Cinemacraft question...

[chanchan]

I'm just wondering if you can lower the priority of Cinemacraft in Window's taskmanager without it effecting the encoding.

I'm running it with P4 1.6Ghz and 512 MB DDR with most other programs turned off (including anti-virus), but it still is majorily slowing down my comp and Internet connection (I'm on DSL and pages are not loading). So I'm just wondering if lowering the priority to 'Low' would help out any.

[edit] Thought I'd add in that I'm encoding it doing a 2-pass VBR. That brings me to another question, with Cinemacraft SP is there really that big of a difference in the quality between CBR, 1-pass VBR, 2-pass VBR, or 3-pass VBR?

[adam]

Yes you can safely lower the priority in task manager and it shouldn't hurt the encode, and yes it will make a noticable difference if running other programs.

The difference you get between the different encoding modes depends on your source and your bitrate. Regarding VBR and CBR, the differences are much more noticable as the bitrate decreases. If you have a high CBR rate than you might not get much benefit using VBR, but generally using VBR you can achieve a much higher quality encode at the same size as a CBR one, or one of relatively equal quality as the CBR in a much smaller filesize. VBR is definitely the encoding method of choice for all projects unless you have a very high CBR bitrate.

As for multipass encodes, I do see a difference between 1 and 2 passes. From 2 to 3 maybe some scenes look a little better but generally there isn't all that much improvement. Anything beyond this probably isn't going to be noticable but of course it never hurts.

[chanchan]

Thanks for the help adam.. .

What I'm encoding is AVI's (DivX 5.0) with an average bitrate of 1207kbs. I think I'm gonna stick with using 2-pass VBR for now.