Agressive deblocking?

[Skunk]

I have a DVD project that requires some heavy compression to fit a DVD5. There are 2 short scenes in the movie that involve alot of gunfire in the dark and the encoded product always has ALOT of blocking when the gun flash goes off. Can someone please reccomend a filter or combination of filters that would work well to minimize this?

[Mug Funky]

sometimes clipping off the black point can help prevent blocks (that is, a lot of the time there's no useful information in the near-black regions, so you can simply use the black points in "levels" to clip it off to pure black for that scene).

but a surefire way to get rid of blocks is to increase the bitrate. once it's as high as it can go (8500 normally, 9000 if you really need to push it). if that's still not working, decrease the number of b-frames for that scene. if that doesn't work, you'll have to start selectively blurring your video.

also make sure the blocks aren't present in your source...