Color problems with CCE and TMPGEnc

[Tackemon]

I recently picked up a DVD burner and a Pinnacle DV500 DVD capture board. At the moment I'm in the process of transferring my Star Wars laserdiscs over to DVD and have been experimenting with various encoders.

Now the Pinnacle MPEG2 encoder is pretty good actually. It supports VBR encoding, but it has very few options. No 3:2 pulldown, and you can only change the average bitrate in increments of 1 Mbps. But the quality is good at bitrates of 5 Mbps and higher and the colors are identical to the source capture.

I tried the CCE trial version (SP 2.66.01.07) via the Premiere plug-in and I have to say I was disappointed. The encoding quality is excellent using 1-pass VBR in terms of reducing blockiness, but the colors were a bit faded compared to the original capture. Enough to be noticeable. Is there a way to get around that?

I also tried the latest version of TMPGEnc, which I found to be easier to use and also produced excellent results. However, flesh tones appeared to be too pink compared to the original. Huh?

I'd like to use an encoder that can do 3:2 pulldown (for better encoding quality, right?) and one with flexibile bitrate options. But I want accurate colors too!

Help!

[Tackemon]

OK, first of all, I think I misspoke - I'm really looking for an encoder that can do "inverse telecine" and *mark* the video for 3:2 pulldown. Did I say that right?

Well, after a bunch of experimentation, I found the real issue. I was viewing specific frames in Premiere, and for some reason, the files output from TMPGEnc don't display quite the same as in Power DVD. In Power DVD, the flesh tones appear to be 100% the same as the source material. So I'm assuming there's just some sort of quirkiness with Premiere.

I'm really liking TMPGEnc so far. How the heck do you estimate the final file size with automatic VBR enabled though? I'm going to try and fit a two hour movie on a DVD-R using a quality setting of 45 (min 1000, max 8000). We'll see...

[fasttimes]

Originally posted by Tackemon
I tried the CCE trial version (SP 2.66.01.07) via the Premiere plug-in and I have to say I was disappointed. The encoding quality is excellent using 1-pass VBR in terms of reducing blockiness, but the colors were a bit faded compared to the original capture. Enough to be noticeable. Is there a way to get around that?

I'd like to use an encoder that can do 3:2 pulldown (for better encoding quality, right?) and one with flexibile bitrate options. But I want accurate colors too!You could try changinh the Quantization Maxtix (under the Video button menu.)
Regrding pulldown, try using AVISynth with the Telecide plugin.