What is considered to be....

[JarrettH]

What is considered to be a high or low bitrate?
When using the SixOfNine matrix I understand there are high/low bitrate versions. Can you give me a general less/more than number?
I tried using Quant=4 like Didee suggested in a much older thread and the file size shrunk by over 50MB.

[Blue_MiSfit]

Basically, look at your target filesize. For 1cd rips I usually use 24 or hvs-best, but for the 2cd or cq2 encodes I use 20 as it is a bit sharper.

I use the resolution slider in gordian knot to choose my framesize. It has a nice indicator for bits/(pixel*frame). This is an interesting ratio that can give you some idea as to how a movie will look at a given filesize as a constant and the resolution as a variable.

I consider anything below .15 or .18 as lower bitrate, thus requiring a smoother matrix, like didee24 or hvs best. between .18 or so and about .20 is something of a gray area for me. I have to consider things like which denoiser(s) I am using and my ASP settings (qpel,bvops etc) more than the bits/(pixel*frame).

Anyway - its always best to do an encode (or comp test) with both matricies and looking at the results than it is to just attempt to guess at how well the movie will compress.

~misfit

[Teegedeck]

'Bitrate' is only a side-effect of quantization. What we really try is to work with a quantizer that is low enough to still look good. Let me try to explain.

(All bitrates are just examples: ) If you encode a clip at a 120x resolution with SixOfNine-HVS at quant=4 you might get a bitrate of 300 kbps. The important thing is not the bitrate, which is low because of the low resolution, but that you don't go higher than quantizer=4.

The difference between SixOfNine-HVS and SixOfNine is that I wouldn't like SixOfNine at quant 5 while this still looks good to my eyes with SixOfNine-HVS. SixOfNine-HVS on the other hand doesn't look as good at quant=3 as SixOfNine.

[JarrettH]

I just tried SixOfNine-HVS with Quant4 using 900kbps and 950kbps (because it was undersize 50mb at Quant4 and I wanted to increase the bitrate to see if it would bring it back up to 2CD). I guess Quant4 really limits that. I'm going to try both like you said, but using Quant3 so I can at least predict it better. Thanks!:)