Excessive Banding and Noise After Compressing

[Scintilla]

Though it will hurt your compressibility, you might want to look into the Blockbuster plugin for help with losing the details in the floor. It's the only thing I can think of that's specifically meant to help with blocking up in dark areas (due to low detail).

[Melichan923]

Though it will hurt your compressibility, you might want to look into the Blockbuster plugin for help with losing the details in the floor. It's the only thing I can think of that's specifically meant to help with blocking up in dark areas (due to low detail).

Oh, thank you. I'd never heard of that filter. I just tried it out with help from this guide here and not much luck though.

Original Huffy:


Converted to XviD with BlockBuster applied:

^Loads of blocking on wall and floor, and noise on blankets
I tried out these separately:

Code: Select all

Blockbuster(method="noise",variance=0.3,seed=1)
BlockBuster(method="sharpen", detail_min=20, detail_max=90) 

MP4:


I'm actually at a point where I am giving WMV a shot. Saving it from Vegas now. I tried using the deblocking settings in Zarx264gui with a clip and it didn't noticeably help the problems. At least it's not as bad as the XviD. I suppose the problems aren't as noticeable in pictures that are not moving, so I'm considering making a clip to put up as an example.

I usually like to put up an XviD for the people who can't play MP4 but sadly, it looks like I'm going to have to skip the XviD for this video.

[Melichan923]

Sorry to bump the thread after a few days, but I just wanted to say that I finally got it looking pretty good after trying for the last few days.

I basically took everything that Qyot recommended and tweaked things a bit here and there through various tests. The best results I got for the XviD regarding both quality and size were using the settings 1 for max consecutive BVOPs, 1.00 for quantizer ratio, 50 for I-frame interval, and using 2's for the quantization tab. I also had to do the second pass and use 4000kbps target bitrate like mentioned above and that helped out a lot. The target bitrate during the second pass was really the key to making it look better. I had to turn on the B-frames because the size was just too big, but it didn't hurt the quality too much using the setting of 1. With all the new settings, it took up about 8MB-10MB extra and the XviD totals to exactly 100MB, but for 10MB the quality boost is really worth it. There is still some banding and it's not perfect, but it seems to look better than before.

For the MP4, I used the preset of insane, mode was constant quality, audio bitrate was 320 and the quantizer was set all the way down to 15. I know 15 is a little excessive but 17 to 15 actually really made a noticeable difference (at least to someone who's been looking at the footage for months while editing). The final file size ended up being around 92MB compared to the first MP4 attempts of 75MB and 82MB, but the for such a quality boost, it's worth it.

I feel much better about the results and I don't think both copies could look any better under 100MB, so I can now upload. Thanks for everyone's help!