I ripped all my footage, cleaned it up in Avisynth, and my footage looks great. I sent it to a few conventions and gave them either lossless copies or converted to MPEG-2 and even though they were large files, they looked good.
But when I compress my video to x264 MP4 and XviD AVI I see excessive banding and noise and discolorations in especially the dark places. I spent a long time cleaning it up before editing and have even tried gradfun2db() and various denoisers such as deen before I compress to XviD/x264 so I'm not sure what's causing it. Is it the way XviD and mp4 compresses footage?
Here are some example pictures. But please beware of SERIES SPOILERS for the first season of Clannad and Kanon 2006 which provide the best examples for darker areas:
Spoiler :
Maybe those scenes just pop out to me because I've looked at the HuffYUV version for so long. Some scenes are worse than others and some scenes even look practically as good as the original, but I'd love to make the darker scenes above look much better if I can. I am using VDub to convert to XviD: BVOPs set to 1, Quantizer ratio set to 1.00 to boost quality slightly, and on the quantization tab I alternate 1 and 31. For x264 I am using Zarx264GUI latest version: The preset is set to insane, the Quantizer is set all the way down to 16, and the mode is constant quality. I've tried it compressing for the ORG with and without gradfun2db and gradfun2dbmod() as well as with various denoisers. The best results I got were when I had gradfun2b() and that only. the x264 compresses better and looks a little better than the XviD, but not quite as good as I want it to be.
Anything I can try to do next, like any settings I can mess with or new filters I can try? Thanks.
























