question about compressability test

[MaxPlanck]

I've been reading alot about how x264 can take a while, tonight will be my first attempt encoding using x264. Is it normal for the compressability test to take so long, the estimated time says about 40 minutes. I have a pentium 4 3.2 ghz processor.

[DarkZell666]

If you have enabled all the "gimme more quality"-like options, 40minutes is probably normal ;) MPEG4 AVC really IS _very_ advanced video coding.

How many frames do you want to encode, and with which settings ?
It is pretty normal to encode @ 2-4fps using all the nicest settings :)
(especially if you use Exhaustive Motion Search =))

Tell us more if you want more advice :)

[MaxPlanck]

201546 frames. I wanted to do a whole movie. The first pass took about 5 hours and to my dismay I woke up this morning only 15 minutes into the second, with about 13 hours remaining. Are there any settings I could leave out that could reduce the time?

[DryFire]

could you post your settings?

[MaxPlanck]

For the settings, I followed the doom9 x264 guide exactly. You'll have to forgive me, I don't know how I can easily post all the settings I've used. Although it took almost 18 hours, the quality looks incredible. I did starwars episode III revenge of the sith on two cds and it came out really well. Like I said though, 18 hours compared to the 6 or 7 it takes for me a to do a movie with xvid scares me :eek:

Still, I'm hoping that there might be a way reduce this time without ruining quality too much.

[MaxPlanck]

I'm an idiot, forgot about the good old fashioned screen shot
http://img183.imageshack.us/img183/8752/settings6by.th.jpg (http://img183.imageshack.us/my.php?image=settings6by.jpg)

[foxyshadis]

If you use megui, there's a "show command line" option, you could paste that in, or just upload screenshots of the options.

My first movie encode was pretty darn long too, although x264's become faster in the meantime more options have shown up to take care of that. xD I think nearly half the time was in script because of some denoisers, that movie took film grain to a new dimension.

Sharktooth also has his custom profiles sticky where you can get exactly the speed/quality tradeoff you want, rather than mucking about with a lot of options.

[MaxPlanck]

If you use megui, there's a "show command line" option, you could paste that in, or just upload screenshots of the options. options.

Well, I posted my screenshot above your post, you were probably replying at the same time I was posting my screenshot. That's how I configured the codec... Are those settings I have the reason why it's taking so long? I didn't see the sticky you were talking about, do you mind giving me a link?

[DryFire]

your setting look pretty modest. I suggest you try MeGui and teh x264 cli version instead. I get about 13 fps w/ subme 6 and mixed refs, whcih i guess is faster then yours and with more demanding options (I have a 2.4 ghz A64).

It seems your getting ~2.8 fps which is incredibly slow.

[MaxPlanck]

thanks I'll give it a try

[MaxPlanck]

just started a job with it, getting between 8-14fps, much better! :D

[DarkZell666]

Watch out, have you checked that pretty nice turbo box ? Did you ? heh ?

Do you know what it does ? It's evil stuff hehe, it limits many options, and you'll have to check the commandline to be sure what has been changed and what settings are _locked_ (even if you change them in the GUI :p)

</kidding>

I'm really surprised by such fps, I can hardly get that speed encoding @ 512*384 (using a good amout of "nice" settings of course).

What's the size of your picture ? 640*352 ? more ? Hmm just saw that you have a 3.2Ghz CPU, it might explain, or it might not =)

Tell us more when you've finished ^^

[foxyshadis]

That's not too surpising, given that he's using me=5, regular hex, and no 8x8, which speeds things up considerably. (I assume he's using the same mostly default options in megui too.) And I believe first pass always defaults to checking turbo now.

and yeah, I didn't see before I posted earlier, sorry ^^

[MaxPlanck]

What are the odds. I woke up this morning, eager to check the results and voila...NO POWER :mad:

Apparently it went off in the middle of the night briefly and came back on, so obviously I'm going to have to start over. That's ok though, I've got another question. I said before that my first attempt was using GK, can I load the AviSynth script that was made from the job with GK into MeGUI, or is that a major no no.

[DryFire]

You shouldn't have a problem doing that.

[DarkZell666]

if an AVS script works in a program, if should work on another since an AVS script is processed by avisynth (not the program itself).

Hope you'll have more luck this time :P

[pwh04]

I use 1 pass CQ only. My pent 4 2.6gz takes just too darn long to do a 2 pass. Using 5gpel/hex/1-1 bframes/loop 0-0/no chrome, I get 10- 11 fps on a 512x384 with no other filtering in .avs. Quant 22 (possibly 23) is very close to quant 3 in xvid if you try a Constant Quant encode.


Bye

[nm]

I think you would get better quality with 2-pass even when using a fast (turbo=2 in Mencoder) first pass and perhaps some faster options for the second pass. Go ahead and try it. Would be nice to get some PSNR values. I did some tests a while ago, but threw the results away.