x264vfw encoding first frames really low quality, how to fix that?

[Srivas]

Hi there!

I want to render through Vegas with x264vfw and everything is fine, except the fact that first frames of every encoded video (the bitrate and level is quite small, 400 kbps, baseline 3.0) are really low quality. Handbrake doesn't produce such frames, even on low bitrate encoding. Is there some command I have to add to look for more reference frames or what is it?

I could go with Handbrake but I couldn't set it up to get the same quality as through x264vfw. I guess it's my laziness, but as I use Vegas anyway, it would be convenient to do direct encoding from there. The only problem are those washed out first frames.

Any ideas?

[KarMa]

Are you doing CRF encoding?

[LigH.de]

A 1-pass CBR (constant bitrate) encode will take some time to get the bitrate control averaged. This is usually the worst quality mode, only recommendable if you need a low bandwidth stream. In such cases, it is quite important to set up VBV max fillrate and VBV buffer capacity for a convenient quality control.

If you don't need a result for slow streams, don't use 1-pass CBR. Best quality is provided for target quality (CRF) or target size (2-pass VBR).

[Srivas]

Thanks for a quick response. Did a quick testing and CRF seems to be a better option, just no time today to do more testing. Btw, somehow x264vfw in Vegas doesn't allow to do multipass encoding, at least on my system multipass gives an error, "no compatible video codec was found".