Optimized settings for Canopus

[Lucius Snow]

Hi all,

I've been used to encode with CCE SP and i just read on different forums that Canopus procoder 2 was a better choice for interlaced sources.

So my source is a DV PAL 4/3 interlaced and usually under 60 min. I want the best quality whatever the times it takes. I selected "mastering quality" and put CBR at the highest bitrate since my films are short. No need for VBR then.

- A limit is set automatically at 7800 kbit/s with a PCM audio stream at 1536 kbit/s ... but i'm still far from the total of 9800 kbit/s theoric limit. I know that some cheap standalone players don't handle very high bitrate very well but more than 9336 should be fine. What do you think about it ? Is it possible to override this limit ? Or should it stay at 7800 kbit/s ?

- I notice that only one pass is possible for CBR (it's not the case in CCE SP). Why ?

- What is CQ settting ? Can it make better results than CBR for highest bitrate ?

- I let the advanced settings to default except Intra DV precision that i put to 10. What do you recommand about these settings ?

If you have any othe proposition to optimize the settings, let me know.

Thank you :)

[Boulder]

CQ setting in ProCoder is pretty poor. Even at the highest level, it doesn't use much bits, so you'd better forget that.

Choose field-based encoding although you should check that your authoring program and standalone support that. Any newer standalone should be able to play them correctly. What comes to authoring, TMPGEnc DVD Author didn't author them correctly (don't know if it does nowadays) but DVD Maestro does.

Disable the audio and you should be able to choose a higher bitrate. I would still be careful as there might be spikes that will make the standalone choke.

Still, I would rather use HC with the Fox Home Entertainment matrix and do a constant quant 2 encode. ProCoder seems to use some kind of filtering as it makes the video softer looking and it doesn't allow changing the quantization matrix (it uses the MPEG standard).