Having trouble with TMPGEnc

[jnojr]

I'm trying to use TMPGEnc 2.521.58.169 to change a movie that's a "letterbox" in 4:3 to anamorphic 16:9 I used DVD2AVI to create a .d2v file that TMPGEnc will open. After cutting top and bottom pixels, I run into a problem at step 4 of the Wizard:

http://www.john-oliver.net/tmpgenc.bmp

I cannot do anything to lower the resulting file size. I've tried changing the bitrate down. It will go up with the arrows, but not down. If I manually change it down, as soon as I do anything else it resets itself to 3000 Unchecking "Auto setting" or going into Expert does ot help. The video is about 90 minutes long and is only video... I demuxed the .mpg before creating the .d2v

[eb]

Do not use wizards or templates, use unlock.mcf from EXTRA folder.

eb

[jnojr]

Where can I find something that'll tell me how to do what I want to do without the Wizard? And what do you mean by "use unlock.mcf from EXTRA folder"? I'm brand-new at this, and have absolutely no idea about a lot of this stuff.

[Dimmer]

Originally posted by jnojr
Where can I find something that'll tell me how to do what I want to do without the Wizard? And what do you mean by "use unlock.mcf from EXTRA folder"? I'm brand-new at this, and have absolutely no idea about a lot of this stuff. Press F1 in TMPGEnc to see the help. Also, there are several files with .mcf extension that are installed along with the program. They are the standard settings templates including DVD. These are loaded using Load button. After loading a template, load an additional one unlock.mcf that would allow to modify the standard settings.

[jnojr]

OK... thanks for the info! If I understand correctly, I can load one of the .mcf files for pre-set settings, or unlock.mcf to set everything myself?

I've been experimenting without the wizard, and think I'm mostly where I need to be. However, it looks like the output is always 4:3 I've tried checking and unchecking "Resized image is used to display preview". Unchecked, the screen on the "Clip frame" screen looks 16:9 Checked, it fills the screen. The preview and the "main" screen http://www.john-oliver.net/screen1.gif always look 4:3 It looks like it'll take quite some time to encode (I'm a 2500+ Barton, 512MB RAM, 240GB disk space), so I wanted to see if what I saw had any real bearing on what the output would be :-)

[jnojr]

I think this screen may have something to do with it:

http://www.john-oliver.net/screen3b.gif

http://www.john-oliver.net/screen3c.gif

[davexnet]

Clik setting/video.
One of the settings is "aspect ratio". Set this to either
PAL or NTSC 16*9.
Cheers,
Dave

[Dimmer]

Originally posted by jnojr
If I understand correctly, I can load one of the .mcf files for pre-set settings, or unlock.mcf to set everything myself? No, that's not correct. You can set everything yourself without loading any .mcf files, but it's easier to load a DVD template. However, if you want to make changes to the settings after loading the template, you have to load unlock.mcf once you've loaded the template.

I would suggest cutting off a minute or so of the original MPEG video using MPEG Tools - Merge&Cut and experiment with it before encoding the whole movie.