little on the low side. Also cheap DVD-Rs have problems on the outer edges, which would promt you to stay even lower. Replacing the 4.37 for 4.0 in the formula would put you on the safe side.

Note that kbps in mpeg-2 encoding almost allways refers to thousands of bits per second and NOT 1024 bits per second. It's certainly so for TmpgEnc and CCE.

Oh, and for the min/max 1000/9500 should be fine. Average of course obtained by the above formula.

good luck in your exploits :)

cheers

[chipvideo]

Thanks for the reply. Seems better now. Man that two pass takes me 10 hours to do. Long time. I am now finding out I have synch problems. In fact every dvd I have made has a synch problem. It is almost to the point where I might not even think about recording dvd's anymore. What is the point in watchign a movie and then all of a sudden the audio and lips don't match up. Now I looked at them all and I have 8 dvd's all out of synch. UGGGGGG. A waste of money and most importantly a waste of time.

[ulfschack]

Hey now, don't mope about :) It is way possible to get nice, synched copies. I don't know your procedure, but I never reencode the sound ... simply rip the AC3 stream which is time stamped and therefore very hard NOT to be in synch with the video. Of course I'm a PAL man so I needn't do all that IVCT and pull down crap (and still wind up with a inferior resolution :) )

If the movie + language of choise fits on a 4.7 DVD I use IfoEdit. If it doesn't I reencode video using dvd2avi->avisynth->tmpgEnc and slap the resulting file on to DVDMaestro (fantastic program, easy and powerful) for authoring.

You have to live with the processing time tho, or get a 2nd CPU, or start using CCE.

cheers