2-Pass Encoding, different settings for both passes?

[MysteryX]

For encoding AviSynth results with x264, what gives best quality is 2-pass encoding. However, processing the output of AviSynth twice would just kill it (double the processing time).

Now I'm thinking... the first pass is to get statistic information about each frame. What takes the most time is the EEDI3, and then the NNEDI3 filters.

Can I do the first pass WITHOUT EEDI3 and NNEDI3 filters with a plain Spline resize, and then use the real settings only for the 2nd pass?

Are there any side-effects to doing this?

[TheFluff]

no don't do that, it can have weird and unpredictable results

also, there is really no reason to use twopass unless you absolutely have to hit an exact filesize, and you probably don't, so don't use twopass

if you still really do need twopass and want to avoid running avisynth twice, encode to a lossless intermediary file first

[Reel.Deel]

How about saving to a lossless file and then encoding with x264?

Edit: TheFluff was quicker :)

[MysteryX]

How about saving to a lossless file and then encoding with x264?
Great idea!

Is 2-pass really worth it? I was thinking I could just use CBR but then one file would go from 35MB to 60MB which is reasonable but then another file would go from 25MB to 108MB which is not. I want to keep the file size in reasonable proportion to the original file because I had hundreds of such videos to re-encode.

Doing it this way might not be that bad on performance though. Most of the time is running through the EEDI3/NEEDI3 filters.

[Asmodian]

Not CBR but CRF. CBR is basically never a good idea for us home users.

2-pass means the relative quality will vary while the size will be predictable, CRF means the quality will be predictable while the size will not be. You cannot have both and only you can decide if one is worth it over the other for you.

I always use CRF myself but I am targeting a many TB raid array or similar size agnostic storage. I might as well not do the encode if it comes out with bad quality due to the bit-rate being too low. If a video is too big turn up CRF for everything. The more space saved from the easier to compress videos the more space for everything. If you cannot turn up CRF anymore because it starts to look bad then the large video you want to use two-pass to reduce the size of would look very bad after two-pass encoding because the bitrate would be much too low. In my mind two-pass is for filling a specific storage medium, like a DVD+R, not controlling size of an entire collection.