The Count of Monte Cristo

[SirDavidGuy]

Is relatively easy except for one scene.

Where Dantes is in the steam room with the one who put him in prison, even at quant 2, the scene looks horrible.

I've tried using custom quant matrices, down to the point where the 5-minute scene take up about 30 megabytes, amazingly high levels of blurring filters, etc. And the scene still looks like crap.

Any ideas?

[Dali Lama]

Try using QPEL in the latest TEST build of Xvid on Nic's site. I have found similar problems with fog scenes in Iron Monkey. Amazingly they disappeared with QPEL. It seems it has something to do with the Motion Estimation. I have read that sometimes lowering the ME actually helps. I'd like to hear if it works.

Take Care,

Dali

[SirDavidGuy]

Qpel doesn't significantly help, and besides, the rest of the movie uses B-Frames, which I don't want to sacrifice for 1 measily scene.

Using a lower search precision helps some, but leaves trails and lots of grain in the image. I guess I have no other choice, though.

Thanks for the help,

SDG

[-h]

You can splice together sections that use B-frames or QPel, it shouldn't matter.

Did you try quant=1 for the scene in question?

-h

[tanksimpson]

I've had trouble with this movie, too - it's been sitting on my hard drive for weeks. In addition to the fog scene, there is also the very dimly lit swordfight scene early in the movie that takes place in a mansion with drapes over all the windows (Chapter 6, I think). The only solution I can find (and its a real PITA) is to encode that chapter with fixed quant=1 and splice it. Otherwise, the dim colors just seem to blend together and you can barely see what's going on. I will say that Xvid's new Qpel definately improves this scene when the quant is fixed at 2, but I do not completely trust Qpel yet because I am starting to notice faint little streaks after moving objects.

[SirDavidGuy]

You can splice together sections that use B-frames or QPel, it shouldn't matter.

Hehe, I discovered this shortly after posting.

Did you try quant=1 for the scene in question?

Tried, but unsuccesfully. The resulting file was just far too large. What I'm now doing is having a const. quant 2 stream, with an I-Frame every 3 frames, Qpel (Which is helping more with more accurate I and P frames). This made it out to be about 30 megs, but it's much better.

The only solution I can find (and its a real PITA) is to encode that chapter with fixed quant=1 and splice it

I had a bit of trouble there too. I eventually ended up using a custom quant matrix, which helped alot.

Thanks for the help, everyone!