What's up with x264 zones failing so bad?

[Selur]

If I'm using the latest x264 why does it matter what GUI I use? I use Megui...

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I can confirm it works now through the GUI.

The megui version I had was about a year old, so something got fixed.

-> That is why it is important to post details like which versions of which tools were used.

[Mephesto]

I'm back.

Excellent!

For CRF to work in a zone when using 2 pass encoding you'd assume the encoder would need to run the usual 1st pass, decide how much bitrate the zone was going to require, subtract that from the total specified bitrate, then use what's left for the remainder of the video. I wonder if it'd need to encode the zone using CRF, or whether it can work it out just using a normal first pass. Or maybe 2 pass and CRF in zones just won't play nice together.....

I did run the usual first pass with the crf=40 in the zone and then the second pass. As I said this works on small tests but not when I encode the entire film. Weird.

I'm glad weight at least worked but it's a little awkward to work with. The rain scene is 4 MB/s when doing the usual 2pass with no zones and it's 1.3 MB/s when only that scene is encoded with crf32 so I set the weight to 33% to match what I would expect when using Q in a zone. The result was 1 MB/s or 25% weight so the quality is now noticeably lower than what I intended.

For the credits I used the same routine to find out what weight I'd be looking for and I ended up with 13% but this time it slightly overfed it with bits. Not that it matters, better to be little oversized than starved.

Selur, according to the log and later the encode itself, the zones were definitely being utilized but not properly. Using x264 without a GUI later confirmed Megui had nothing to do with it. I wanted to avoid irrelevant speculation because I know many people have interoperability problems with Megui but I knew this wasn't the case so I didn't wanna mess around with the settings. Megui luckily is working fine and I wanna keep it that way. Sometimes I've had problems with it that took over a year to figure out.