I'm wondering if I should be using VBR or CBR. Now I know VBR is way better for quality but what if I'm starting with a low-quality AVI? I have a sopranos collection, all around 50mins, about 200mb avi's. Obviously the quality isn't that good, and there's quite a bit of noise and pixelation. From 1 to 10 I'd say the quality's around 6 or 7, so not too bad. My question is that with a mediocre quality source video, is there any point to using VBR or would I be better off spending the extra time applying a reduce noise filter? Also, if anyone thinks they know the best settings for reducing pixelation in TMPGenc, considering both time & quality, let me know(High Quality Mode?, still picture and range settings? Time Axis? Sharpen Edges?)
Hi. From the size and length of the files you mention it sounds like VCD would suffice (CBR). But if you have much pixel noise on the source video I recommend trying out the Smart Smoother filter (http://sauron.mordor.net/dgraft/hiq/smoothhiq.html). You can resize, apply this filter and frameserve via VirtualDub, then encode to mpeg1 using TMPGEnc. I used to use the noise reduction filter for TMPGEnc (which is excellent), but it's so damn slow I switched to offloading filtering to VirtualDub...
