x264 settings on Toon Shaded CG

[Dogway]

Toon shaded CG or High Quality Anime (lets say Akira) with many details and movements, but also flat areas and clean lines...

I thought using the Insane film settings for this was nice, but I just read about psy-rd and AQ to be tuned whether it was film or anime. The case is I consider this kind of content a mix of both? but Im not sure, should I average those settings? or use them like one of the presets?

Actually Im using Psy-RD 0.4:0 AQ 0.6 for Anime, and Psy-RD 1.0:0.15 AQ 1.0 for Film.

I also would like to know if these parameters are too high, although I want insane quality I dont want them to be ilogical stupid:

--merange 32
--ref 16
--bframes 16

[Chengbin]

AQ is good for anime, albeit at a lower value like 0.6.

Psy-rd is good for anime for high bitrates, albeit at a lower value as well, like 0.5.

merange 32 is useless. 16 is good.

Ref 16 and bframes 16 are insane, but could be useful for anime. If you can accept that the encoding will be 50% slower, then use it.

[Dogway]

Thanks. Things are just more clear now, at least related to anime.
I read on another thread that CG should be considered film, but I dont know if toon shaded CG too, it dances in between, although motion is still smooth/progressive, spatially it has wide flat color areas and some sharp lines. But the camera not only pans or zoom, it also tumbles around detailed textured environments.

Now that I updated to the newest x264 version this also stands to other parameters like Tunings, Mb-Tree and M.E. Algorithm. I would like to know for AQ and Psy-RD and Trellis strength too, as mentioned.

[MatLz]

Hi!
I just wanted to say my newbie opinion on that.
AQ and psyrd are the devil for ringing on animes...
Personaly if I have enough bitrate, I disable AQ and use psyrd 0:0. If I'm limited by my bitrate I use AQ mode 1 strength 0.1 to 0.5, same for psyrd.
Ringing vs banding....what a pity...

[Dogway]

so AQ and Psyrd is for banding? Im newbier than you so thanks for the feedback. I also thought the easiest way was to throw 3000kbps in it and done, but reading it seemed AQ was the next big thing. Actually I dont know which of the options are more biased to quality or optimization, so it's confusing. I have to say that I dont encode oftenly, and all my encodes are avs scripts with denoisers and heavy cleaners. I only aim for visual quality, no matter file size.
Besides that a little extra knowledge comes handy, I like to know what does what for eventual encodings, but those are exceptions.

[Dark Shikari]

It's a problem of ringing vs banding because of bit allocation. If you steal all the bits from the backgrounds and give them to the sharp lines, you lose detail and get awful banding and blocking in the flat areas. If you do the reverse, the sharp lines get ringy.

Personally, I prefer a bit of ringing to blurry flat areas.