ZarxGuI .MP4 Looks horrible after I rendered it

[guardiansoulblade]

I just finished rendering my newest AMV and was getting ready to put it up on the .ORG and decided to make it an .mp4 using ZarxGUI and something must be messed up because it came out horribly pixelated and I rendered it from a Huffyuv that rendered perfectly fine.

[Emotive]

And what should we know without looking at your settings?

[guardiansoulblade]

I had it set on Constant Quality
I had the Quantizer at 51 and I had it set on Normal with the Normalize option checked.

[Emotive]

I'm not too much of an expert on this but it's fairly simple, something along the lines of the thingy below does the trick for me A-Ok.



Also make sure you don't have many other programs running while rendering (that also depends on your processor/RAM of course, some putes can handle a lot but it's nice to be safe).

Also, ignore the "directshow" part of the screenshot, use avisource. Rush mistake.

[guardiansoulblade]

I'm not too much of an expert on this but it's fairly simple, something along the lines of the thingy below does the trick for me A-Ok.

Quoted Image converted to link:
http://i45.tinypic.com/2drqma.jpg

Also make sure you don't have many other programs running while rendering (that also depends on your processor/RAM of course, some putes can handle a lot but it's nice to be safe).

Also, ignore the "directshow" part of the screenshot, use avisource. Rush mistake.

I will input these settings right away! Thanks.

[mirkosp]

I had it set on Constant Quality
I had the Quantizer at 51 and I had it set on Normal with the Normalize option checked.

That's awfully high!
The higher the quantizer, the more it compresses. With SD content (that is, anything 576p or lower) you should have it around 18. With 720p, around 20, with 1080p around 22. Generally speaking you can bring it as high as 26 if necessary, but if you want good quality, 23 is pretty much as high as you'll want to go. If you need high quality, you could go as low as 16, though unnecessary most of the time. Crf 10 is REALLY as low as you'd ever need to go if your source is terribly impossible to compress, and that would come off as an insanely huge file for the gained quality, really. Doing 0 would be doing lossless, by the way, and I'd say that anything between 0 and 10 wouldn't likely make any difference to the eye in quality terms, or maybe only on the gradients. Filesize would still skyrocket for basically nothing tho, as when it comes to just a bunch of banding, using ffdshow's deband over playback is a MUCH better solution.

[Zarxrax]

I had it set on Constant Quality
I had the Quantizer at 51 and I had it set on Normal with the Normalize option checked.

Seriously?

[Qyot27]

If you need high quality, you could go as low as 16, though unnecessary most of the time. Crf 10 is REALLY as low as you'd ever need to go if your source is terribly impossible to compress, and that would come off as an insanely huge file for the gained quality, really.

Generally speaking, what with the addition of weightp and interworking mbtree and b-pyramid, if you were used to CRF 18 producing ~10MB per minute encodes, you'll be shooting for around CRF 14 now to get around the same filesize. But you might be a tad hard-pressed to see the quality difference between 14 and 16 unless things went really wonky. On largely-flat, non effects-whoring stuff, all those features can literally cut the bitrate in half at CRF 18 from what it was around this time last year.

Just another reason I've always tend to use settings in the Insane or Placebo category, where the benefit is often even greater.