A tip for CCE bitrate tweakers...

[primo]

Hi all. This is a minor tip for those of you guys are like me (anyone?) when it comes to CCE encoding (I like to utilize every last couple megabytes of disc capacity by maximizing bitrate). I'm sure you CCE guys already know that CCE lets us do that by going into the 'advanced settings' and tweaking the bitrate till the desired filesize is calculated. Well the problem is that parsing/scanning the VAF file (which CCE uses to calculate the final video filesize) can take upwards of almost a minute or more depending on the speed of the hard disk where the VAF file resides. To cut a long story short you could create a RAM drive (i.e. emulate a hard disk drive using system memory) to (temporarily) put your resulting VAF file (from the first pass) in, point CCE to it, and then go to 'advanced settings' to tweak the bitrate. This significantly reduced my VAF parsing/scanning time from ~30 seconds to 2 seconds. There is a website www.cenatek.com that features RAM drive software. They have a 100 use trial if any of you guys cares to try this.

[quantum]

My Athlon 1.4 system(s) with 512megs of ram, it only takes a few seconds for the advanced dialog to open. Never had it take more than 5 seconds. Maybe you have a bottleneck somewhere that can be tweaked.

[primo]

Quantum I wasn't talking about opening the 'advanced settings' dialog box. I was referring to tweaking the bitrate once you're inside the advanced settings dialog box. If you adjust the bitrate from there you can see what the resultant filesize will be (but like I said it can take upwards of almost a minute to scan the whole VAF file and calculate the new filesize). Putting the VAF in a Ram drive would help in this situation.

[quantum]

I understand now. I adjust the bitrate myself frequently to obtain my desired file size to fill a DVD-R. However it never takes more than a few seconds to complete a bitrate change even with large movies.

[DVD__GR]

Hello!!
Just check ur ide drivers.I believe something is messed up in your pc.
I have an amd1700+ 60gb WD and everything is done in maximum 5 seconds.i am one of the slowest here i believe :-(

[primo]

well thanks for the replies guys. I guess my PC is just slow hehe.