CCE Variable Bit Rate: Experience?

[Tim Newton]

I am considering using variable bit rate in CCE and am wondering how much CCE actually varies the bit rate during complex or simple scenes. Let's say I set the average bit rate to 4 Mbps, and max to 8 Mbps, and did a 2-pass encoding. How much would the bit rate change for complex and high motion scenes?

Is there a way for me to determine, after encoding, what bit rates were used along the way, or what the actual maximum bit rate was?

Here is why I want to know. 2-pass, or N-pass encoding substantially increases encoding time. However, if the actual bitrate only varied between the average at 4 Mbps and say 4.5 Mbps for complex scenes, then I'd simply be better off encoding at 4.5 Mbs constant bit rate, and save all that time. Does anyone know, from practical experience, about this kinda stuff?

Tim

[adam]

CCE is a very good mpeg encoder, probably the best one on the market. If you use logical vbr settings then yes it will make full use of vbr encoding, using substantially varied bitrates for high and low complexity scenes.

If you want to check how the bitrate was allocated to your encode just use a bitrate viewer. http://www.tecoltd.com/bitratev.htm

I would recommend using cce at 3 to 4 passes, anything more than that will only have a marginal increase in quality and will take substantially more time to encode. Remember though that the first pass is just to make the vaf file so when you set cee to do 3 passes, its actually doing 4.

[ImaWeTodd]

If you're really interested....

here's a link :http://www.doom9.org/mpg/cce-advanced.htm

I Quote from the above link:

CCE has an advanced mode where you can tweak the bitrate distribution manually down to the GOP level. This guide will teach you how to use this feature and how to get better looking files by reducing the number of passes and a rather quick manual intervention between the first and the second pass