Best Rate Control Mode?

[ExtremeChaos]

I see alot of people that use CBR (constant bit rate) and VBR (variable bit rate). Here is what I know (or believe to know)

1. CBR has problems with fact action seens
2. VBR takes twice as long b/c of the 2-pass

So what one gives better quality (assuming I'm encoding a long movie)? And if CBR is the case, is it better to encode at a slower or higher bitrate? Are the Bitrate Calculators reliable? I don't want to encode a movie forever and have the fast action scenes be crap!

All-in-All ... what is the best to use for quality purposes?

Thanks,

Extreme

[kinneera]

VBR will give better quality, especially as you try to cram more and more video into a given space.

CBR has the convenience of being faster, and necessary for some standards. If you use it, the higher the bitrate the better. Pretty simple really. (For VCD, you cannot exceed 1150Kbps or you will have a nonstandard format).

Of course the bitrate calculators are reliable, we wouldn't use them were they not don't you think? You have to do CBR, or a form of VBR that allows specification of an average, though (notice this eliminates the CQ modes in TMPGEnc).

[ExtremeChaos]

Thanks kinneera!