Scripting Help (mostly for dark scenes)

[mirkosp]

And I'm a girl.

I managed to forget about that while writing my post. Whoops.
Anyway...
Quantizer can be lowered, 17 is more like it for SD content (should still yield an acceptable filesize), and it's --qcomp, with two - not just -qcomp. See if that improves.

[Kazemon15]

Oh it is --, but when I type it into zarx, it looks like one whole "-" if that makes any sense? But I'll bring down the quantizer and try that.

[Kazemon15]

Yay! It looks so much better now. Thanks alot, mirkosp, you too, Mister Hatt. =3

I know it's not going to be perfect quality, but if I can at least get rid of all those banding issues, I'm happy. =3

So is it possible to use this setting with my other AMVs as well? Since I've been having the same problems with one (same footage) and another of a different anime.

[mirkosp]

Yeah, they should be more or less fine for most anime. I'd lower the quantizer a bit more, btw, but it's not as bad as it used to be.

[Mister Hatt]

Yeah I actually typo'd at qcomp for 0.8, 0.7 makes way more sense w. As mirko suggests, lower the quantizer a bit more. The best thing you can do for quality other than that is to increase the bitrate for your audio I guess. I would probably run a linear sharpener of some sort for those edges, and maybe a really minor deblocker, but tweaking that stuff is difficult and will likely just make it take forever to encode and look worse unless you get it perfectly.

One thing that may be worth trying is adjusting the RC lookahead for mbtree. I'm not sure what the defaults are in ZarxGUI but setting it as high as possible (make sure your machine has enough memory though) may improve the performance of the adaptive quantizer, especially on darker scenes.

[mirkosp]

setting it as high as possible (make sure your machine has enough memory though) may improve the performance of the adaptive quantizer, especially on darker scenes.

Nooooope. Back when Dark_Shikari was on #darkhold, he explained that the max for slower settings is 60 because with animation and generally content with highly static/flat visuals higher mbtrees would make the video look worse because it'd fuckup the bitrate allocation. Live Actions don't have that issue since there tends to be enough motion and detail and thus ends up fine, but with anime he was talking about potentially introducing some sort of rc-lookahead-min or whatever, which never ended up being done anyway.

Then again, mbtree's internal workings might have changed since then, so in that case it would be better to increase it.

[Mister Hatt]

I would normally agree there but because Reborn has so many dark scenes, it makes sense to raise it. Filtering can work too but the end result should be that blocky motion in flat dark zones needs to be smoothed out. IMO anyway.