Scripting Help (mostly for dark scenes)

[Kazemon15]

Alright, I set the VAQ to 0.8 and used the addgrainc(6.0) filter and got this for the MP4:



A little better, but it still has some banding issues.

[Mister Hatt]

Raise qcomp to 0.8, lower aq-strength to 0.7, and use CRF mode encoding. Potentially LOWER the addgrainc setting a bit too. There is some initial blocking in your video but the grain you're adding is making x264's quantiser cry a bit. By tuning the adaptive quantiser settings and lowering the frame complexity, you can stop x264 from shitting all over it. Basically your cleanup for the initial blocking is causing the banding.

[mirkosp]

Raise qcomp to 0.8

That's getting pretty high. Might as well use constant quantizer. Which is dumb.
Though raising it to 0.7 should still help over the default 0.6.
@Kazemon: go to the command line tab and add:

Code: Select all

--qcomp 0.7

and use CRF mode encoding

He already is, one pass quality based in zarxgui is crf.

[Kazemon15]

Sorry, the addgrainc was a typo, switch the 6 and the 0, it's actually 0.6. I couldn't change it due to no edit button and when I was typing this, I didn't check over it until after I posted.

Okay, I'll try that. And I'm a girl. Thanks for the help. I'll try it and respond back to see how it worked.

[Kazemon15]

Alrighty, it's getting there, slowly but surely. =3



I'm wondering if it could be my other settings? I'll put everything down.

I have in the script:

Code: Select all

avisource("filename.avi")
addgrainc(0.6)

My settings are:

Container: MP4
Mode: Constant Quality
Present: Very Slow
Quantizer: 20
Tune: Animation
Audio: AAC (Bitrate)
Bitrate: 128
VAQ: 0.8
Custom x264 Command: -qcomp 0.7

and that's everything in regards to my settings.

[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.