I read that more than 4 passes is useless since the quality does not improve much. Has anyone ever tried 10 passes? Does that improve the quality a lot? I am assuming that 4 passes should take twice the amount of time to encode than 2 passes.
Also, in the same settings menu there are these: VBR Bias - it is set to 25 but on mine it goes from 0 to 100. Another one is Quality Prec - it is set to 16 and goes from 0 to 64. Anyone knows what are these for and what is the optimal setting?
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VBR_Bias controls how CCE distributes the bitrate. During the first CCE pass, the bitrate is distributed to achieve constant quality. The bias determines how much weight is given towards keeping that allocation. High values prevent high bitrate fluctuations in between GOPs, and low values give CCE more freedom to use bits in highly demanding areas.
VBR_passes indicates the number of CCE passes. This has to be 2 for CCE Basic. For all other CCE versions, note that if you use X passes when setting up CCE manually, enter X+1 here as CCE SP does not count the creation of the vaf file as one pass.
Quality_prec corresponds to Image Quality Priority in CCE 2.50, and Quantizer characteristics in CCE 2.66/2.67. The value ranges from 0 - 64 (as in CCE 2.66+), but is scaled to 0-100 when using CCE 2.50 (so if you're a CCE 2.50 user and have set this parameter to X, you have to enter X*64/100 in DVD-RB). This setting determines if CCE gives priority to image details, or evenly colored areas. The lower the value, the more priority will be given to details, which could result in blockyness or banding in other areas. A high value will result in good looking evenly colored areas, but could result in edge artifacts.
I guess for now I won't touch those settings unless someone in this forum has tried them and can recommend something, because the guide didn't make much sense. The two passes that I have been using gave great results, but took around 4 hours to complete. I'll try 6 passes and maybe 10 over the weekend just to see whether there is any difference. Maybe using Remake in a professional manner will prevent the necessity to have a large number of passes.
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If you know how to use all the advanced features of Remake it will be possible to edit the DVD so cleanly that it will reduce the size significantly and the extra passes won't be as necessary due to reduced size.
Perhaps you are right about the passes, 4 is enough. But instead of just mentioning the setting in the Rebuild Pro, it would be more useful if you could provide a link to the source so that I can see what these settings should be. Better still, if you have already done the research yourself, it could be great if you could explain the optimal settings of RB that will deliver better results.
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