superior results with tmpg -why?

[morey]

I am very happy with the results ive been getting from tmpg but i thought id give cce a try and see what all the fuss is about
i ripped a short chapter. from phantom menace and encoded with tmpg then cce
Surprisingly I found the cce slow , does the vaf file always take four times real time even before the encoding starts? Is cce 4 pass generally slower than tmpg 2pass?
Also the finished cce mpeg is inferior to the tmpg even though I put the qual on80, the problem is a heat haze effect around all objects
This goes against everything I have read on these forums so is it my inexperience with cce(probably)or is it my relatively low spec computer.
Im not losing any sleep over this problem as I find tmpg very easy to use with brilliant results but any feedback on where im going wrong with cce would be appreciated

[adam]

If you set CCE to 4 passes than it is actually doing 5, because the creation of the VAF is the first pass. So you have CCE doing more than twice as much processing as TMPGenc, that's why your not seeing a speed increase. Try just setting CCE to 3 or 2 passes. This is really all you need. Also there are so many other things which affect encoding speed. Are you running any filters? What is your source? If its DVD than use avisynth and you will get speeds up to %30 faster because it skips the YUV->RGB conversion. Try usign FitCD to generate your avisynth script. It crops and adds new borders which significantly increases encoding speed and increases quality as well.

The haze you are referring to is called mosquito noise and it is probably the number one complaint that people have regarding CCE. There is a slider where you set the "Image Quality Priority" though it is named something else in later versions, I think it lists it by flat or complex or something. Anyway, read the manual, it explains what this does. You absolutely MUST set this correctly or you will get mosquito noise every time. I would tell you what settings are good but I'm guessing you are using a later version of CCE and the scale it operates on is different than my version (2.5.)

Basically, you need to take into account the amount of bitrate you are using and the complexity of your movie (lots of action vs many flat scenes ie: chick flick.) You then have to make an informed decision. The manual gives a pretty good description of how to use it and gives some good general settings. This is by far the most important setting in CCE, so you really have to learn how to use it correctly if you want good results.

[macleod]

thry the test using DVD2SVCD (do the same dvd rip using the same settings, however, use tmpgenc for one and cce for the other and see how it looks. You might be surprised that it was changes that you did vs. tmpgenc and CCE.

In thinking about my statements, were you encoding to mpeg 1 or mpeg 2? The reason I say this is from my readings and experience, TMPGENC does a better job on mpeg 1 and CCE does a better job on mpeg 2.

[morey]

Thanks for the replies i think i do need to read the manual in more detail
my source is the original dvd ,i used dvd2svcd, bicubic resizing,bbmpeg to do final muxing on cce but did both audio and vidio in tmpg(2325av 2650max 1700min, audio128,soften block noise 70, no filters
used default settings on cce but qual at 80