Sopranos and Video Quality.... 6 pass encodes = yuck!

[SiliconSoul]

im doing a 6 pass encode on Sopranos season 1 episode 1. im fitting 59 mins on 1 cd which is a little bit much but why an i get macro blocks around people that are standing around or moving very little. i set the bitrate at 1900 which should be right for a 80 min cd unless im tired and looking at it wrong...

im encoding a part of the first episode again... read below

Another thing i noticed which might be causing problems is that the source is interlaced. when i do a sample and get end credits they are interlaced BAD. doing a smartdeinterlace and next im going to try the first pal option but im not sure if im going anywhere with this.

how i also noticed the interlace problem... i was playing the first encode and the bottom line of the screen keeps jumping up a bout every other frame when i pause and step. (was fast forwarding when i noticed then did the pause step.)


but please HELP any and all suggestions would be great! YOU GUYS ARE THE BEST AND HAVE ALWAYS HELPED ME BEFORE! :-)

[UltimateDBZ]

A bitrate of 1900 isn't overly generous, you may want to up it to 2200 or even above. Also, smartdeinterlace isn't that great either.. use telecide. Do both those things and encode a short portion of it, and report back the resulting quality.

[SiliconSoul]

smartdeinterlace and bitrate 2000 still looks like crap...


watching the source on powerdvd and the source is not that great quality... its looks fine on tv but on the 17' computer monitor it looks kinda bad...

so the deinterlace might not help... could be crappy source...

ps i might try using sharpen and denoise to see if it helps out at all.

[UltimateDBZ]

If your source isn't all that great to begin with, deinterlacing becomes that much harder, and therefore can result in lower quality. Have you tried telecide yet?

[Jason28]

@SiliconSoul
I have been in a conundrum about what to do with the Sopranos for a while now. If you poke around you will see the setings that I used to do my encodes and I wasnt that happy with them (I am not saying that its crappy by any means its just not as good as the other movies that I have done in the past). The problem is that we are trying to squeeze too much on 1 cd. I never put that much on there. The thing is that I dont want to put each episode on 2 cds. I was thinking of trying to cut out the credits and see if that does anything. The last thing that I thought of doing is trying a 90 or 99 min cd and see if I can get those to work. Let me know if you have any ideas.

[SiliconSoul]

yes i tried telecide and that seems to not really help... is there a deinterlace for TV shows that are NTSC and on dvd and done by crappy hbo!

[SiliconSoul]

but the higher bitrate does not help so a 99 min cd will not do it....

i mean let me set it up for that and re encode the first episode again... but if u watch the source on powerdvd or any computer dvd player. It just is NOT DVD quality... they are almost svcd quality and we are basicly reencoding that. its like taking a high quality dvd encoding it and then encoding the output from the first and expecting it to get better....

with the first episode it is 59 mins so the bitrate at 80 min is set at 1600 WHICH IS TOO LOW....


have u tried sharpen or denoise or any other filters...

what we are dealing with is sort of a divx to svcd...

so what ever filters you would use on that might work on this...