Mpeg 2 Encoding

Author: Metallaxis
Date: 11-Sep-2006, 1:04 PM

Author: Metallaxis
Time: 11-Sep-2006 1:04 PM
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Hi!
I am doing a preservation project of all my analog video-camera recordings of the past. Thing is, though the source is already of poor quality, I am totally obssessed about not loosing anymore quality due to capturing - encoding. So I ended up with some massive uncompressed files that take more than 400 GB of space.
Can anyone help me and suggest which is the best way to encode to mpeg2? I've read many threads where you people did multipass encodings that took years to complete, but I cannot find any mpeg2 encoder that isn't at least dissapointing qualitywise. I don't care if the encoding proccess takes 3 months, I just want the best result possible.
Any suggestions?
By the way, I'm on PC, but Mac suggestions are also wellcome (who knows, I might end up buying a mac to do my job)

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Author: Zion
Time: 11-Sep-2006 7:15 PM
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CCE is the best MPEG-2 encoder. It allows up to 10-pass encoding I believe, though most will tell you that anything past 6 is overkill and the difference is nominal. TMPEGenc is another good encoder, though I haven't used it in a few years. But if you have the means, definitely go with CCE.

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Author: Moth3r
Time: 12-Sep-2006 3:46 AM
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Keep in mind that noisy, low quality sources will not encode well.

Basically MPEG video compression relies on lots of clever stuff such as motion prediction to reduce the amount of data storage. Noise is random - unpredictable - and therefore takes up a lot of the available bitrate to encode.

If you filter out the noise before encoding, then you should get better results.

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Author: Metallaxis
Time: 12-Sep-2006 6:44 PM
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Thank you Zion and Moth3r for your help!
I tried CCE and it works great! I didn't find any quality setting (fast, normal, slow etc) but the result was perfect anyway...
It was also a good piece of advice the one about encoding noisy sources. Aside from using Premiere's noise reduction filter, I'm gonna try to find some more sophisticated filters, and hopefully this will deminish the noise as much as possible.