faster codecs

[dstarfire]

Which codecs are faster than x.264 for anime content? Currently, it's taking me 5+ hours to encode a single 30 minute episode (using megui, with AE-standard profile).

[Dark Shikari]

Which codecs are faster than x.264 for anime content? Currently, it's taking me 5+ hours to encode a single 30 minute episode (using megui, with AE-standard profile).
Try changing the following settings in the AE-Standard profile:

Trellis from 0 to 1 (helps a lot on anime, speed cost is pretty low)
ME algorithm from UMH to Hexagon, will speed things up a lot.

AVC Profiles Main -> High, then choose Adaptive DCT and i8x8 in Advanced (speed cost for this is very low).

The quality settings I mentioned will likely increase quality far more than going from UMH -> Hex will lose quality, but cost less speed.

Now, if its really taking you 5 hours, you have one of two issues:

1) You're using a very slow CPU.
or
2) You're using a slow Avisynth input script, or some sort of slow processing, like deinterlacing or denoising.

If 1) is the case, things you can do to cut encoding time (at the cost of speed):

1. Disable "mixed reference frames."
2. Lower number of reference frames.
3. Lower subpixel precision to 3 or 4.

[dstarfire]

Thanks for the tips, I'll give those a shot, and see how it turns out.

As for the other issues: I've only got a 1.8 gig athlon. I'm also deinterlacing, as I read somewhere that leaving the video interlaced would result in ugly video and severely reduced compression ratios.

So, really noobish question here: how "difficult" is it to compress a 30 minute episode down to 200-300 mb? In other words, do I have room there to be "messy" and still maintain barely-noticable quality loss?

[Dark Shikari]

Thanks for the tips, I'll give those a shot, and see how it turns out.

As for the other issues: I've only got a 1.8 gig athlon. I'm also deinterlacing, as I read somewhere that leaving the video interlaced would result in ugly video and severely reduced compression ratios. This is likely your problem. Deinterlacing is likely your bottleneck, rather than encoding itself.

Are you sure your source is interlaced, and not telecined? Almost all DVDs are telecined, not interlaced.

So, really noobish question here: how "difficult" is it to compress a 30 minute episode down to 200-300 mb? In other words, do I have room there to be "messy" and still maintain barely-noticable quality loss?On a Core 2 Duo you can 15-20 FPS encoding with relatively high settings for DVD-resolution content.

[Adub]

It is fairly easy to encode a 30 minute episode down to 200-300mb. Just use all of the bframes options, as they really help on Anime with its duplicate frames and so on, turn trellis on, check out Dark Shikari's new AQ patch, and go!

[dstarfire]

I'll double check on the telecining. I just assumed interlaced based on the info from dgindex. And yes, I do know that dgindex can easily mistake telecining for interlacing.

I'd been hoping to avoid that, as the guides I've found on determining if a title is telecined, and then fixing that look rather daunting.

Again, thanks for the help and advice.