Encoding beat down or results that make you go - huh?

[SonofPhatty2x4]

I have have four movies that have made me want to give up encoding/converting and just keep ISO images of my DVD's

1) Aliens
2) AVP - Requiem
3) Inside
4) Saving Private Ryan

Aliens, AVP - Requiem, and Inside (especially Inside) are extremely dark movies that just eat encoders/converters alive.

Saving Private Ryan has massive fast action scenes with cut to grandiose open spaces of moving trees and grass which just make all encoders/converters cry.

What other movies has anyone had an issue with where they converted the movie and the result was so far out of left field that you went back to view your settings?

[Dark Shikari]

The biggest tortures I've had encoding-wise:

1. "First Man Into Space," an old grainy black-and-white film for which deadzones beat out trellis by a long-shot (my initial trellis encode ate much of the grain). So I wrote psy-trellis.

2. Any Touhou clip (http://mirror05.x264.nl/Dark/Flash/mof.html). My first-ever encode at CRF 25 (before AQ and everything else) ended up looking rather mediocre and being over 6 megabits. Oh, how things have improved...

3. "300". Just... "300".

[Ranguvar]

The Mummy, and Saw (former on DVD, latter on Blu-ray). The former has a huge amount of invisible grain/noise, and ridiculously strong haloing. The latter has a ridiculous amount of chroma noise and an odd pattern of luma noise that just dissolved into vibrating pools of mush after my usual FFT3DGPU. I eventually ended up using FluxsmoothT followed by FFT3DGPU at light settings to remove a little of the luma noise and help encoding, but I had to resort to pumping the bitrate to keep the rest, as it's important to the film's feel.

[CWR03]

Clerks was tough - just for fun I ran a denoise, and it looked like crap.

[Mug Funky]

pi is fun. 16mm black and white reversal film. that's never going to look good.

i can't imagine spiderman 3 blu-ray looking much good.

generally speaking, grainy or small gauge film (16mm), and anything sharp with trees and water will kill most encoders.

if you guys want impossible amounts of grain, see if you can find some fuji eterna 500D in 16mm. that will nuke any encoder. it's pretty and colourful, but not made for compressing :)