"What Happens in Vegas" 720p @ 2 Mbps in Silverlight

[benwaggoner]

Hello all.

In putting the new beta of Expression Encoder 2 through its paces, I decided to see how low I could push the bitrate while still maintaining compatibility with Silverlight 1.0 and the Silverlight Streaming Service. I was able to do what I think is a pretty darn good 2 Mbps total (VBR), with 3.2 as the overall peak.

Here's the embedded clip, plus the settings I used to make it:

http://on10.net/blogs/benwagg/21587/

I don't have the URL to the actual .wmv file at the moment, but I'm sure someone here will figure that out in about 8 seconds .

[Schrade]

Originally Posted by benwaggoner

I don't have the URL to the actual .wmv file at the moment, but I'm sure someone here will figure that out in about 8 seconds .

http://msbluelight-0.agappdom.net/e1...s_1280x528.wmv

[Dark Shikari]

The quality could use a bit of work though

[CruNcher]

jep it's not so good in some scenes tough most of it looks very nice (the subjective sharpness is perfect, trying to get this with H.264 will be pain in the ass, tough you also see in this encode that blocks are prefered instead of inloop deblocking it,the good old ASP Look and Feel). I would say it would help more trying to clean it out of all the grain completly tough you can see the grain in some frames but it's not really perceptable the whole time (nicest scene is in my opinion the one when ashton kutcher opens the door i was like wow and nope i don't only mean the two laddies there ) but maybe the source is allready like that hard to say also ringing can be seen @ the begining in the MPAA text (hmm is it artificialy oversharped?), in some scenes it really looks like film other scenes look more like digital cinema again. I know how hard it is to keep the grain effect , my opinion on this matter is if a (HVS) perceptable grain layer can't be preserved @ low bitrates better clean it out completly (via the encoder,and use FGT), instead of creating such mutant stuff (tough nice work Ben) . The most bad looking scene btw is when ashton kutcher is whoping up from the couch tough it is high motion the complete Roi is blocked and it stays for a relatively long time visible (but it's a dark area again tough not so dark to be not perceptable by good eyes) to the viewer (again spoils the fun).

Here is a example of some stuff i try currently with X264 and Darks beautifull AQ tough it's a little lower sized this time i decided to improve this @ SD bellow 3mbit levels first before going to HD (High profile)







i get a compression factor of above 2x currently @ 2x realtime speed (1 Pass VBV closed gop size 25 ) (with second hand source) (Main Profile Level 3)

PS: That swiming background effect looks visualy the same as your new trellis Dark

Dark you shouldn't forget that all these compression artifacts are very well hidden in the dark areas (but yeah the first scene after the logo spoils all the fun and isn't really showing the whole beauty that comes after that (rc problems?) ), under correctly calibrated viewing conditions it's hard to realize them tough

Ben where is the uncompressed real footage you promised

[benwaggoner]

Yeah, the grain was definitely a pain. And it was very much in the source; the only processing I did was scaling down from the 1920x1080 source. Obviously some high-quality denoise/degrain would help enormously, but didn't make sense in the context of the demo. I'll prep another one using the codec's interal noise reduction filter to see if that makes a meaningful difference.

I'm actually trying to upload a 960x540 of a rough cut of the uncompressed footage right now, for perusal. No color timing, but it'll give a sense of the what the content's like. It's about all I could bear to edit on my laptop .

My new real editing workstation should finally be arriving next week, so once again I aspire to finish the edit in the next few weeks. But I've said that before...

[benwaggoner]

@Cruncher,

Also, not that this used the VC-1 In-loop deblocking filter. Not as wide as the H.264 one, obviously, but it is extant.

[benwaggoner]

Originally Posted by CruNcher

Ben where is the uncompressed real footage you promised

Thanks for reminding me:

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.ph...55#post1113255