DV to DVD using CCE - settings?

[Braindrain]

I'm doing some conversion using TMPG, MCE and CCE. I first capture as a DV AVI Type II (to minimize loss) and then convert.

The settings between them are :

TMPG 2.520
2-pass, vbr, 2500-6000-8000, high quality

MCE 1.4
2-pass, vbr, 2500-6000-8000
NR - off, search method - 12, search range - 25

CCE 2.62
3-pass, vbr, 2500-6000-8000
antinoise filter - 0, image quality priority - 0 (complex)
present matrix - standard


Using these settings, both TMPG and MCE are quite comparable in terms of both quality and time.

CCE is significantly faster but the video is visibly worse.


Just wondering what are some settings other people use?

[adam]

You should never use an image quality priority of 0. This will surely give you horrible banding on low motion scenes. Generally speaking, the higher the bitrate the higher this setting should be. With an avg bitrate of 6000kbits your setting should be in the 30's or 40's. This should help quality substantially.

Also, there is no reason to use a minimum bitrate of 2500kbits. This just arbitrarly limits the effectiveness of the VBR encoding. Use something like 500 instead. Raising the min only hurts quality.

How did you set the settings on the Video tab? You should have everything unchecked except for insert time code and top field first (there are actually better ways of handling field order with DV but this will work.)

If you want the best quality with DV you really need to do some prefiltering. DV is incredibly noisy especially in low light. You really need to apply some sort of noise reduction filter to blend all those "grains" into a smoother picture. This also makes the image much more compressible, which is necessary since DV is usually very complex due to all the shaking which is hard to avoid.

If you want top quality DV in CCE or TMPGenc for that matter, you really need to use Avisynth. Here is a little guide on encoding DV in CCE. http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=60392

[Braindrain]

Thanks!

I'll give it a try!