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16th March 2008, 15:52 | #21 | Link | |
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Quote:
The price for XPRESS is a little more than I want to pay but at this point, I'm willing to pay it just to put myself out of my misery. If the differences between the encoders are as minimal as this example, then paying the extra $100 for ProCoder is not worth it to me (not too mention the no trial and awkward purchasing process). I'm almost out of your hair. There maybe a couple follow-up questions.
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Matt Smith |
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18th March 2008, 04:26 | #22 | Link |
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OK, I'm done. I can move forward with the rest of my life now
As mentioned above, TMPGEnc 4.0 XPress worked out great for encoding my clips to MPEG2. It two attempts to get a good DVD out of it. On my first attempt, I took the encoded clips and created the DVD in Adobe Premiere Elements (APE) 2.0. I got kind of worried because it seemed to actually be re-encoding the video. When I played the DVD on my TV, it was very choppy/stuttered/odd/not right. Figuring that APE had something to do with it, I decided to try to create the DVD in TMPGEnc DVD Author 3. When I got to the Simulation screen, I received a message that MPEG-1 Audio Layer II was not the best format and that the source audio should be converted to either PCM or Dolby. So, back to TMPGEnc 4.0 XPress. While changing the audio to Dolby, I thought I saw a setting that indicated the interlacing on the clips was being read as Top Field First. From everything I've read, the DV clips should be BFF. So before re-encoding, I made sure that they were all set to BFF.* I took the newly encoded clips and ran them through DVD Author and created another quick test DVD. When viewing the new DVD, two things were immediately apparent**:
So, my birthday is coming up this weekend and I think I'm going to buy myself a copy of TMPGEnc 4.0 XPress***. I may have to go back for DVD Author or and editor, but I'll be busy for a little while encoding what I've got. Thanks everyone! *In comparing the first and second round of encoded clips, I can't tell any difference when watching them or looking at stills, so I think the Field Order was set to BFF originally. This potentially means that APE introduced the artifacts and the choppyness. But I haven't gone (and probably won't go) back to definitively prove it. ** To give you an idea how much better, I had my wife watch both DVDs to see if she could tell a difference. While not trying to discredit my wife, she is normally oblivious to the nuances that drive me up the wall. However, the differences were significant enough between these two tests that she could easily tell the difference. *** While ProCoder came out in some of the tests in the threads I linked to, it would be lost on me (I think there was a wine analogy in one thread). TMPGEnc may not have been the best, but it wasn't as criticized as some of the others. I'm happy with my decision so please don't burst my bubble. Thanks again!
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Matt Smith |
18th March 2008, 04:31 | #23 | Link |
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Two last little requests:
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Matt Smith |
18th March 2008, 06:09 | #25 | Link | |
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Quote:
You have no idea how happy I am right now
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Matt Smith |
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24th April 2020, 19:31 | #26 | Link |
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Hey Matt!
This post is from your future self. Because our main computer crapped out and we don't have access to the video we converted way back then, I decided to revisit again. Check out this thread for more details about how I did it his time and got much better results: https://forum.doom9.org/showthread.p...57#post1908957 Hope that helps. Be sure to get a Synology NAS box sooner than later. Also, Plex is great to access the home video content but comes with it's own issues as well. Take care! Come see me some time.
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Matt Smith |
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