Originally posted by: bongloads
...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). Yes it does, in the manual for CCE-SP 2.50. And in Doom9's (extremely uninformed
) CCE FAQ it is stated that this also holds true for later versions. Of course it does.
Originally posted by: bongloads
But it DOES state that "image quality improves with each additional pass". Albeit a small increase in overall bitrate, it IS an increase.
Huh? Since when did an additional encoding pass increase the overall bitrate? The whole idea of carrying out multiple passes is to optimize the allocation of the available bits to where they are needed the most, at the expense of less complex parts of the video. The overall average bitrate remains the same. (Why I have to explain this to someone who claims to have extensive knowledge of encoding is beyond me.) ...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). Yes it does, in the manual for CCE-SP 2.50. And in Doom9's (extremely uninformed
) CCE FAQ it is stated that this also holds true for later versions. Of course it does. Originally posted by: bongloads
But it DOES state that "image quality improves with each additional pass". Albeit a small increase in overall bitrate, it IS an increase.
My laserdisc rips were encoded with 3 passes. I couldn't tell any difference between pass 2 and pass 3, but I did use a relatively high bitrate. (Also bear in mind that encoding video originally from a laserdisc source is less demanding than the sharper, more detailed image from a digital source).
In the opinion of the Doom9 FAQ author, anything more than 3 passes is just a waste of time. The DVDR Releasing Standards state that if the final average bitrate is over 4000kbps then 5 passes are required.
It would seem that a 9-pass encode is an excessive waste of PC resources for no additional advantage. In my opinion, the average bitrate is 10 times more important than the number of passes you use - which is why my DVDs have 192kbps AC3 audio (which incidently is the bitrate recommended by Dolby labs for 2 channel audio) to make more room available for the video.