Hi...I have been playing around with my settings in TPMG AW 4 for a few weeks, ran into some problems. I have found out through trial and error basicly now that the picture gets kinds of blurry/pixaly when someone moves/ camera moves after I use AW to put it on dvd. I am importing files through my dvd recorder as well as converting AVI files with the AW software to DVD. The files themselves are all good and great quality until I put them through AW. I am thinking it has something to do with the encoder settings. I did change the "Motion Search" settings to higest with error correction, that seemed to help some, but not a ton. I wonder if when u go into settings and MPEG settings it has a "Intercom MPEG encoder" thing there, do I need to change it to a different encoder? I LOVE AW and I just need to get my settings right LOL! Please help! :D

What are your other track settings? I'm guessing your source video isn't in a DVD-compliant format, otherwise it wouldn't re-encode the video and there'd be no quality difference.

In Source stage-->Track settings-->Video tab, change the encoding mode to "Re-encode all videos as below".
Then for Rate control mode, select "VBR (Full rendering 2 pass VBR)".
Pump up the bitrate and max bitrate to 9200 kb/s if it isn't up there already.
Change motion search settings to it's best setting as you have already done.

You'll have to change these settings for each track.
Other than this, I'm not sure what else you can do within TAW4.
Outside of TAW4, you can use some other video encoder (such as 4.0 XPress) to re-encode your source video into DVD-compliant MPEG.

I am importing mostly from dvd files from my dvd recorder...the only thing that is re-encoding is the cut out parts (smart rendering) BUT I am using the target size 4.7 gb otherwise it wouldn't fit onto a single layer dvd. I will still try what u said though! Thanks! BTW- is there anything else u would suggest from reading this post? :D

Ah I see, you're using the transcoding settings in the Output stage. I'm pretty sure that is what is causing the quality drop. How big is your project before transcoding? If your project is huge, like 9GB or so, then you're going to get a quality drop no matter what as long you're trying to fit it on a single layer DVD and keep it in the DVD-Video format.

You can try selecting "None" as the target size and then output the file without burning to disc. You can then check the output file to see if the quality is as it should be. If it looks good, then we can confirm that it is the transcoding settings that are causing the quality drop.

Well, it isn't really bad quality...it is just after I put it through aw it has a kind of blurryness/pixal thing when it is done rendering...so it is probably the transcoder, so I will play around with the settings and what u suggested! TY! :D

Also, is there any way to have smart rendering with the 2-pass encoder for the re-encoded parts?

Unfortunately, no. However, you can change the picture quality to 100 (by default, it is 90 I think).

LOL...I have it that way already LOL...well anyways I will see what happens and thanks again! :D

Hey again...LOL! I have FINALLY figured out that it is the transcoder making the blurry/pixaly thing...not too bad except for after a big move in the picture, when it settles the pixals show a lot and then go away...is there anyway to reduce or get rid of this? Also if there is a bright picture and then after it a darker one, the pixals are even worse...can anyone help? There is something in the preferences about the transcoder engine and it looks like you COULD change it, but it is greyed out...I am not sure if changing that would even help...but I am just asking if anyone know what to do to improve this! Thanks! :D

I am trying to re-author a double layer DVD as a single layer DVD. When I get to the end of the project I get an error massage that says "Total Bitrate is too Large for Standard DVD ....."
I'm not sure what that means or how to fix it.
Would appreciate any suggestions.
Thanks

The video is probably too long or the quality is too high for a single layer DVD. Thus, lowering the bitrate will make the filesize smaller, allowing it to fit on a single layer DVD. The less space on the disc you have, the more you're going to have to sacrifice on quality (assuming it's a full-length movie).

If you don't know much about bitrates, try the Transcoding option in the Output stage and make sure you select single layer DVD as your target media size. This should automatically adjust the quality so your video can fit on the single layer DVD.

Thanks, I will try that, but just for an experiment I ignored the warning and hit the "Continue Anyway" button. It created the DVD and I tried playing it in my new DVD player. It was perfect, but of course it's a new player and that may make a difference. I'm going to find an old DVD player and see if it will play on that. If it works in an old player then maybe the error message is a useless glitch. What I really can't understand is where the message says "total bitrate" I thought a bit rate was just an adjustable number. How is it related to a "Total" as though something is being added up. It's not saying the bit rate is too high, it's says the bitrate TOTAL is too high. I don't understand that at all.

The maximum bit rate you have selected may be above the nominal DVD standard maximum rate, even if the total file size fits on a single layer. Many, but not all, DVD players can cope with the higher bit rate. Thus there is some risk it will not play on some, especially older, DVD players.

Something is screwy. If I set the Source Encoder to Automatic it comes up with a non-adjustable maximum bit rate of 9641 which is well below the maximum of 9848, and that's when I get the error message about it being too high at 9866.
But if I set it to "Re-Encode All" I can set it all the way to 9840 and it does not present me with the error message. Do you think it's a bug in the software?

Might the difference be whether or not audio is included in the bit rate setting/calculation?

Hi

I have been trying to produce a slideshow from high quality photos (15 megapixel) but am very disappointed with the resulting DVD (viewed on the computer only so far). The source pictures are crystal clear, yet the images in the resulting video are degraded so much that the video is 'unwatchable'. I have tried installing various video codecs (thinking I might not have some necessary bit to achieve the quality I expect), and have tried resizing the image files to smaller 720 x 540 size in case TMPGEnc AW4 is struggling with the size of the source files. Both methods fail to correct the problem.

I have also tried to produce a slideshow using MemoriesOnTV and get the same kind of poor quality results. I have used both these packages previously (over a year ago) and was pleased with the results. That was on a different computer no longer available to me.

I am using a Dell Dimension 9200 with Vista.

I hope someone can help, and will thank any responders now in advance.

It's possible that you just have a bigger, better monitor now and can thus see how DVD-quality just doesn't look as good on a larger, high-resolution display.

Can you take a screencap of a frame from the slideshow DVD (via PowerDVD or something like that)?

I have used Tmpg Express successfully to (edit out the ads) then recode TV recordings (English FreeView), giving an output file of a tiny bit less than 4.4GB, which i can then burn to DVD.
Trying to do this with Tmpg Authoring 4, however, gives
a) several complaints about non-compliant data rates etc and
b) a file size less than the original TV recording eg a 1.58 .mpg file gives a file of 1.32 GB - which then burns to my DVD making it look like an idiot has recorded it. What is going wrong? I just can't figure it out . . brianMacD

What are the specs of the source video? is it HD? What output format did you use in TMPGEnc XPress? Specs? Dimensions, bitrate, framerate?

-thnx for your questions tkrave - sorry to be tardy in response. This is the first time that I have had to be involved with any of this, in many years of recording TV broadcasts via my computer to disc!!! And also copying from DVD to DVD has been trouble free.
I put film A into TMPGExpress 4 and it gives :
Highest bitrate 15000 Kb/s; average b/r is 2769 Kb/s.
The film is PAL, 25 fps , 720 x 576, duration is 1h 47 min

The O/P format used is DVD standard MPEG which works fine and here gave
an average video bitrate of 5168 Kb/s and audio 224 |Kb/s which gives
a file size to burn later of approx 4.38 GB.

Now in TAW4 I get identical figures for the input film but when I move to the output stage I select "single layer DVD" and get an o/p size of 2.291 GB at the bottom. If I look at the output size it is grayed out and says 4.359 GB.
When clicking on "Start O/P"; now there occurs 2 complaints about both the video bitrate and the total bitrate being too high for the DVD standard and the recode goes ahead as less than half the required figure.

HAVE YOU ANY SUGGESTION PLEASE? I certainly seem to have been spoilt because this TMPG author 4 prog is obviously meant for use by real professionals. I do know that these terms exist but have never been asked to use them myself.
Using Nero, or FLICK or SHRINK or ISOBURN or Decrypter or DVDFab has insulated me from all that.

This is important to me as I just hate to be bested!! Many thanks for your help. Brian

It might be that the maximum video bitrate is too high, but I don't think it should be since you output it as DVD-compliant MPEG in 4.0 XPress. Your average bitrate and audio bitrate look fine.

My advice is to ignore the warnings.
Also, select "None" as your target size in the Output stage. This should keep your file size the same.

This authoring program still has absolutely no support for Windows 7.
When you intend to do that ? next month ? next year ? never ?

don't use cracked one

yeah its the patched software which makes it not work.

the patch currently works for all version apart from windows 7, and its all down the the different files system used within windows 7

Hi

I would like to include a kind of chapter at the ending of the clip, which will contain the credits of the movie.

Do you know if it is possible to do that with Authoring Works 4 or I will need to create it outside of the program and import it to the program.

Thanks in advance

Slfreire

if its just to add a segment already done, then yeah just add it on, but if its here you need to create it fom scratch, then outsider software is needed

Hi Mathew

Thank you for your prompt help.
Then I understood I need to create the chapeter of the credits in an outsider software and then import it to Tmpgenc.

Do you suggest any software with power to do that ?

Slfreire

well if your on a pc , adobe premier pro can do it and so can sony vegas pro 9

itl take a bit to get used to with both areas.

with mac, there are many great software since mac is far far better than the pc with editing and video encoding...but i dotn own a mac sadly

I don't if this is possible or not. I want to create a multiple file DVD project with anywhere from 4 -7 video episodes per disk. I had read somewhere that, if your going to use multiple clips then associate one clip per track. I'm not sure how that's helping my menu plans though.

After I load up all of my tracks and files, I want to create a top menu that says just the name of the show, that's all. Then have it set up where I just click on one button and that would then lead me to just one page that has all of the files I am using.

I don't want to have a separate page for each file but I've noticed that TMPGEnc likes to do that. Ok so how do I do what I want to do?

Here's how to do it.

-In the Menu Wizard, select Create a custom menu.
-In the next screen, in the "Title Page Use" box, check the box next to "Create a title page in the top menu."
-Then go on with the menu creation process and choose the layout you want for your top menu. I suggest choosing "TEXT" for your button template.
-When you get to the Menu Composition Settings window, select Top Menu only.
-Choose whatever other options you want and finish the menu creation process.

In the Menu stage, you should have an extra page (the title page).
This will appear before your Top Menu. By default it should have a Title, Play button, and Track Menu button.
Since we chose TEXT as our button template, the buttons are composed of editable text instead of an image.
-Change the "Track Menu" text to the name of your show. If you don't want the Title and Play button to be visible, just delete the text.

That should get the menu structure that you're looking for.

Can someone recommend a format/program to convert FLVs to that won't double or triple there size? What format would be acceptable to TMPEnc 4 authoring works 4 and still have roughly the same size/quality?
Thanks to all who contribute!

Did you planned to Windows 7 support?

I've noticed that if I just start with my Track Menu page, there is a link for "Chapters" on the first page. I've never been totally sure what chapters are. Do you even need them? I've noticed that I can get rid of the reference if I want to.

very simply put, instead of going to the start each time and fast forwarding to the part you missed etc, you can go to the selected chapter of the where abouts it is.

if you go to the start where you added the file theres the edit tab, go in and on the edit tab within it look down right theres a menu button and i think its the top option, i would noral select the 2 option within that ie the mins selection. i go for 5 mins. it will then scan for every selected chapter section.

you thenpress ok and go on with your editing.

Actually, right after I posted this I discovered some revelations about chapters in my AVI's. Basically the ones I have don't have any more than one chapter. I found that out by opening up the "Chapter Editor" That makes sense too because someone else had told me that things like special features, cannot be retained in an AVI, so that would explain about chapters too.

I want to burn several different 50 minute videos to one disc, however I've noticed that, in the main menu, when I click "Start New Project" and add multiple "clips" or "files" that they all just get listed as chapters under "Track 1". Is there any way to make each "clip" an individual "track" instead of "chapter" or how's that all work?

The column on the left side of the Source stage shows your tracks. Click on the "Add a track" button to add another track. Click on a track to select it and add your clip(s). Or you can drag a clip from on track to another.

Got it! That worked out great! So it's kind of designed to where tracks are, or can be the same thing as files or clips, correct? Also... how would I set it up where, say I have 5 tracks...I want my top page to show the track button, then when I click on the track button and go to the main track page, it shows all of the tracks? I don't want separate pages for each track.

Also, I recently had to reinstall TMPGEnc but I never noticed something that may have been happening before. When I loaded up an avi file that was only 808 MB's in size, it showed on the bottom display that it took up 6163 MB's but when I finally advanced to output and set it on single disc, it went back down some. That's normal right?

Also I had a friend that was able to get an hour and a half show and quite a few few 44 min shows on each disc, but I don't know how he did it. In all, he was able to spread out 22 episodes onto 4 discs. One disc had up to seven episodes and the others had less.

I messed around with trying that in TMPGEnc but I was only able to get to two episodes, the one big long one and the smaller one, but they both almost maxed out the capacity. But here again, I know that some of that readout will go down when I set the output...So how do you know how many files you can load up in the Source page and how do you think this guy was able to get all those files squeezed on a disc?

with the files size, can you do us a screen shot as thats around 6gb of file.

Hope I did this right. Here's a screenshot:

http://img186.imageshack.us/img186/4251/tmpgencmainwindow.jpg

ah right, thats normal due to the time legnth of the footage and also depends on what settings you have it on .

with me ill make it encode to the best it can so in the settings on the left i drop the bar down to custom, and push the average and max bitrate to max and also to 2 pass vbr.

you can then at the end change it to the dvd5 size

So at what point can I customize all that you are talking about? I did find where, in the "Output" menu I can select "Custom" and reduce things there. Is that what you were talking about? Is there some other place you can tweak too? You mentioned something about 2 pass vbr...where is that at?

Also...So in regards to putting multiple tracks and files of this show I was mentioning, do I just take a guess and try loading say, 4, 5 or more episodes, then when I get to the end, once again, select custom and drop down the bitrate?

the shot you showed.

look at the elft for track 1 settings, go into there and experiment for the bitrate.

now the output stuff all you need to do is select 4.7 size so that the target is to fit onto a normal dvd5 dvd

So I can do the same thing with multiple tracks or files. Just go in there and crank each individual one down some. How do you know if you go to to low a bitrate?

you wont, becuase you can not change the minimum bitrate.

but its also to do with taste of the users .

Why TMPGEnc Authoring Works 4 didn't work on my xp windows computer? Other computer which is vista version works well. Program don't start all in xp windows computer.

Mine stopped work as well..Been using this for a year and now it stopped working on my XP..Went back to Version 3.

very simple, do a reinstall of your os its seems to eb the main reason this happens.

i bet you when you do a fresh install of your os the software will work again.

I doubt that because same problem performer three different xp computer. Let me know if os reinstall however aid.

well ive had the issue when software starts to mess up or not work, so after doing a chkdsk function and unistall and reinstall of the said software if it still doesn't work right, i normally format and do a fresh os install

works a treat and also allows you to sort your system out to how you wish it to be.

You are probably right. Os reinstall lead to large number software install. Therefore i evade thus alternative. I wonder...how is possibly that three different computer was similar out of order?! Thank you good advice!

Markku

i bet you that the other system havent had a fresh install in quite a while.

and how many progs on your system do you actually use?