What is the cutoff bitrate level for CCE?

After Watching two towers, I noticed that there was some minor macro blocking in some dark scenes of the movie, but the LOTR series is a real good trilogy, so I figure I am going to do the whole set with DL discs. I just picked up a bunch on sale anyways, so its not too bad, 25 pack for 15 bucks, decent make too.

In other thoughts, I have come to the consensus that all encoders whether its procoder,HC, or CCE suffer trying to remake dark scenes especially at lower bitrate levels, your guaranteed to see some. Other than dark scenes, the LOTR backups I made were very impressive.

Although when I went to go pause the scene to go get something from the kitchen, as I was walking by the screen, I saw all these large macroblocks (due to low bitrate) which could not be seen from where I was sitting. In fact, from where I was sitting, you probably could barely if it was the backup or original copy playing.


Anyways, I have made an educated decision that from now one, anything under 60% compression or at least 3000 kbps (will have to evaluate this level) will be getting burned to DL (1:1 copy) and anything over will just go through HC or CCE.

 

I'm not sure if this would help or not, but have you guys tried the luminance gain feature?

You can adjust it to either 1, 2, or 3. By default it is set at 0. This may be a solution to solving this problem, but it would probably alot of trial and error.

How does HC perform with higher bitrates and compressions say 65% and up?

 

There are a lot of settings you can adjust. Did you try to give more bitrate to the areas that you say have blocks?

 

Well, just for curiosity, I decided to use CCE SP2 1.0.01.5 (lastest build i believe), and the results were very surprising, I know alot of people usually take down towards CCE lately because of the overgrowing popularity of HC, Prodocer, QUenc etc, but believe it or not, CCE on its default settings produced the best picture. During both slow and fast scenes, CCE looks virtually the same as the HC backup, and during the dark scenes, CCE produced no visual sings of blocking (other than pausing the tv while the frames are in transition). I think I am going to keep using CCE, its been good to me, and still continues to stay produce astounding quality.

What did strike me though is that I have used both CCE SP and SP2 and I recently used SP2 for this rip (trial version).

This kind of caught my eye a bit

New enhancements
- Changes of GUI
- Automatic resolution conversion function on DVD/SVCD/VCD mode
- Automatic file size calculation
- 3:2 pulldown
- Automatic adding of encoding pass for more accurate inverse 3:2 pulldown
- De-interlacing function
- 4:1:1 -> 4:2:2 interpolation
- Allow adaptive quantization matrices switching for multi-pass VBR
- Provide an option of outputting bottom field first stream
- Y and C parameters for dithered quantization
- Automatic switching of block scan order
- Blanking function
- Quality improvement in fades on a static scene
- Adjustment for black frames
- Monochrome encoding mode
- Save/load template to/from file
- Reuse of the last modified parameter setting
- Save/load a chapter list
- Shut down the system when finished encoding
- Play sound when finished encoding


Could be that this new version handles black frames better than the previous, either way, visually, there was NO macroblocking at all in my CCE rip.

 

yes, as far as I know, there is no multi core support.

I have a dual core pentium D 2.8 GHz processor with 3 gigs of ram on my pc. It's almost 5 years old now, and with the 2 gigs of DDR2 memory I added this Christmas, it drastically increased my processing and encoding speeds (I guess it can handle a larger workload now). A typical 3 VBR pass through CCE takes just over 2 hours long, 5 VBR passes takes approximately 160-200 minutes depending on the compression ratio.

Not too long compared to others that I have read where it takes up to 400-500 minutes. Doesnt really bother me too much as I can go watch a movie, come back, and the encoding process will be complete. Procoder 3 took about 200 minutes to encode king kong with two VBR passes, not too bad, but it is incredibly slower than CCE.HC finished its 2 VBR pass just over 150 minutes, still not too shabby.