Encoding B&W Movie (Clerks)...Better Settings?

[OvERaCiD23]

I'm encoding Clerks, and the whole movie is in B&W. I've tried it with just b-frames, over 2 CDs, but it does not compress well (or even look that great). the compressibility test shows max to be at 1.004!!! can you guys suggest any tools that would be helpful for doing a better encode for B&W movies (VDub filters, built-in DivX filters)? i'm trying some psychovisual settings right now, and possibly some pre-processing later.

[DJ Bobo]

what do you mean doesn't look that great?! DivX nevers looks perfect, it's even far from perfect, even with 100% quality encoding.

[RadicalEd]

You know, come to think of it there really isnt any sort of optimizations today that would compress something like this better than any full color movie. Which makes me think... perhaps it would be a very good idea to implement 8 bit RGB coding into something like XviD or DivX 5 (although that would be out of our hands I suppose). By allowing the choice of the usual 12 bit YUV coding or 8 bit color/black and white coding, compression for black and white movies and certain animated features which use a small palette would gain a huge amount of efficiency. I wonder though... I guess an RGB color space format wouldn't be compliant with MPEG 4 ISO specs, so it would have to be outside of the standard. Well anyway just wanted to throw that idea in and see if it ends up anywhere

-edit- correction on my part; MPEG 4's standard is huge and supports all kinds of RGB bit depths

[rvas18]

You should try using virtual and apply some filters to the video

[jevans64]

I am not sure how much you will save ( maybe 10 % to 20 % ) but try using the "grayscale" filter in Virtual Dub. Using this filter will have the added benefit of removing the "chroma shimmer" ( rainbow colors ) from any B & W source where the Mastering Engineer did not turn on the chroma filter when dubbing.

I am using this filter with the Twilight Zone series with good results, but my file sizes are still large for B & W. A dedicated Chroma Filter and 8 bit RGB for VDub would be nice. ;-)