Cinema Craft Assist for SP3

[Lyris]

Early last year, I wrote a tool called CCE Assist for SP2. Then the next morning, Cinema Craft SP3 was officially announced. D'oh.

So, here is a better, more robust, faster version of CCE Assist, for SP3, which now works with 60i, 50i, and 25p video too. If you find it useful, or if it doesn't work for you, or if you want a feature added, let me know.

I wrote CCE Assist to speed up the boring, repetitive, and time consuming process of re-encoding little clips from a film with differing picture settings, in an attempt to find the best quality (eg to tailor the quantization parameters to a specific film stock, or to bias things in one direction for a difficult to encode scene). Once set up, CCE Assist saves you many minutes (and cumulatively, hours) worth of mouse clicks.

Here's what it does:
1. Automatically generates an ECL (encode list) file and passes it automatically to Cinema Craft Encoder SP3.
2. Runs DGIndex on the resultant MPEG2 encodes.
3. Uses AVISynth + SSIM plugin + VirtualDub to show the results of the encodes, letting you visually inspect the differences between the different settings.

It's nothing you couldn't do by hand - but it saves a lot of time.

Tested as working on my machine using the latest version of CCE SP3. Let me know if you run into problems.

Not affiliated or supported by CTC or its resellers.

Download (~400kb) (davidmackenzie.me/cceassist/cceassist_sp3.zip)

http://img217.imageshack.us/img217/3907/cceassistsp3.jpg

Intro / How To Use video (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bDGueu3fgw)

REQUIREMENTS
* AVISynth 2.5
* AVISynth SSIM plugin. Direct download link (http://perso.wanadoo.fr/reservoir/dl/SSIM-0.24.rar) | Doom9 thread (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?p=370323)
* VirtualDub
* DGIndex / DGMPGdec (download at bottom of this page (http://hank315.nl/))
* Cinema Craft Encoder SP3 (of course)

BEFORE YOU RUN
Open CCEAssist.ini and double-check that all of the paths to CCE, DGIndex, and VirtualDub are all correct.

LIMITATIONS
Doesn't work with QuickTime input files. For these, you can use an AVIsynth script with QTInput() or FFMPEGSource, or similar. Will add if requested.
Some other functions (eg lowpass filter) not implemented.

[kolak]

Great job.
Maybe it would be useful for CTC to see it- they could build in such a system into SP3 :)

Andrew

[Lyris]

Version 1.1, bug fixes:

Version 1.1
– Solves a bug which prevented CCE Assist running on 32-bit OS.
– Solves a bug which prevented encodes beginning on pre-Vista OS or
OS with unusual font size.
– Info for v1.0 users: “CCEPath” (in the CCEAssist.ini file) now should
point to the folder where CCE SP3 is located – not directly to the
file. Paths to other tools (DGIndex, VirtualDub etc.) are not affected.
You may need to delete (or modify) your existing CCEAssist.ini file if
you are upgrading from an older version.

Download link at the top of the page updated.

[Lyris]

Version 1.2, updated to work with the latest version of CCE SP3.

[Lyris]

I just uploaded version 2 to the usual URL (top post).

This version solves minor bugs, improves speed - and best of all, adds SSIM quality charts for another visualisation of the different settings:

http://i74.photobucket.com/albums/i258/lyris-lite/qualitychart.jpg

[Lyris]

Just a heads up if anyone had trouble with the above feature, the program has been updated:

Version 2.1
- Fixes a bug where the chart generation would never finish if the source file was very long.

[Lyris]

Anyone else here still care about MPEG-2? :D

New version in the usual place.

Version 2.2a
- Fixed an incredibly stupid bug which would cause test videos to be encoded in the wrong frame rate/scan type if the user had previously used CCE to encode a video of a different type to the test video. EDIT: false alarm. It was a bug with CCE SP3 that I had to fix by uninstalling and reinstalling. CCE Assist was not the culprit. Program updated.
- Better support for non-English OS (CCE Assist no longer uses English-only words to detect window states).
- Sped up SSIM chart generation by removing redundant step.
- Added message during SSIM chart generation.

[TheSkiller]

Anyone else here still care about MPEG-2? :D
Oh yeah, definitely. I actually care more about MPEG2 than any other video compression. Simple reason: making DVDs. :cool:

I am one of those who try to squeeze the very last bit of quality out of their encodes. Your tool looks like it would come in very handy. I will try it out soon. :)

I especially hope it will help me find out good "Min Bitrate" values for a given video – it's pretty hard to find a good minimum Bitrate so that you neither waste too many bits nor that it makes still or low motion sequences look inferior.

[Lyris]

Oh yeah, definitely. I actually care more about MPEG2 than any other video compression. Simple reason: making DVDs.
You and me both. DVD can still produce very good quality on television-sized screens. When I show people the discs I've been turning out with CCE (with the lowpass filters safely shut off - who needs that?) they often say "it looks more like a Blu-ray" (or similar).

Let me know if you have any trouble.