Slow as molasses! Better way to change colorspace?

[phædrus]

Last week I converted a 1080i transport stream of Sting's PBS Labyrinth special to DVD compliant mpeg2 using CCE.

Took about 14 hours on my older computer.

A simple avs script, load plugins, load d2v, resize to (720,1080), telecide, decimate, resize to (720,480), and finally convert to YUY2.

Tonight I tried doing an hour-long (did not excise commercials) Smallville episode .tp file, also 1080i, using what I thought was the same script. Then I remembered I modified it to convert to YUY2 directly after loading the d2v file and prior to any resizing.

The speed of the encode slowed down to maybe 1/4 or 1/5 of what it was before. So I changed the script back and everything is back to normal speedwise.

scharfis_brain told me that chroma is cleaner if you change colorspace before resizing. Maybe it makes no difference in this context (he told me this in the context of resizing a 1080i program to a 480i DVD-compliant stream). But if this is the cost of the change in processing power, I can live with sloppy chroma.

Or is there a more efficient plugin to change colorspace that could handle a 1080i stream without choking the computer?

[Blue_MiSfit]

You could always use a different MPEG-2 encoder that accepts YV12 input. HCenc, QuEnc and ffmpeg all accept YV12 input. CCE is great, but there are a lot of options these days that truly rival it in quality, even at the expense of a little speed since none of them are multithreaded IIRC.

~MiSfit

[phædrus]

I use ffmpeg through HDTV2DVD, and was not impressed. Maybe it isn't implemented well in that software. I haven't tried it by itself. I guess there is a gui4ffmpeg. Any words of wisdom on configuring it for best performance?

HC encoder I have -- and have used it with DVDRebuilder. I guess it is very good, but slow.