Transcode Clips - Remove Grain & Blockiness

[therube]

Transcode Clips - Remove Grain &/or Blockiness


I'm transcoding some old video clips.
Looking to get near transparency, to me, at smaller file sizes.
Generally, I can accomplish that.

The clips, mostly AVI files, ~1000kbps, mostly Flash VP6.

In general, the clips often look (what I'll describe as) as "grainy" & or "blocky". Suppose it was the nature of the beast at the time given the encoding.

I'll be using VidCoder, output to MP4's.

What I'm looking to do, perhaps better, is to preserve as much "quality" as I can, while at the same time trying to reduce the grain/blockiness.

If I just go for transparency, that is what I get, including the grain/blockiness.

If I simply up the crf= value, I can "soften" things, so reduce the grain/blockiness, but at the same time I'm loosing quality.


Wondering if there are other H.264 (x264) encoder settings I may experiment with to try to "reduce the grain" while maintaining as much quality as I can?


(Heh. Now that I've finally written this in ink, so now I'm coming up with some hits...)

Treatment of noisy sources (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=165059)

Removegrain, x264 and mkv (http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?t=106095)

The best way to remove grain? (http://forum.videohelp.com/threads/328078-The-best-way-to-remove-grain)

How to remove grain in video (http://forum.videohelp.com/threads/329308-How-to-remove-grain-in-video)

Advice regarding 'grain' reduction x264 (http://forum.videohelp.com/threads/350559-Advice-regarding-grain-reduction-x264)

Fighting noise/grain in handbrake – custom denoise settings (http://mattgadient.com/2012/06/19/fighting-noisegrain-in-handbrake-custom-denoise-settings/)

[hello_hello]

I know nothing about how to use Vidcoder for removing grain, but if you're not married to using it, an Avisynth based encoder GUI might be a better option as there's lots of filters/plugins for Avisynth.

I mentioned MeGUI and FFCoder in your "Simple Encoding tool question" thread. The former makes it fairly easy to manually add filters to a script. In theory it shouldn't be hard with FFCoder either, but I haven't used it that way myself.

Setting up AVIsynth plugins and getting them to work can be a bit of a learning curve initially, but I guess it depends on how much time you want to put into it. Given the massive number of replies here so far, you might get more help/suggestions with Avisynth noise filters than Vidcoder.