Recommended settings for Sports

[jozza]

I have used search, but noone has really answered this sufficiently

Using xvid 2nd pass encoding with all sorts of matrices, hasnt really made much difference.

What are some recommended techniques used to get good results.

[DarkZell666]

Good settings are settings that give the result YOU are looking for :)

2pass is the best way to go if you have a desired filesize, but you shouldn't expect the quality to be good if it is constant (very) high-motion ...

A couple of guidelines :

n°1 : for a 20min clip, don't target below 200MB ... anime can fit easily on 175MB or less but real-life content will have to take a bit more, that's the way it is :)

n°2 : reduce resolution to something "watchable" : <= 640*480 or even <= 576*432, or you will waste too much data on reproducing useless details (useless being what YOU condider useless of course ;))

n°3 : enable bframes ! and set the quant. offset to 2 or 3 rather than 1 (over 3 will make the picture look really washed out, especially with low resolution)

n°4 : use avs scripts, for ex: to reduce details in high-motion scenes (since high-motion scenes require much bitrate : lowering the detail level will raise the quality at a given bitrate)

n°5 : do a couple of tests yourself and decide what YOU consider as good

tell us more on what you're trying to encode :)
and another question : can you give us some screenshots for us to look at ?

[Teegedeck]

http://forum.doom9.org/search.php?searchid=664074

[DarkZell666]

actually that link says "no matches found" ;)
here is what you were probably trying to link to :

http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=96117

[Teegedeck]

It seems that the board's cache stores searches for only short time. Search for the word 'sports' in topic titles in the XviD-forum and you'll get two good hits.

[jozza]

thanks I've read all of those, but still nothing that I'm looking for, noone really has given some good recommendations for sports apart from some avisynth pointers for dvd's. Not the actual encoding.

And another thread had that that sports is hard to compress.
I was hoping for something a little more.

But really I've got a headache with all this encoding, lost alot of time too and will just rely on autogk and maybe 2nd pass xvid virtualdubmod - basic encodes.

[foxyshadis]

For encoding, the best you could probably do is turn all the xvid options to max, maybe use a low-bitrate custom quant matrix, and most of all jack the bitrate up until it actually looks good. Sports take a lot more space than movies. Maybe do a quant 2-4 encode and see how that looks, and whether it's small enough for you.

[DarkZell666]

Honestly, try some or all that I've suggested, I've managed to get anime episodes from 223MB down to < 100MB using XviD and the tips I've given you, and pretty clean too ;)

[Karl Beem]

I mostly do sports (basketball games). I recommend lots of bits. I use a bitrate of ~6000 kbps for 720p or 1080i, fitting a game to a DVD-R. I use ~3000 kbps for analog. I encode interlaced where appropriate and don't use Qpel, GMC or Bframes.

[dukey]

sports/live stuff is normally interlaced
deinterlace with tomsmocomp
encode with 1 pass quanterizer 2-4
or do 2 pass if you need it to fit to a cd etc