MeGUI and zones

[Dr.Khron]

Two questions...

First, I have problems saving profiles with zones set. Not sure if its a bug or not. If I take a profile, and add a zone, when I click OK to exit the configuration, I get the pop-up saying that I've changed the configuration, and asking if I want to update the profile... If I update the profile, the zone stays until I close and re-open MeGUI, then its gone. Adding the zone in the "Custom Commandline Options" seems more reliable.

Second, this one is more of a x264 question:
When using zones, you have two choices weight (bitrate), or Quantizer. The Quantizer option is "...frame.q35"
Is that Constant Quanitizer or Constant Quality? ( -qp 35 or -crf 35 )

I'm guessing that its -qp, but since the switch is different, its a little ambiguous.

[Doom9]

megui doesn't save zones. Why? Because zones are movie dependant. So suppose you defined your zones and accidentally add it to a profile (it used to be that profiles were automatically updated which greatly increased the chance of this involuntarily happening), then the next time you start up, you select that profile again, forgetting that you had zones set.. and then you wonder why your movie didn't come out the way you wanted it.

If you really want this, make your own custom build and deactivate the zone clearing before saving the profile.

iirc the quantizer option for credits always means constant quantizer.

[Dr.Khron]

Doh! I just realized I've been using the zones wrong... I've been using them to put a constant quantizer on the end credits.

But MeGUI can do that automatically, can't it?
When you set the "Credits" position in the video preview, I'm guessing that uses the "Credits Quantizer" setting to apply a zone to that part of the video. It doesn't show in the command line window in the Video Confif window, though.

[Doom9]

But MeGUI can do that automatically, can't it?Yup, and it works just like you described :)
There's a zone consolidation mechanism that works behind the scenes, but only once you add something to the queue - so the job's commandline will contain everything, but you can't use the commandline preview in the codec configuration because at that point, we're nowhere ready for a zone consolidation (don't forget that you can open the codec configuration at any point where you don't have the final video source selected). It was actually quite a headache to add zones to an already existing credits/intro encoding selection mechanism because not only do you have to add the additional zones, you also have to make sure they don't overlap with any of the zones the user has set him/herself and there's only one point in the workflow where you can consolidate the two without breaking the workflow - that's the point where you add a job to the queue.