Bit Allocation Misery

[1576]

Being fairly new to CCE, and needing a very good quality picture with a greatly reduced filesize, I had a go at doing a 2 pass VBR, after first running a CBR to get the vaf file.
After a while of playing around with the local bitrate settings to get a green background in the first few seconds, I felt confident enough to try the entire movie (nearly 3hr film)
So I get to a point where Ive painstakingly got a green background 45 mins into the film (which has taken me in the region of 9 hrs to do!!) and all of a sudden my PC crashes and I lose the entire lot. Not very happy!!

My question is this: Is there a way to save any work that Ive done on bit allocation in the future, if Im doing massive (to me) projects, and I dont feel like leaving my PC on day& night? Or do I just have accept that this kind of work can only be done in a certain way?
Id be grateful for any relevant feedback, as I'd like to have another go, but need to be able to back things up as Im going along if I can.

[RB]

First of all, if you have a desired fixed target file size then this manual bitrate tweaking method is just a waste of time, IMHO. Reason is, you cannot raise the global average bitrate in this case. So as you walk through the GOPs and raise the bitrate for individual ones, CCE will have to take bitrate away elsewhere to satisfy your request to raise this GOP's bitrate. IOW, if you had managed to complete this process and finally walked through the graph all the way back, you'd been shocked to see that it turned back grey or even red in many, many places. So maybe you should be thankful that it crashed quite early :).

CCE is really the master of VBR and especially if the average bitrate is low, I suggest you simply do a standard 3 pass VBR and I can almost assure you that the result will be very good.

As for why it crashed anyway, there can be many reasons. This operation is very sensitive to bad memory, make sure your system is not overclocked and your memory sticks aren't faulty. Also what version of CCE are you using?

In any event, as soon as CCE displays "Clean" in the upper right of that dialog, your modifications are saved to the VAF. Have you tried to just reopen the project to see if your modifications are still there? They should unless the crash trashed the VAF file.

[digitalman]

Follow the RoBa Method guide located in the guide section on Doom9. It explains what RB is talking about. Great results!

[1576]

Thanks for taking the time to reply RB. I wasnt aware that the changes would be backed up every time the status reported being clean. When I get home, I'll check that the vaf is in tact or not.
But if I have a desired filesize, how can I set this target within cce? Do I have to use something like DoCCE4u ? Im not asking for a guide - Im quite happy to go looking if Im pointed in the right direction.
Im using FlaskMPEG to read the VOB files, with cce2.64 plugin.
If I set up for a 3pass vbr, the filesize will be unpredictable. Or will it?

[oddyseus]

Every time status window reports clean, u can see just below it the estimated file size for the video. It is amazingly presice.

[1576]

Sorry about that. If I had taken a few more seconds to think about it, I wouldnt have asked. Of course - the predicted filesize is given. In a moment of stupidity, I overwrote my vaf file, so I have no hope of carrying on from where I left off, so Ive just started a 3pass vbr which will hopefully give me a filesize of just under two GB.
My last question (for now!!): Flask tells me that the encoding has another 7hrs to run. Normally I just do a cbr in cce, so is this 7 hrs for just the first pass of three, or for the whole lot?
My apologies if this is real Noob stuff to you all, but I have to start somewhere.
Thanks in advance.

[RB]

If it's already encoding the MPV, then this is the total time remaining for all passes.

[1576]

Well the seven hours came & went. CCE encoding failed at 100% (!!) leaving me with nothing but a growing electricity bill.
Back to the drawing board......

[RB]

What was the specific error message? If it failed that far into the process, there is a good chance you can still use the generated MPV provided CCE didn't delete it. Could have a few frames missing at the end, though.

[1576]

I think that there must have been something drastically wrong somewhere. Ive now re-installed my pc, and am starting all over again. Ive done a 1 pass vbr, and got a vaf file. Now Im coming to the end of an additional 3 pas vbr, which looks a whole lot more promising. Its taken 16hrs though, using vfapi to frameserve the d2v file that dvd2avi produced. For some reason, when I tried using avisynth, the resulting encoded film was upside down AND back to front. Never seen that before. Isnt using avisyth supposed to be faster? its the 2.5 version by the way.
Another question. If I did a 1 pass vbr to get a vaf file, and shut down cce, can I re-open it without overwriting it to do a few more passes? I assume its all to do with saving as a project, but I cant see where you save/open...
Thanks for your patience. Im a whizz with AutoCAD, but a dummy with cce!!!

[RB]

Try installing the latest AVISynth 2.51 beta from http://cultact-server.novi.dk/kpo/avisynth/avs_cvs.html. Yes, AVISynth 2.51 should speed up things considerably. Make sure you put an ConvertToYUY2() at the end of your script.

As for saving/loading a project, that actually means saving/loading an .ECL-File from the File menu. In any case, you can always reuse an existing VAF file. Just point at the existing file in CCE but make sure your source hasn't changed dramatically. The CCE manual lists a few cases where you need to recreate the VAF file.

[1576]

Thanks for your reply RB. Just downed the beta Avisynth and will give it a go.