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View Full Version : My thoughts about DoItFast4U, DoCCE4U...


blue
4th June 2003, 22:46
Hoping my english is good enough that you understand what I want....:)

So let's start:

Yesterday I did my first test with this nice little "DoItFast4U-DoCCE4U-ReAuthorist"-thing on "Pearl Harbor" (PAL, R2).

The thing is, that this DVD is multi-pgc. The first pgc is the main movie (Title 1) and the second is a dummy-pgc (Title 2) which is only 16 frames long. According to the mutli-pgc-guide the dummy-pgc is added as "Still show".

So when I put the original DVD in my standalone, the following happens: First comes the languange-selection, then the touchstone-intro and then it jumps to Title 2 the dummy-PGC and after the dummy comes the main menu. Now what happens to the copy is that it stops playing at the dummy-pgc until you manually press play again and then you see more than 10 seconds black until the menu comes up! So I tested a little bit and found out that it's better to add the dummy-pgc as slide show and changed the duration to 16 frames and it now acts exactly like the original dvd.

The second thing: the subtitles. There are 12 subtitle-streams. So i deselected all except german and english in DoItFast4U. And here's a list of what came out in DoItFast4U and in Reauthorist:

DoItFast4U: EN, FR, IT, DE, ES, DE, DE, DE, ES, ES, DE, DE
ReAuthorist: EN, Dummy, Dummy, FR, Dummy, IT, DE, DE, Dummy, Dummy, DE, DE

As you can see I have subtitle-streams that I dont want, because the subtitle mapping in DoItFast4U was wrong. I found out that there are actually 6 subtitle streams but every stream exists twice, one for wide and one for letterboxed so the right order is: EN(wide), EN(letterboxed), FR(wide), FR(letterboxed), IT(wide), IT(letterboxed), DE(wide), DE(letterboxed), ES(wide), ES(letterboxed), DE(wide), DE(letterboxed).

So it would be nice, if future versions of DoItFast4U could show us whether a subtitle stream is wide or letterboxed and which of them are forced subtitles (in this case the last two german subtitles are forced).

Last but not least a few questions about DoCCE4U:

Why is the option to close all GOP's everytime checked even if I dont encode multiangle dvd's?
Why is the Luminance Level allways set to 0-255 when 16-235 will do it too?
Why is the encoding mode set to progressive and upperfield first even if DoItFast4U has detected that the movie is interlaced and we all know, that CCE everytime encodes upperfield first but when the option is checked it shifts the hole movie one line up?

So it would be nice too, if DoCCE4U would offer more options to manually "tweak" the encoding process so that I don't need to modify the ecl file or even start cce manually and change things there....I think everybody has it's own configuration for CCE which works best for him/her.

So that was my little "test-report" of Pearl Harbor and even when there are things went wrong I like this software very much and I hope this helps making the software even better! :)

Doom9
4th June 2003, 23:00
have you noticed that you can make your own profiles in dc4u? I never felt the need for it but it's actually possible.

Closed GOPs: I once had the same question.. it's mentioned somewhere on the forum, I'm afraid I just can't recall where.
luminance level: when the DVD was first encoded it was using the restricted luma range.. so if you restrict it again now, you have restricted it twice and your blacks really won't be blacks anymore.
You have to blame the upperfield on CCE because it's the one making the mistake, not DC4U.. the labelling just stays the same.
Oh, which sources are detected as interlaced in DIF4U and encoded progressively? PAL stuff? Of course they are.. so far there has been no reliable interlaced/progressive detection for PAL.. (maybe you're using the latest DIF4U beta which does it.. but that's not fair since the supporting apps haven't been updated to the new DIF4U feature yet.. in the future interlaced stuff will remain interlaced or you'll have an auto-deinterlace option). For NTSC.. interlaced stuff should be IVTCd so it makes sense to encode it as progressive.

As for the subs, I'm sure Eyes will come to the rescue. I have an idea but I'm not really an everyday user so I better leave this up to somebody more knowledgeable in that area.

blue
4th June 2003, 23:12
Oh yeah, completly forgot to mention the new beta of DoItFast4U. This was the version which detected that the movie is interlaced, but it "configured" DoCCE4U to encode progressivly too. But I had another problem with the new version: everything run fine, then ReAuthorist came up and then DoCCE4U and when i push the "play" button in DoCCE4U it loads CCE and then CCE locks up and doesn't start encoding. CCE even don't react anymore so i have to kill it in the task manager. When I use the latest official DoItFast4U-Release everything works fine! (CCE-Version is 2.66.01.07)

ShaneZ
5th June 2003, 00:10
Yeah, I had a similar problem when I upgraded to the newest DIF4U beta. My system has been stable for weeks, but for some reason when I installed it CCE began locking up. It was like it would begin to encode, but before the progress bar comes up it would freeze. The only way to close it was to kill the process in task manager.

It wasn't DIF4U's fault this happened. I just mention it because it has been a fairly common occurance and I am just trying to isolate the cause. In my case I installed the new eclCCE and it solved my problem. Its just strange that we had the same problems solved in different ways. :confused:

adam
5th June 2003, 06:00
Regarding Open/Closed GOPs. I haven't read the thread you mention Doom9, but I think there may be some confusion regarding this setting. I know for a fact that TMPGenc simply has a silly bug regarding its GOP setting where using open GOPs can result in the # of frames per GOP exceeding your set max, and thus making your video non compliant with the DVD standard. I think this may have led to the general belief that open GOPs can cause problems in certain authoring programs with certain sources. This is simply not the case with CCE, or with any other encoder as far as I can tell. I never close GOPs in CCE. Its not required, its not recommended by Custom, and there is simply no reason to do it except for multi-angle footage. I author in lots of different software, and I never have any problems except if I use TMPGenc and open GOPs.

benf2
5th June 2003, 15:46
just to make sure i have this straight, when i use doitfast4u. I should choose 0-255 luminance in cce, not 16-255

ShaneZ
5th June 2003, 18:22
Originally posted by benf2
just to make sure i have this straight, when i use doitfast4u. I should choose 0-255 luminance in cce, not 16-255

Quoting Doom9:
luminance level: when the DVD was first encoded it was using the restricted luma range.. so if you restrict it again now, you have restricted it twice and your blacks really won't be blacks anymore.

BBWoof
6th June 2003, 18:28
@blue

Sorry bud, but I'm not going to make every option that available in CCE available in DoCCE4U. I'm going to try to include those options that are most important for DVD reauthoring. If you're not happy with the settings, click the "Start" button, select "Run", then type regedit.exe in the text box and hit enter. In the registry section: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\WoofSoft\DoCCE4U\templates you can tweak each of the templates all you want, or even copy and make your own. Hope this helps.

Luminance Level: That's just one of those settings I'm not going to add :)

Closed GOPs: I did this at the suggestion of someone much more knowledgable them myself at DVD reauthoring. I haven't seen any negative results because of it. Could someone explain why it's bad?



BBWoof

Eyes`Only
7th June 2003, 02:44
Closed GOPs can give you a very slight decrease in quality (hardly noticeable) but it avoids the famous "GOP size" errors that can occur without it. It's a matter of preference, but I'd prefer to stick with something that I KNOW will not give me GOP errors in my final Scenarist project.

Back to the very first post. The reason why it stops on that PGC and you have to hit play to continue is because for some reason Scenarist authored your IFO with that cell as 'restricted'. We are unable to figure out why the heck it does this on occasion, so we can't stop it from doing so. If you ifoedit it, and change that cell's restricted value from whatever it is (mine seems to be 64 when it occurs) to 0, the cell will play and continue normally.