First post here. I'm trying to determine the best TMPGENC settings for a software capture of a video webcasted concert. The capture files are ASF files and are relatively small when compared to a decent quality MPG file of the same length, so I'm thinking that ASF files must be very compressed. I have been working on getting them encoded to MPG2 using TMPGENC Plus so that I can then use the MPG files to author a DVD. I've done some tests using 2-pass VBR...in my first test I set the Average Bit Rate to 8000, Max BR 8000, Min BR 2000, and I used the High Quality setting for Motion Detection. The results turned out pretty good, although I do see some differences between the output MPG files and the original ASF files, primarily some graininess after a scene change. The TMPGENC log file reports that the "Surveyed Bit Rate" of the ASF file is 2900 KBPS so I am wondering if I would not get better results if I were to set the Average Bit Rate in TMPGENC to something around this surveyed bit rate, say 3500, rather than 8000. In other words, can there be problems with raising the bit rate higher than the original source? Or by setting it at 8000, am I insured of squeezing the best quality possible out of the original source files? BTW, disk space is not an issue...the video I am working with is an hour long and comfortably fits on a 4.7 GB DVD when it's encoded using an average BR setting of 8000. Thanks!
ASF are so compressed that you could even use VCD mpegs (CBR 1500 kbps). Making VCD mpegs is very quick (CBR encoding needs few hours), you won't notice much the quality difference and you can author 80' CD-R of 450' DVD-R (only if you use DVD-Lab).
