slight blocking in smokey scenes

[rahzel]

im noticing some VERY slight blocking in certain low bitrate smokey scenes. would a lower or higher VBR bias help this, or would changing the VBR bias not help at all?

im using HC 0.18 with DVD-RB 1.09.3 btw. i tried 20 and 25, but i couldnt really see a difference.

also, the average bitrate is 3390 i believe. im alreading using the autoq2 matrix, which seemed to help A LOT.

[jptheripper]

you can also try raising the minimum bitrate

however realize the bits have to come from somewhere, so if you improve that scene, you have to degrade something else

[rahzel]

how do i do that?

im now using CCE btw.

[jptheripper]

rb-opt.. or search the forum on minimum vts size

[writersblock29]

@rahzel

You may profit from checking for those artifacts on your original material, as well; sometimes people (I do it too!) get so caught up in the quality of their backups that they don't realize their encoder's "shortcomings" are actually just a faithful reproduction of what's on the original disk. If you have pixelation on your original, you might be able to mop it up by using the filter editor with some filters like Undot and Deen. Come to think of it, trying filters would improve the compressibility of your project (by a slight reduction of detail) and perhaps give you that little extra you need to fix the smokey scene... exactly like jptheripper suggested in that you DO kind of have to sacrifice from one area to give charity to another.