Originally posted by: Arnie.d

ungodly low 3 PASSES
certainly hope the X0 guys do AT LEAST the max 9 passes in CCE's SP version, hopefully the max of 14 or whatever is allowed in the corporate, or regular CCE version.

As Moth3r already said quality improvement reaches its limit at 3 ~ 4 times of encoding.
I bet you can't show us some clips that shows us the difference!

Besides the maximum is 99 passes. Bongloads, you really encode a lot yourself, right?

No, I can't show you any clips, because I would never waste my time encoding at less than 5 passes, let alone pass a movie twice. And "Moth3r", the official Cinema Craft Encoder Manual DOES NOT SAY "image quality slightly improves each time encoding is repeated, but quality improvement reaches its limit at 3 ~ 4 times of encoding" (you probably pulled that from someone's extremely uninformed guide). But it DOES state that "image quality improves with each additional pass". Albeit a small increase in overall bitrate, it IS an increase. And when working with a high-bitrate video to begin with, every Mbps counts. Also, while the manual does state that the maximum passes is 99, DVD-Rebuilder only allows 9 passes on CCE-SP (10, including .VAF). And yes, I do ALOT of encoding - over a hundred movies to date. So I can say from extensive personal research, that the more passes you do, the better your "backup" will be. Take a 7GB DVD9 and run it through CCE 5 times, then take another 7GB (same filesize) DVD9 and pass it 9 times. Then compare original bitrates at any given moment to the new "backed-up" copies on each - you will certainly see a difference, numbers don't lie. Again, you may need a High-Definition television or a high-resolution monitor to actually SEE the difference, but I assure you it's there. I have seen many a 2 or 3 pass CCE encode that still exhibits blockiness or artifacts that could have easily been avoided by more passes. Think about it - if you looked at a page of text for one second, and then tried to recall all of the text you saw; and then looked at the same page for 10 seconds, would you remember more? Yes. And that's precisely what CCE does on multipass VBR - every pass is comparing the original to the "backed-up" video over and over - in an effort to increase overall bitrate and image quality. Basically, if you have never used an encoder extensively, then you have no idea what you're talking about - and no amount of Google-searches will cue you in. Now being that we've gone completely off-topic here, that's all I'm saying about that. You go ahead and encode your movies with DVDShrink or 3 Pass VBR, and I'll do mine 9 pass; and when all anyone has is HDTV's in the near future, and you have to throw away all your backup's because they look like poo, don't come crying to me

Why don't you call Pixar and ask them how many variable bitrate passes they do? You'll be shocked.