Help with best x265 Handbrake settings for miniDV etc

[jimmy5]

hi

are there any good settings in Handbrake(v1.2.2) to archive all miniDV tapes and Canon 5D2 raw videos?

i am currently using most of the default settings, except for video codec(x265 10-bit + Fast Decode), Audio(AAC Passthru) and Constant Quality(23 RF).
or are there any other better settings for these videos?

edit*
i did notice very small degrading difference on the final result(in green areas), but would disabling the 'fast decode' again and 22 rf change anything to more equal quality?

[Blue_MiSfit]

Why did you choose fast decode mode? It's a big hit to compression.

5D Mark II records in 4:2:0 H.264 (definitely not raw) already, and while bitrates are fairly high it's not exactly perfect. I'd question the benefit of transcoding this into HEVC for archival purposes. Is storage really that much at a premium for you?

DV is super inefficient (25 Mbps for SD) by modern standards, so you can easily cut that down to no more than 10 Mbps with HEVC I'm sure. The tricky bit here is handling the chroma correctly. DV uses 4:1:1, so whatever tool you're using will need to do a good job of converting it into 4:2:0.

Post a sample of the "degrading difference on the final result (in green areas)" if you'd like feedback on improving that. It may or may not be due to compression.

[jimmy5]

well, 5D2 raw(mov) video seems to be 350MB 1minute, so it is already quite a lot after 2 minutes... (7 minutes =~2,32GB)

not sure what are those 4:2 things, so probably have to investigate that first...

but i even found better examples - basically all green, skin and water areas get even more degraded than i noticed before:
https://www.upload.ee/image/9804427/MOV_snapshot1.jpg
https://www.upload.ee/image/9804363/x265_snapshot2.jpg
(it was even noticeable when i saved the MOV image with 95% quality and x265 100%)

original video file is 2:38 and 895MB, hevc 10bit is 201MB(without fast decode and with 22rf)

... i also found some old Fraps movies that i would like to make a bit smaller - that seems to be: "Video: FPS1 1920x1200 25fps 266441kbps [V: fraps, yuvj420p, 1920x1200, 266441 kb/s]"
and i probably have to work with Huffyuv or Lagarith lossless codecs also, so does this default 10-bit Hevc option work for those too?

[Blue_MiSfit]

Yes HEVC should be fine for those use cases.

Regarding the green degredation, this is indeed just softening due to compression. Lower crf (aka raise bitrate) and possibly disable SAO as well.

[jimmy5]

i just enter --no-sao into the extra options for that? if that should work, then it actually made things even worse... so now i just try with 20rf and the sao thing default...

[Blue_MiSfit]

SAO is a very powerful tool, but for absolute max quality it's often better to disable it to improve sharpness. Sound like you need to raise bitrate more.