Encoding Quick Over View

• Load video.
• Cut/edit out undesired parts.
• Crop the frame. Don't render black borders and trash.
• Balance luma levels.
• Balance chroma levels and white balance.
• Deinterlace/IVTC.
• Run smooth, blur, sharpening, denoise type cleaning filters if needed.
• Resize.
• Add subtitles if needed. Make sure subs are clear and readable.
• Balance the audio. Don't encode something in the mud. It will only make it worse. Likewise, don't blindly increase the volume until it clips. It will sound worse than trash. Use a good normalization method. Try to stay away from compression as that will make the audio sound funny.
• Set audio conversion if needed.
• Set audio compression. Never use mp3 "joint stereo" mode. It will mix the lower frequencies in the name of "compression" and actually make it sound worse. Use normal "stereo" mode.
• Set video compression. Keep the compression levels set so that the episode comes out an even fraction of a CD. If you go over the size, START OVER AND DO IT RIGHT. Even though a "good" CD will have an overburn section, it is typically only 1 to 2 megabytes. Not all discs have clean dye at the very edge, either. This could lead to faulty data writes.
  Manual bit rate calculations. These are a bit more complicated so pay attention. Given: CD_Size=700m, desired size is 1/4 CD, time is 20m15s (20m*60s+15s=1215s total time). Since CD's are measured in megabytes and we need kilobytes, 1024 is used to multiply it out.
  total = ( (CD_megs*1024/File_Size_Fraction) / Seconds) * 8 = total bit rate
  total = ( (700*1024/4) / 1215 ) * 8 = 1179kbit/sec (rounded)
  Since this is total episode bit rate (video+audio+overhead), the rest needs to be subtraced out to get the video rate. Audio encoding rate will be 160kbit/sec for this example.
  video = 1179 - 160 = 1019kbit/sec (rounded)
  Since there will be some overhead, take 1019 down to 1818 or 1017 to get the proper file size. Unfortunately, this is more determined by experimentation than mathematics. The container will have some specific overhead, but more often the codec will have trouble compressing the video and will come out on the large side. Each codec and raw video is different.
  Quick size list in bytes. This is generated by multiplying the size of a CD (700megs typical) by 1024*1024. Simple eh? There are combinations that can be used, but the byte count should not exceed the entire disc size. Also take into count block sizes of the CD when creating multiple files per disc.
  1: 700m = 734,003,200
  2: 350m = 367,001,600
  3: 233m = 244,667,733
  4: 175m = 183,500,800
  5: 140m = 146,800,640
  6: 116m = 122,333,866
  7: 100m = 104,857,600
  8: 87m = 91,750,400
  
• Start the encode and come back later.