Help! Sudden quality drop in TMPGENC

[RNCSerge]

DV video transfered through Firewire, edited in ULead, recompressed in DV (no noticeble quality loss), compressed in TMPGENC (DVD format, 720x480, 2 pass VBR 8000 k average and maximum rates, highest quality (very slow) motion search precision). The first few encodings came out looking great, others after that looked very pixelated, at same settings as the other encodings. Any help? One thing I should mention, during encoding, something hogs up the CPU non-stop. Encoding slows to a few frames per hour. This CPU hoggin didn't happen during my previous encodings. Any help is appreciated

[ormonde]

What version of TMPGEnc are you using?

[RNCSerge]

Plus 2.521.58.169

Also, I figured it out. Turns out, something I must have installed switched the DV filter in TMPGENC. Here somewhere, there was a page about some problems, saying to move the DirectShow Multimedia File Reader to highest priority. I did it, and the quality went right back up where it's supposed to be. Turns out it's just a file reader mix-up. Apparently some are better than others.

[ormonde]

"Turns out it's just a file reader mix-up"

Glad to hear you've appeared to have solved your problem.