CCE settings questions

[fasttimes]

Now that I have a DVD burner, I'm more concerned about producing "correct" and compatible discs, so I've been reevaluating all my procedures, and questioning some CCE settings that I've never really understood, but it worked "good enough". Could someone please answer the following CCE related questions.:

What is "Dropped Frame" checkbox for and why *not* use 00:00:00:00 timecode, as warned by the CCE docs?

If I use CCEs pulldown detection, do I *not* set the stream as progressive? Do I set 23.976 or 29.97FPS? Does using pulldown detection in effect create a "hybrid" stream?

In CCE, how to know which luminance rage to set?

Is there a link the explains how to use the Quantize Matrices for best quality?

Under Advanced VBR settings, why can't it alter the *average* local bitrate, not just Min/Max bitrate? This seems to make changing local bitrate useless.

Also, under Advanced VBR settings, under Stream info, why is max bitrate number always reported lower than the average!?:confused:

[Endor]

Originally posted by fasttimes
[QUOTE]If I use CCEs pulldown detection, do I *not* set the stream as progressive? Do I set 23.976 or 29.97FPS? Does using pulldown detection in effect create a "hybrid" stream?

It depends on your source. For movies, most of the time they are from film, hence you will set Progressive and a FPS of 23.976 in CCE.

What pulldown does is tell the DVD player to perform a 2:3 pulldown on the stream when played. To the best of my (still somewhat) limited knowledge, the DVD player does the pulldown (aka telecine) upon playback.

In CCE, how to know which luminance rage to set?

Now, this one is interesting as the guides seem to indiciate the use of the "16-235" setting. However, when I did this on a 2.35:1 aspect ratio movie, I noticed two sets of black bars: one true black set (put there by the DVD player) and one off-black set that was included on the original film... quite distracting.

What was happening was the black bars that were part of the actual movie where being set with a luminance level of 16, which was making them very visible and more gray than black. I re-encoded the move using the 0-255 luminance and that problem went away.

So now I just use 0-255 automatically and it seems to work just fine whether it's needed or not.