Preserving original detail, as opposed to effects.

[video_magic]

Sorry if I might get flamed.

I am concerned with a difference I have observed here over the last couple of years. As a kind of newbie, even after a few years, I just want to point out - in the face of supposedely expert advice - that a lot of people just want their footage to look the same as possible as the input, to the x264 (or similar) output, they don't neccasarilly want to debob, smooth or denoise it for gods'sake, and they don;t want to apply 'effects'' - at the risk of being shot down in flames - for all that is holy, I believe that I am in a majority of sorts when I seek knowledge on how I want my encodes to look as similar as possible to my source at a fairly low-bitrate - and I would just like to see advice to that end without technobabble! - I really apologise to the well meaning, but I really want advice after 3 years without some 'cause' behind it.

[Inspector.Gadget]

Here's some techno-babble for you: This is the wrong subforum for your complaint.

[video_magic]

Ok! Sorry! I thought as much before posting - god forbid my point of view!!!

[Mug Funky]

i guess general discussion would be the one for this... there's no "encoding philosophy" subforum really.

FWIW i'm totally with you on this - not all video needs some kind of cure for ills it doesn't have. as good as these tools are for footage that requires it, i notice that a lot of new posters seem (to me of course... opinion) to be led into a cycle of overfiltering, killing any kind of artefact without discrimination, chasing some ideal of a perfect picture.

to be sure, i really like the fact that there are tools that perform amazing things like the sharpening in fft3dfilter, or mvtools combined with temporal filtering, and even things like bilateral filters (that completely nuke detail) are actually quite useful for stabilising mvtools' vectors in the presence of tons of noise.

but... sometimes a video doesn't need anything done before it's fed to the encoder.

[J_Darnley]

Do you really need advice on how to do nothing? As for encoder settings, they remain the same whether you filter the input or not.

[dat720]

I'm not really sure where this post is going... the technobable usually is the advice, video encoding can be a complicated beast sometimes and getting the results you desire is often not as simple as telling a encoder to encode the video you want to the specified bitrate, there are other factors involved which require descriptions, or would you rather just be told what to do without a explanation?

You have to make compromises, if you want a video to fit on a 700mb CD you are going to loose quality no matter how you encode it, the trick is minimising the quality loss, people get caught up with how long it takes to encode and would rather encodes to go quickly, if you set all the quality options of the encoder as high as they will go you will end up with excellent results at the expense of time, if you want speed then your going to have to sacrifice quality, you can't have your cake and eat it, in the grand scheme of things is it really a problem if an encode took 2 or 3 hours as opposed to less than an hour?

If you do a DVD > MP4/MKV encode using h264 (MPEG-4 AVC/MPEG-4 Part 10, there are various encoders that will encode to this format x264 is probably the most popular at this point) with a CRF (Constant Rate Factor) mode set at about 18-22 (lower is higher quality) you should get near perfect results and end up with a video in the 1-1.6gb range.

Is that the sort of information you are after?

PS unless you really must have to get a Movie onto a CD forget about file size.... and choose a quality level you are happy with and live with the final size.