Best type of clip for test encodes

[Zavs]

Hey guys,

Getting into doing some test encodes to try to determine the best x264 settings for my system. What type of scenes would be best to test with? ---brighter or darker, motion or still, portrait (eg face shots) or landscapes, etc---

I'm thinking a clips from avatar or transformers 2...anyone have any favorite scenes they test with?

[LoRd_MuldeR]

You should probably do your tests with the same kind of footage that you are going to encode later ;)

If you are looking for some uncompressed test footage, have a look here:
http://media.xiph.org/video/derf/

You may also want to have a look at the "Tallship" sample sequence for some excellent quality HD footage:
http://video-test-sequences.hexagon.cc/torrents/70618-TallShip_720p60_lossless_HuffYUV

[Zavs]

You should probably do your tests with the same kind of footage that you are going to encode later ;)


Our movie watching tends to cover quite a bit of the spectrum...as in most cases i like the war/action stuff while the wife likes the mushy stuff/little house on the prairie type stuff.

I'm trying to find types of clips that will stress x264 encodes...so that if they look good then the lesser scenes will definitely look good too.

I'm thinking bright, colourful shots might be best, but I've also read that crowds give a good indication of pq as well.

[nm]

If you are looking for generic settings that are suitable for most sources, simply pick the slowest speed preset that's tolerable (usually there's no point past --preset slower) and then --tune film/grain/animation depending on the source type. That covers most situations very well, except when targeting Blu-ray or a device that has specific restrictions.

When you use sensible settings, quality is mostly defined by the average and maximum bitrates. If you don't have a hard limit on file sizes, use CRF (18..22 is normal range for DVD/BD backups). Use as high VBV maxrate and bufsize as the playback device allows.

Many sources require filtering to get good output, especially if you target low bitrates. That also means manual work instead of blind encoding.