Too much black compression

[Ansuer]

Sorry if this has been discussed elsewhere, I've searched.

I've got a few HD movies that I've converted into XviD and x264. The ones with space scenes especially, look horrible when there's a lot of a single color. I can decrease the compression but then the file is huge and it's not worth the size just for better black ranges. I know that those two codecs favor dark colors. However in this case it really looks bad. I was able to use chroma optimization with XviD to get away from this on DVDs, but on HD movies it doesn't seem to help as much.

So, my question is, does anyone know how tell x264 to use higher compression on the multi-color regions, yet use lower compression on the single colors regions, like black?

[edDV]

Luminance range should be independent of bit rate compression.

Can you post arepresentative original and post compression frame?

[poisondeathray]

If you are using newer x264 builds, they tend to have problems with dark scenes and fades at lower bitrates, but other scenes like action sequences are higher quality; it's a tradeoff - this is largely the effect of mbtree

You can either increase qcomp (which reduces the strength of mb-tree) , or disable mb-tree for the old behaviour

Another option is to use zones and/or qpfile & manual override if you don't think it's doing the job correctly - for example you can specify frametype, quantizer, or a %increase for sections

If you can't get it working, please post a sample

[creamyhorror]

I suggest you post some screenshots. What revisions of x264 were these movies encoded with? You should also post the MediaInfo output for a movie or two.