I just found out that AE profiles are for cartoons

[DJ_Borat]

I found out today that AE profiles are for cartoons. I've been using a "tweaked" AE-MaxQuality profile to encode all of my non-animated Blu-Ray/HD-DVD rips. Have I been sacrificing video quality by doing this?

I guess the real question is, what makes AE different than HQ other than a few different encoder settings? If I take an AE profile and then change each setting to match an HQ profile (which is basically what I've been doing all this time--don't ask me why), would I then be using HQ instead of AE? Or do the differences between profiles go deeper than that?

Thank you!

[Dark Shikari]

x264 has no Cartoon Mode anyways, so there's really no loss I'd think.

And no, if the commandlines are the same, the encoding will be the same.

[DJ_Borat]

Thanks. :-)

[Sharktooth]

no quality is sacrificed. infact anime profiles include stronger settings that exploit the compressibility of those kind of sources.
all you may have lost is encoding speed, since those settings are pretty useless for usual filmed content.

[DJ_Borat]

Thanks, Sharktooth.

I have another question that's kinda related to the original question.

I'm now encoding an animated blu-ray (The Simpsons Movie).

My computer is encoding this movie much faster than it encodes other movies. The expected file size is also much smaller. I am using the same settings that I use for other movies (customized AE-Max, 12.5Mbps, x264).

My 3GHz dual core Opteron usually encodes at around 0.9-1.2 fps. However, it's encoding Simpsons at 1.9fps, and the expected file size is only 4.7GB (it usually predicts 10-13GB files). I'm aware that Simpsons is a rather short movie, but 4.7GB just seems too small, and 1.9fps seems too fast (especially for an AVC-encoded BR).

The original m2ts was 25GB, so the expected file size kinda worries me. Are cartoons always like this? The solid colors really make that much of a difference?

[fibbingbear]

the fact that it's predicting about 5 GB does not seem strange to me. I would also add that in general, it's preferable to use constant rate factor (CRF) than to use a constant bit rate for all footage.

[Sharktooth]

the simpson and other cartoons are very compressible. however if you have specified a bitrate the final file size is predictable.
however if bitrate and compressibility are very high there could be some problems with min quantizer settings. if you get an undersize you can either lower the encoder settings or lower the min quantizer value (default=10). that means you're near saturation and both methods wont give any quality improvement since quant<16 is usualy visually lossless.
so, as fibbingbear said, if you dont need an exact filesize, CRF is a better choice.