suggestions to make XviD block like crazy

[Blue_MiSfit]

I know I know, this sounds like an absurd question. I have some nice DV footage that we are using for a feature film. It's not going to be full screen, just displayed on a rack of monitors in the scene as security/webcam footage.

We are dropping the resolution to 480x360, and dropping frames to 7fps. I did some color correction to wash out the image etc, but when it comes to the encoding we want to have a nice blocky image.

We got decent results by doing cq15-20 using MPEG quant, but instead of uniformly blocking, lots of detail was lost and there was lots of grainy smudge artifacts.

I would imagine that a high bitrate CQM would help retain detail but block like crazy, but I tried 6of9 and it didn't really help, only increasing filesizes.

Here are my settings currently:

#Load Input File
QTInput("...\bar_1.mov", audio=false)

#Delete half the fields, reduce horizontal resolution by 2
ReduceBy2()

#Crop to 4:3 AR, increase res
Crop(20,0,-20,0)
lanczosresize(480,360)

#Drop to 7 fps no blending
ChangeFPS(7.0)

#Blur
Blur(.3)

#Murder highlights
Levels(0,1.443,255,0,255)

#Colorspace conversion
ConvertToYV12()

# ***xvid settings***
# cq 15, msp 4, vhq 0,
# quants capped 2-31, trellis,


Maybe a different codec, something really crappy like divx4? :D

Does anyone have suggestions? I know it seems wierd, making good footage look bad in a good way :)

The producers are going for a certain look, I'm just the encoding monkey :)

http://rapidshare.de/files/29066927/bar_1.avi.html

here is a sample of my current settings.

~MiSfit

[Didée]

What about ME=0, quant=31? ... perhaps with "Ultimate Matrix" (that 32 thingy)

In case of doubt,

PointResize( 1/8 size ) .pointresize( origsize )

is guaranteed blocky, and should be easy to code for XviD. Moreso with above settings. :)

[foxyshadis]

Maybe you should "pre-process" with an MPEG-1 or 2 codec instead. Blocks ahoy thataway. If it washes too much detail out, you can load the result back into the end of the avs script and use the mask in Deblock_QED (perhaps with a blur) to merge the original back into the inner 6x6 square of each block.

[Blue_MiSfit]

Awesome suggestions guys!!

I have rough versions that will suffice for now. If the director / DP aren't happy with what I have I will definately try pre-processing in low bitrate MPEG-2, or doing a point resize.

~MiSfit

[chadamir]

Try resizing to something much smaller and blowing it back up with a not so good resizer.