avoiding artifacts

[Nebbo]

hey
is it in anyway possible to avoid compression artifacts when compressing text on a black background?

[jbone]

Use a high enough bitrate, proper keyframing, a proper source, etc...

[Nebbo]

it doesnt matter what data rate i put in
looks great in huffyuv but as soon as its compressed with a lossy
codec there's a lot of greyish flickering pixels around the text

[trythil]

...or don't use DivX.

[jbone]

Is you source a solid black image with solid-colored text on it, or are you recompressing from a previously-compressed black video image containing text? IF you're doing the latter, then odds are that the artifacting is already in the source, so you won't be able to recompress it without artifacting unless you use one or two specialized plug-ins for VirtualDub or such.

[Nebbo]

the source if directly from a psx game compressed with huffyuv
it's as clean as it gets

[jbone]

Files on PSX discs are compressed. Encoding it into Huffyuv simply prevents it from losing any further data; however, you are still reencoding from a lossy source, and thus you will need to take additional measures to prevent further artifacting.

[Nebbo]

yeah, ok
so what kind of measures do you suggest?

[Zarxrax]

Use a temporal or spatial smoothing filter in virtualdub.

[The Wired Knight]

Also some programs will allow you these filters on their own. virtualdub has a simple filter interface though so it should work but so do all pinnacle systems and I believe Premiere does as well.