TMPGEnc 4.0 XPress

Video encoder with high level of tweakability

By John Virata

Digital video is becoming pervasive as more devices feature the capability to capture video. What started with DV camcorders has mushroomed to other digital devices such as cell phones, digital cameras, PCs and PDAs. If you are a fan of Windows Media Center Edition as I am, you are more than likely recording a lot of TV shows that you don't want to miss. Sometimes though you don't want to watch those shows on the TV or PC screen, but would rather go mobile, viewing that content at a park, on an airplane, a notebook, or even in the backyard under a hammock.

So how do you get that video onto the portable media player? Or DVD? One solution is with a video encoder that supports the widest variety of file formats. TMPGEnc 4.0 XPress is one such encoder that enables you to encode video for playback to a variety of portable media players, including DiVx-capable playback devices. It also supports DVR-MS, the format Windows Media Center PCs capture TV to. Within the scope of this first look, since I am new to this encoder, we'll take a look at the workflow as well as some of the new features.

The encoder is full featured, offering support for the widest variety of video file formats, including the capability to import DVD-video, DVD-VR, DVR-MS, and JVC's MOD video format, (the format it uses on its hard disk based camcorders) and input and output to H.264 (ISO and H.264 format MPEG-4 files via the MainConcept MPEG-4 encoder), AVI, WMV, MOV, and MPEG and its variants (MPEG-1/2, DVD-video, VCD/SVCD, XDVD (a highly compressed format to fit up to 24 hours of video onto a single DVD), and HDV. It also supports the output of the following audio file formats: WAV, MPEG-1 Audio Layer II and III (MP3), Dolby Digital, Windows Media Audio, and the AIFF format for the Mac OS.

With version 4, support is now offered for DivX, which is fast becoming one of the most widely used video formats, not only on the Internet, but on consumer devices as well due in part to its minuscule file sizes yet high quality. Casio just announced a digital camera that captures to the DivX video format, the first on the market to support the capture of DivX video.
With that said, some of the new features to version 4.0 include seven new filters for a total of 19 audio and video filters, slideshow creation, frame level cut editing, subtitle support, and the aforementioned support for the DivX video format.

Filter list editor. More than 19 filters are new to version 4.

The Interface
The tabbed interface keeps it simple with the Start, Source, Format, Encode and Options tabs. TMPG Express takes a four step approach to encoding with these tabs. The Start tab is where you begin a new project or open an existing project file. Under the Tools menu you can select from the various MPEG tools, the batch encode tool or visit the help files.

Your first step is to add a file. After you add the file it appears in the Clip addition window. Here you can change the name of the clip, display mode (interlace, progressive), Field order, and aspect ratio.  From this window you can also work with the Cut-edit and Filters window, where you can perform simple cuts to your clips and add filters. The window now displays the start, end, keyframe, and clip-split point marks of the selected clip.

Clip editing

You can also magnify the clip up to 8X to get a better view of the contents of the clip. There is also a histogram tool and a basic vectorscope to view color intensity values of the clip. You can also work with the audio and video filters from this window as well. Version 4.0 includes more than 19 filters, including deinterlace, picture crop, video noise reduction, sharpness, color correction, volume adjustment, picture resize, color phase correction, anti-flickering, contour, smart sharpness, subtitles, audio fade in/fade out, picture rotation, ghost reduction, Gaussian blur, video fade in/fade out, audio noise reduction, and bilingual audio. You can apply all the filters to the source video if you wish and just encode it a single time.

DivX file output window.