Artifacts in Dark areas LOTR

[caprioles9000]

I have encoded three or four movies with CCE till now and i must say that i was just thinking last night when i watched my LOTR that i had squeezed on to one DVD-R that the quality is still not what i really want it to be............i squeezed LOTR with CCE and it turned out fine (i squeezed it with CCE 2.50) ..except ..only at the moments in the film when its dark i get artifacts/macroblocks or lets say that you can see the artifacts/macroblocks better when you increase the contrast on your tv.....

first i did a one pass (the guide getting CCE way with the normal settings)....and during my second pass i used 5 times vbr ..with a max of 9800 a Bias of 0 and the highest possible average kbits ..i cannot remember but i guess it was around 2750 or 3000 because of the fact that the movie is so long .....so is there any other way to make sure that the artifacts dont happen in films with black background or films with low light and/or are taken in night time and stuff....

should i have also set a higher min or something??? I thought that with setting a higher average global bitrate it would have been better quality.....also i watched my movie on tv with my rca out of my video card on my pc .......

so a couple of questions to everyone:

1: is it usually better quality when you play your finished DVD-Rs with a standalone player since its hardware de-encoding instead of software de-encoding with Power DVD???

2: does it change per TV ..maybe because of the fact that my TV is very old i have to increase the contrast light setting on my TV to see things better....this is also for normal broadcasted things ....its usually to dark other wise....and naturally when i do this with the re-encoded LOTR you can see artifacts .....so maybe if it was a newer better quality TV i might see less artifacts...is this a logical thing or not????

3: with my second pass with 5 pass vbr ...if i set also a min kbits together with the avergae kbits..will it make a difference?? So in this case lets say:

5 times vbr
max of 9800
Bias of 0
Global average kbits of lets say as high as possible depending on the file size (plus the audio/subs you have to add)
plus now a min of 2000 (so if i add this ass well)


I must say ...even in the beginning of amelie ....just when its starst there is a moment when the logo of the flim producers come up UFG or something .....even at that point with high contrast settings on my TV i can see the artifacts ...but after that there is very little areas in the movie where its very dark...so with the way i explained above i got amazing quality!!!...just strange that it only happens with movies that have dark moments.....

PS; All movies that i work with are PAL R 2


I wonder whether this is the place to post this if not can a moderator delete this post since i wouldnt want to have double posting here and under DVD encoding!!!

[mezzanine]

LOTR is probably the most difficult movie to backup. I would try setting bias higher ( 30 ) and the picture quality to 25. Change your maximum and minimum bitrate ( if the average bitrate is 3000 i would set min. to 1500 and max to 5000 ), if you do that you will see that slow scenes with static walls and less motion look much better, it might give you some artifacts on very fast parts of the movie, but you can't really see them because of the motion.
In general i've noticed that setting bias to 0 and the min and max bitrate to 0 and 9800 gives bad quality on slow scenes and dark scenes.

Give it a try and post.

p.s. If the quality is crap on your old TV it will look much worse on a new large screen.

[Boulder]

If you use Avisynth, try SansGrip's BlockBuster filter.

[caprioles9000]

Originally posted by Boulder
If you use Avisynth, try SansGrip's BlockBuster filter.

could you elaborate a little bit more about this filter ..what does it do??? and do i just sue it with my avisynth avs.....which line do i past it under???

[Boulder]

There is a thread about it in the Avisynth forum. There's a lot of discussion and details on how it works.