One of the benefits of AVC is the ability to adapt the compression to suit the target device or quality. So you can use a very high quality set of settings and take 19 hours to compress a 2 hour movie. By the way even these are not the highest quality (read: slowest) settings.
The good people over at the doom9 forum have already created a number of Profiles which you load into MeGUI and then choose from a drop down list. They range from the above multi-pass through to ” I just need an okay compression” quick single pass.
Even within such single passes they offer at least 3 profiles, balancing speed of encoding against quality:
1P-Maxspeed: Everything disabled for max encoding speed (good for live capturing).
1P-Intermediate: Intermediate settings for average speed and final quality.
1P-Goodquality: Settings for good quality with 1 pass.
(Source: above doom9 forum post)
You can also use these as a basis and create your own profiles too.
I did a quick series of tests on a 2 minute DVD sample (video only) to confirm these three – unchanged from defaults – work as designed :
- 1P-Maxspeed: About 2 mins
- 1P-Intermediate: About 5 mins
- 1P-Goodquality: About 8.5 mins
On balance, I’d be aiming for 1P-Intermediate. If it’s a show that has little or no movement – say, a chat or comedy show – I’d probably copy that profile and drop the data rate to say 700kpbs from the default of 1000.