TMPGEnc encoding guideNowadays TMPGEnc's internal filters and functions have basically been completely superseded by those in AVISynth, therefore this guide has been totally rewritten. Now encoding in TMPGEnc is very simple - just load our specified profile after loading your AVS file into TMPGEnc. First off, you'll need to download TMPGEnc from their homepage. The folks there got mad at Doom9 for posting the install files, so we didn't include them in our install pack because we don't want them yelling at us. Once you have it installed and setup, you want to fix the environment settings to use various external programs for your audio encoding. See this section in the audio guide for details. Your AVISynth file should already be serving 352x240 resolution so just drag it into the main TMPGEnc window. Then, hit the "Load" button in the bottom corner and select one of the two profiles we've provided for you. If your AMV has been Inverse Telecined somewhere along the way (either before or after editing), select the AMV24fps.mcf profile. If you didn't do IVTC but instead chose to deinterlace at the end, select the AMV30fps.mcf profile. The reason we're using non-square pixels, by the way, is because MPEG streams allow you to specify an aspect ratio - which means on playback it can be resized by the player to the correct dimensions on your screen. When you hit Full Screen in Windows Media Player 6.4, it will autoresize a properly flagged 352x240 MPEG1 file to fill the whole screen (or at least, resize it to 4:3 if you aren't running in a 4:3 ratio resolution like 1280x1024). By storing 352x240 video and flagging it properly, we can store extra bits of horizontal resolution for when it gets upsized later. This cannot be done in an AVI file since AVI files don't allow for aspect ratio information, thus this is the only guide in which you'll be instructed to resize to a non-square-pixel resolution. We've left all the options unlocked for you if you feel like playing around with them, but we highly recommend you leave the settings alone, although you may feel like tweaking the bitrate settings to alter your filesize. The type of bitrate we've selected is Constant Quality at 80% with a 3MBit/sec ceiling. This means that TMPGEnc, as it's encoding the video, will vary the bitrate based upon how much the current scene needs it. If the scene is low motion, has very little noise, and other things which make it highly compressible, then TMPGEnc will most likely allocate a small number of bits to the scene. If the scene is very high motion and needs a lot of bits to compress, then it will allocate more bits. This means that with the same settings, two video of the same length might wind up being different sizes because one video had more high-motion scenes than the other. We think this is a better idea because obviously not all videos need an average of 2MBit/sec. This is different than the 2-pass VBR method recommended before. What 2-pass VBR does is it gives you a definite filesize. If you want a 40MB file, take 41680, divide it by the # of seconds in your video, subtract 224 (or whatever bitrate you've got for your audio) and that's what you should put for your average bitrate. Unfortunately, TMPG's bitrate curve calculations aren't actually as accurate as they seem and it can give you totally the wrong final size, so be careful if you do use 2-pass to watch out for any strangeness. Note that 2-pass encoding can take approximately twice as long as a Constant Quality encode because, as the name implies, you are making two encoding passes across the entire video. If you find that your final encode has a lot of MPEG1 artifacting, you can try increasing the maximum bitrate (if you left it on Constant Quality) or raising both the ceiling and average bitrate if you went with 2-pass. Once you've got everything setup, hit the Start button and let it go. |