TMPGEnc MPEG1 encoding guide

Nowadays TMPGEnc's internal filters and functions have basically been completely superseded by those in AVISynth, therefore this guide has been totally rewritten. Now encoding in TMPGEnc is very simple - just load our specified profile after loading your AVS file into TMPGEnc.

First off, you'll need to download TMPGEnc from their homepage. The folks there got mad at Doom9 for posting the install files, so we didn't include them in our install pack because we don't want them yelling at us.

Open up TMPGenc and close the wizard.

Your AVISynth file should already be resized to your desired resolution so just drag it into the main TMPGEnc window. Then, hit the "Load" button in the bottom corner and select one of the two profiles we've provided for you. If your AMV has been Inverse Telecined somewhere along the way (either before or after editing), select the AMV24fps.mcf profile. If you didn't do IVTC but instead chose to deinterlace at the end, select the AMV30fps.mcf profile. After you load the profile, have a quick browse of the settings and see if they look correct to you - the frame size, fps and pixel aspect ratio are the key things to double check.

We've left all the options unlocked for you if you feel like playing around with them, but we recommend you leave the settings alone, although you may feel like tweaking the bitrate settings to suit your desired filesize.

The type of bitrate decision we've selected is Constant Quality at 80% with a 3MBit/sec ceiling. This means that TMPGEnc, as it's encoding the video, will vary the bitrate based upon how much the current scene needs it. If the scene is low motion, has very little noise, and other things which make it highly compressible, then TMPGEnc will most likely allocate a small number of bits to the scene. If the scene is very high motion and needs a lot of bits to compress, then it will allocate more bits.

This means that with the same settings, two video of the same length might wind up being different sizes because one video had more high-motion scenes than the other. We think this is a better idea because obviously not all videos need an average of 2MBit/sec.

This is different than the 2-pass VBR method recommended before. What 2-pass VBR does is it gives you a definite filesize. If you want a 40MB file,  use the following math:

Take 40 and multiply by 8192 (which would give you the number 327680)... this is the number of kilobits that a 40 megabyte file has.

Now divide this number by the number of seconds in your video. This will give you the overall bitrate in kilobits per second. If your video was 4 minutes long it would be 327680 divided by 240 = 1365 kbps. Of course, some of this bitrate has to be used by the audio, 224 kpbs in fact, so subtract 224 from your bitrate and you will have the bitrate for your video stream which in this case is 1141 kbps. This is the number you should put in the average bitrate box. Unfortunately, TMPG's bitrate curve calculations aren't actually as accurate as they seem and it can give you totally the wrong final size, so be careful if you do use 2-pass to watch out for any strangeness.

Note that 2-pass encoding can take approximately twice as long as a Constant Quality encode because, as the name implies, you are making two encoding passes across the entire video.

If you find that your final encode has a lot of MPEG1 artifacting, you can try increasing the maximum bitrate (if you left it on Constant Quality) or raising both the ceiling and average bitrate if you went with 2-pass.

Once you have it installed and setup, you want to fix the environment settings to use various external programs for your audio encoding. See this section in the audio guide for details.