Cinema Craft Encoder Settings

[mltwitz]

Can anyone provide some input regarding Cinema Craft Encoder settings (v.2.10.02.06)? I'm new to CCE and I can't seem to get any decent results when trying to reduce the size of my Sony Vegas produced mpg files. For example I have a 600mb mpeg2 file of a 10 minute clip and want to reduce the bitrate in cce such that the filesize becomes, let's say half, prior to authoring, so I can fit more on a DVD. I don't want the authoring software to reduce the file, as usually they don't do a very good job in re-encoding. I heard cce is the best for that, but when I tried reducing it using 3-pass vbr, approx. 2.5 kbits/sec, the portions with high motion had lots of macroblocking and blur. I tried the same with autogk and get near perfect results, however the resulting file is an avi,so it's not DVD compliant, so I can't use that. An alternative would be to reduce the file in autogk first and then convert it back to mpg using cce, but then I have to re-encode twice. Not sure what that does to the quality.

PS: I'm frameserving the mpg file from virtualdubmod to cce.

[Baldrick]

You cannot compare avi xvid/divx bitrates with mpeg2 bitrates. xvid/divx is much better with lower bitrates than the old mpeg2 format.

And it wont help to first convert with autogk and then to mpg...it will just make it worse.

[mltwitz]

OK, so what do you recommend?

[Baldrick]

lower the resolution, 325x288 or 352x480 are valid for dvd.

[daamon]

lower the resolution, 325x288 or 352x480 are valid for dvd.

352 x 288 = PAL VCD resolution
352 x 480 = NTSC Half-D1

As the OP's in Texas, I'm guessing you meant 352 x 240 for NTSC valid VCD resolution, not PAL's 352 x 288?

[mltwitz]

Why won't it help to reduce the file size with autogk first? The quality hit is much less severe when reducing the filesize with autogk (and converting to xvid/divx), compared to cce. Will the conversion from avi back to mpg in cce have such a large impact on the quality?

[jagabo]

Every time you convert to a lossy codec you lose some detail and add some artifacts.

Compressing with autogk first won't help because the process of converting the video to Divx/Xvid consists of decompressing each frame or the source back to an uncompressed state, then compressing with Divx/Xvid. Imagine if autogk compressed the video really well, then decompressed it with no artifacts and with every frame exactly the same as the original source. That would be no different than simply using the original source for your conversion!