Older Movies In Colour

[Frave]

I have recently noticed that older movies, in this case "North by Northwest (1959), become disturbingly "grainy" after compression.
While the DVD is obviously clear the difference with the avi is much
bigger than p/a "Crouching Tiger".
FYI I have used 5.02 pro for "NbN" and my settings were;
- 576x304 res (16:9) - Precise Bicubic A=0.60 - two pass encoding bit rate 1100 - using GMC and Bid Enc. - Did not touch Advanced Parameters. If you need more info pls tell me
Used about the same settings for "Crouching Tiger" which resulted in perfect quality.
I am not too familiar with all the filters of VD (v. 1.4.10) e.g should "sharpen" work for this one.
TIA for any advice given.

[DJ Bobo]

1) I can't say it enough: no GMC cause it's buggy (but it has nothing to do with the results you got)

2) encode 5 minutes in 1-pass quality based 100%. If you got the same results, you can't do anything about it.
If it got better, you should use a lower resolution for your 2-pass encoding session. Use 512x288 for example.

[Frave]

Thanks. I've done what you suggested. After 1-pass quality based 100%
it looked a touch better but that could have been my "optimistic" eyesight deceiving me. I also did lower the resolution in 2-pass with
more or less the same result. So I guess nothing can be done.
Question still is - is this a common problem with movies in colour
from way back, I don't seem to have the problem with b/w's from those days. Could it have to do with the scope those movies were made and stored and eventually digitally re-mastered for DVD distribution.
I am asking this because it happened with some other older colour movies from those days as well but certainly not all.

[Frave]

One more thing. I made a sample using the "old" 3.11 alpha codec in low-motion and to my big surprise it turned out in excellent quality.
I'm absolutely flabbergasted. Anyone with an answer, I'm more than interested?

[DJ Bobo]

Seems like you're comparing with 2 different post processing levels, turn post processing in DivX5 to max and see what happens.
And may be the grain is caused because of you having activated "film effect" -.-

[Frave]

You're absolutely right, I had post processing turned to max but much to my disgust "film effect" was activated. Lucky for me this is only a playback function. Thanks for your time and trouble.