Dark anime scenes

[oddball]

I've been watching rather a lot of anime which features dark scenes where XviD has been used to encode. One example is Last Exile. This show appears to be a very tough anime to encode. Typical sizes are in the 150+MB for [Anime-Kraze] and 175MB for [Inf-AF-F] version.

Blocking is very bad in dark scenes. Is there anything that can be done with the codec to better handle dark scenes? Not just in the encoder but in playback?

[Angrychair]

Originally posted by oddball
I've been watching rather a lot of anime which features dark scenes where XviD has been used to encode. One example is Last Exile. This show appears to be a very tough anime to encode. Typical sizes are in the 150+MB for [Anime-Kraze] and 175MB for [Inf-AF-F] version.

Blocking is very bad in dark scenes. Is there anything that can be done with the codec to better handle dark scenes? Not just in the encoder but in playback?

Did you consider that maybe the raw versions are where the problems are stemming from?

[BoNz1]

Hmm, quite probably the raw versions had this problem too since a lot of mpeg codecs have this problem in dark scenes. IIRC though sysKin was talking about adding some things which might improve XviD's performance on dark scenes see this thread, http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=55702 unfortunately this won't be added probably for quite some time since 1.0 seems to be still not very close. There are a couple things you can do in the meantime if you are encoding darker movies. A lot of the time what I do is just disable b-frames for dark movies or you could encode them seperately or if you are using dev-api-4 create a zone and set the b-vop sensitivity to -40 (I think thats right, thats what the latest Koepi build used to disable them, IIRC)