TMPGEnc 2.5 plus versus TMPGEnc 3.0 Xpress

[mikalm]

I had downloaded the trial of TMPGEnc 2.5 plus and loved it. I then purchased the bundle of TMPGEnc 3.0 XPress and TMPGEnc DVD Author 1.6, paying the extra money because it sounded like the 3.0 Xpress had all the features of the 2.5 plus and some extra features. I just finished my first encoding with XPress and found that it took about four times as long to encode as the 2.5 did and the encoded project took up more space than encoding with 2.5 did. The video I was recording was one hour and 20 minutes, and I was advised by DVD Author that it wouldn't fit on a single layer DVD. With 2.5, I had no trouble getting a two hour video on a single layer DVD.
I would like to duplicate the settings that I used with 2.5 on 3.0 Xpress, but after going through the help files, I can't figure out how to do that. Can anyone help me with that? Thank you.
Michael Kalm

[CarolynC]

I just found this board and this thread by websearching on exactly the same problem. I don't even know if TMPGEnc 3.0 XPress ends up with larger files than TMPGEnc 2.5, because I've never let 3.0 finish an encoding. But like miklam has experienced, 3.0 takes much much longer to encode than does 2.5. I keep giving up on 3.0 and going back to 2.5. Is there something obvious that I might be doing wrong with 3.0?

[mikalm]

Hi Carolyn,
You might be interested in the response I got from Pegasys Technical support:

Basically, TMPGEnc 3.0 XPress is 100% different thinking, processing and structuring than TMPGEnc 2.5 serial. In fact, it most optimized fro the XDVD creation and Dual Layer DVD creation. So the MPEG encode engine between them are completely different.

I means a lot of default setting are completely changed. For example, in the "Set Output" windows, in "MPEG Output..." > "Other" tag, "Optimize half/full pixel motion search" is checked by default, but in TMPGEnc is "No motion search for still picture part by half pixel" has checked by default. If you uncheck the "Optimize half/full pixel motion search" and "Apply low-pass filter on color channels" in TMPGEnc 3.0 Xpress, your encode will be much more fast than TMPGEnc 2.5.

A lot of settings as this delay the processing of MPEG encode in TMPGEnc 3.0 XPress. Only one goal is higher the quality.

Best regards,

--------------------------------------------------------------
Pegasys Inc.
(Hifan Lim)
Support Section

I haven't had a chance to try the suggestions yet, but I will.
Mike

[CarolynC]

Thanks, Mike! I'll give that a try.