Is no-strong-intra-smoothing really beneficial?

excellentswordfight · 5th May 2019, 13:33

I've been doing some tests with common settings that I see people use arround here for detail retention, and since there is no good tune preset for this, it seems to differ a bit what settings should be used as an substitute for an tune film preset.

For my medium bitrate test (1080p @ 6Mbps) I found that no-strong-intra-smoothing actually only displayed negative effects. So my question is why I see a lot of people using it. Have you done tests or is this somthing that just sounds like it should be befinitial so it's just assumed that it it is? Or maybe its only better at higher bitrate?

Default: A clear loss in detail, some areas are blurry.

No-sao: Most detail restored, some areas are still blurry

No-sao, deblock -1,-1: Most detail restored, most of the blurry areas are gone.

No-sao, deblock -1,-1, no-strong-intra-smoothing: Most detail restored, blurry areas from the default is back. While not visable in sample, some areas display blocky tendencies simulair to an comparable x264 encode.

Tests are done with Tears of steal uncompressed 4k source downscaled to 1080p encoded with x265 v3.0+14 2pass preset slow. 6Mbps equals crf19 for this sample.

5th May 2019, 13:33	#1 \| Link
excellentswordfight Lost my old account :( Join Date: Jul 2017 Posts: 326	Is no-strong-intra-smoothing really beneficial? I've been doing some tests with common settings that I see people use arround here for detail retention, and since there is no good tune preset for this, it seems to differ a bit what settings should be used as an substitute for an tune film preset. For my medium bitrate test (1080p @ 6Mbps) I found that no-strong-intra-smoothing actually only displayed negative effects. So my question is why I see a lot of people using it. Have you done tests or is this somthing that just sounds like it should be befinitial so it's just assumed that it it is? Or maybe its only better at higher bitrate? Default: A clear loss in detail, some areas are blurry. No-sao: Most detail restored, some areas are still blurry No-sao, deblock -1,-1: Most detail restored, most of the blurry areas are gone. No-sao, deblock -1,-1, no-strong-intra-smoothing: Most detail restored, blurry areas from the default is back. While not visable in sample, some areas display blocky tendencies simulair to an comparable x264 encode. Tests are done with Tears of steal uncompressed 4k source downscaled to 1080p encoded with x265 v3.0+14 2pass preset slow. 6Mbps equals crf19 for this sample. Last edited by excellentswordfight; 5th May 2019 at 16:15.