Craig Sanders wrote: ...
one-pass took 37 minutes and resulted in a file 381MB in size. (transcoding at approx 50fps)
three-pass took 206 minutes and resulted in a file 707MB in size. (transcoding at approx 227fps for pass1, 50fps for pass 2, and only 8fps for pass 3)
quality was excellent on both versions. the one-pass seemed very slightly fuzzy in comparison to the three-pass, but it was only noticable if you were looking for it....and even then, i'm not 100% sure that i didn't just imagine it because i was expecting it to be worse.
I thought that the whole point of mutipass divx encoding is to achieve a better quality at the same bitrate. Am I wrong here? Are you sure you specified the same bitrate for both experiments?
And, just for benchmark purposes, have you tried a low bitrate for both one-pass and three-pass, so you can see the differences easier?
Carsten.