Rebuilder pro and cce 2.7 question

[jamos]

Hi thanks for this wonderful forum it has helped me so much in learning the ins and outs of DVD Rebuilder pro (registered of course).

I use CCE SP for most of my videography (ie mastering weddings that I do in Adobe Premier). But this is the first time I've used Rebuilder Pro with this program (ie remastering existing dvds).

It seems with the CCE settings set with rebuilder pro, I get better results with setting the VBR Bias higher than recommended..about at 66 for medium compressed high bitrate movies (ie movie is peaking at the top bitrate 9k uncompressed). By better results I mean a more consistent picture quality (no edging or blockness or sparkeling artifacts on faces) and a better overall bitrate (by this i mean it seems to be steady from 1.9 to 3.5). The movie has action and dark scenes and is pretty balanced with light scenes. It is compressed about 40%.

With a double dvd merge (two dvd-9 dvds (12 gig) merged into one dvd-5 ;) ) I get better results setting the VBR bias around 20. It is compressed about 66%, and looks pretty damn good with these settings.

My question: Has anyone noticed CCE SP 2.70.02.04 being extra sensative with the VBR? It seems like 2.5 wasn't as sensitive with dropping some frames to very low rates when they shouldn't be.

Am I losing something with higher vbr settings (do not want artifacting though)? should I go back to 2.5?

ps other settings are 3 passes and precison at 16

[jdobbs]

v2.70 seems to be more sensitive to the bitrate range. If you set the minimum bitrate too high it appears to be more likely to lose frames. It also seems to be even more sensitive to overclocking -- and will crash (losing frames) on an overclocked computer even when no other software does.

On it's good side, v2.70 does a better job with interlaced sources than v2.50. It's also faster on most Pentium processors (but, interestingly, is usually a little slower than v2.50 on some Athlons).

As the average bitrate gets lower, raising the VBR bias becomes more harmful to the picture because it steals bits from the higher and lower end and pulls them toward the middle (becoming more like CBR). As the average bitrate goes up and there is less difference between the upper and average VBR boundaries you may not notice it as much. My personal belief is that 66 is probably too high. I'd keep the value in a range of between 10 and 35.

[jamos]

Thanks JD I will try that. Do you think I should mess with precision to get rid of the artifacting?

[jdobbs]

If your talking about edges, yes. Qual_Prec is the proper adjustment. You also may find that an alternate matrix may help.

[jamos]

Thanks JD setting the quantization matrix to mpeg standard seems to have vastly improved it at default settings.

[casperse]

A quick Q. The default under "Quantization Matrices" / "Main Feature Matrix" is "Encoder Default" CCE default right? so is "MPEG Standard" then not the CCE default?

[jdobbs]

No. CCE has it's own "standard" -- which uses different "Non Intra" values.

[jamos]

Really love Rocxas program and custom matrixs..the Rebuman matrixs does an excellent job at my bitrate level, Rebuilder pro compresses more than Recode can and it looks better too! Really cool stuff here.:)

[jamos]

No. CCE has it's own "standard" -- which uses different "Non Intra" values.
Yes CCEs standard matrix is the same as the one that comes with Rocxas program named medium medium (with custom matrixes you could use them with other encoders than cce if you do not own basic or sp :sly: )

[Dashiell]

No. CCE has it's own "standard" -- which uses different "Non Intra" values.


Hey, J!

I just purchased CCE Basic a few days ago. I've made one disc so far using the encoder default matrix, with beautiful results.

Pardon the newbness, but would be the difference between the default matrix and the MPEG standard. Does one deliver more reliable output in terms of player compatibility, etc...

Thank you in advance.

[Jeffster]

The Standard matrix used by CCE is "the matrix which was used for the evaluation of the MPEG-2 international standard algorithm". The MPEG standard matrix is "a default matrix under the MPEG-2 international standard".

BTW - CCE Basic doesn't support custom matrices so it will always use the Standard matrix anyway.