encoding some anime

[Tylerr]

Can anyone give some tips to make my settings better?

here are samples of my encode and the original

http://www.mediafire.com/download/g3r7w4ksp6wbyf5/FmabOriginal.mkv
http://www.mediafire.com/download/77fr6pgovfp69c6/FmabEncode.mkv

settings i encoded with

Encoding settings           : cabac=1 / ref=6 / deblock=1:1:1 / analyse=0x3:0x133 / me=umh / subme=10 / psy=1 / psy_rd=0.40:0.00 / mixed_ref=1 / me_range=24 / chroma_me=1 / trellis=2 / 8x8dct=1 / cqm=0 / deadzone=21,11 / fast_pskip=0 / chroma_qp_offset=-2 / threads=6 / lookahead_threads=1 / sliced_threads=0 / nr=0 / decimate=1 / interlaced=0 / bluray_compat=0 / constrained_intra=0 / bframes=5 / b_pyramid=2 / b_adapt=2 / b_bias=0 / direct=3 / weightb=1 / open_gop=0 / weightp=2 / keyint=250 / keyint_min=23 / scenecut=40 / intra_refresh=0 / rc_lookahead=60 / rc=crf / mbtree=1 / crf=17.0 / qcomp=0.60 / qpmin=0 / qpmax=81 / qpstep=4 / ip_ratio=1.40 / aq=1:0.60

Also encoding to 10 bit, original is 8 bit.

[smrpix]

Your "original" looks better than your encode. What are you trying to accomplish? Why re-encode at all?

[Tylerr]

I'm re-encoding it to a smaller file size... of course the original looks better....

I just want opinions from people who have experience with x264 on what i can do to improve the settings i used.

[newpball]

I'm re-encoding it to a smaller file size... of course the original looks better....

I suppose I should not bother to ask but why not just keep the original?

[Tylerr]

To save space and make room for more series.

some episodes are over 1gb, imo that's too much and i'd rather cut that down.

But that's off topic

[newpball]

some episodes are over 1gb, imo that's too much and i'd rather cut that down.

Over 1GB you say?
Heavens no!

On a 3TB drive this colossally spaced movie already costs a whopping $0.04 let alone if it is put on a 128GB flash drive then that is already over $0.33!

No, you are totally right to spend a couple of hours to get that cost down and reduce the quality, the money obviously does not grow on trees.

[WazaKrash]

@Tylerr, Maybe with Free Make Video converter. I think when your convert your video, you can change the file size.

If it's 1go you can convert it in 780 mo if you want or 800 mo (sorry i'm not really an expert in file size ^^")

#edit : I also had that kind of trouble with file size and I also tell me the same question, it's nice to see that i'm not alone with this problem x)

[hello_hello]

I'll confess if there's a whole lot of "original looks better" to be had when it comes to your samples, I'm not seeing it.

I'd give serious consideration to resizing. Everyone has their own opinion there but the x264 animation tuning, CRF18, 10 bit encoder and slow x264 speed preset resulted in a bitrate of 759kbps at 720p. I think that's similar to the settings used for the re-encoded sample at 1080p and it's bitrate is around 1330kbps (video only).

I'm no exert in animation but I'm not sure if there's any encoder setting tweaking cleverness to be had. A second 720p encode using the same settings while increasing the CRF value to 18 gave me in a 650kbps average bitrate. If I'm not seeing any resulting horribleness I'd be happy for someone to point it out to me.

I used Spline36Resize to downscale. How much "sharpeness" you may loose compared to the original while they're both running fullscreen might depend on how sharp the up-scaling is. There doesn't seem to be anything close to 1080p worth of picture detail in the source. Running the 720p version fullscreen on my TV with MPC-HC doing the upscaling with a soft resizer I'm still only seeing a very tiny loss of "sharpness".

Anyway, if it was me and the object of the exercise was maximum quality at minimum bitrate, I'd resize first, then nudge the CRF value up a bit if need be.

[Tylerr]

There's a lot of quality loss during the high motion scene when its panning up the side of the building (seconds 7-10)

I'm just looking for what x264 settings to tweak so i can reduce that.

[Acımasız]

I'm just looking for what x264 settings to tweak so i can reduce that.

What do you think to this?

[Tylerr]

mind explaining what you did and why you did it?

[Acımasız]

mind explaining what you did and why you did it?

--crf 19.0 --b-adapt 2 --ref 5 --rc-lookahead 50 --bframes 5 --merange 24 --me umh --direct auto --subme 9 --trellis 2 --psy-rd 0.20:0.20 --no-fast-pskip

You asked if there was a x264 setting you could tweak to reduce the quality loss during the high motion scenes and I remembered reading somewhere (possibly doom9) PSY-Trellis might be useful for anime. The PC I used is slow so I trimmed the clip (first 15 seconds), modified my profile and used 8 bit instead. Here's my second attempt using 10 bit, resized it to 1268x714 (spline36) and used these settings

--crf 17.5 --bframes 6 --b-adapt 2 --ref 6 --rc-lookahead 60 --merange 24 --me umh --direct auto --subme 9 --partitions all --trellis 2 --psy-rd 0.20:0.20 --no-dct-decimate --no-fast-pskip

http://freetexthost.com/e0fh1xzabw

Basically the changes I've made are --aq-strength 1.0 and --psy-rd 0.20:0.20, try tweaking these settings and also try AQ Mode 2 and 3.

[hello_hello]

There's a lot of quality loss during the high motion scene when its panning up the side of the building (seconds 7-10)

I'm just looking for what x264 settings to tweak so i can reduce that.

There's blurring. I guess that'll be the sharp resizing and not the encoding.....

[Tylerr]

There's a lot of quality loss during the high motion scene when its panning up the side of the building (seconds 7-10)

I'm just looking for what x264 settings to tweak so i can reduce that.

There's blurring. I guess that'll be the sharp resizing and not the encoding.....

but i didn't resize

[hello_hello]

There's a lot of quality loss during the high motion scene when its panning up the side of the building (seconds 7-10)

I'm just looking for what x264 settings to tweak so i can reduce that.

There's blurring. I guess that'll be the sharp resizing and not the encoding.....

but i didn't resize

I thought you were talking about my sample.

[hello_hello]

some episodes are over 1gb, imo that's too much and i'd rather cut that down.

Over 1GB you say?
Heavens no!

On a 3TB drive this colossally spaced movie already costs a whopping $0.04 let alone if it is put on a 128GB flash drive then that is already over $0.33!

No, you are totally right to spend a couple of hours to get that cost down and reduce the quality, the money obviously does not grow on trees.

It's like posting in a video conversion forum to ask someone why they're converting video and suggesting they shouldn't bother.
We all have different hobbies.

[Tylerr]

There's a lot of quality loss during the high motion scene when its panning up the side of the building (seconds 7-10)

I'm just looking for what x264 settings to tweak so i can reduce that.

There's blurring. I guess that'll be the sharp resizing and not the encoding.....

but i didn't resize

I thought you were talking about my sample.

I'm was talking about mine.

[newpball]

It's like posting in a video conversion forum to ask someone why they're converting video and suggesting they shouldn't bother.
We all have different hobbies.

There could be good reasons for converting a video, there could also be good reasons for lowering the bitrate of a video.

But I think that compromising quality should be done only when there are no alternatives, not just for the heck of it or because "1 GB is a lot".

Quality videos take space and storage nowadays is dirt cheap.

How anyone could not think that is a reasonable position is beyond me.

[Tylerr]

Well for one this isn't a topic about buying storage, i'm asking for opinions on how to improve my x264 settings.

So whether or not you think storage prices are reasonable these days is irrelevant.

[hello_hello]

There could be good reasons for converting a video, there could also be good reasons for lowering the bitrate of a video.

But I think that compromising quality should be done only when there are no alternatives, not just for the heck of it or because "1 GB is a lot".

Quality videos take space and storage nowadays is dirt cheap.

How anyone could not think that is a reasonable position is beyond me.

I agree.... it's a reasonable position, although some people have totally different viewpoints. I know a few people who place so little importance on quality, once they've watched a video they reduce it quite dramatically to save on storage costs. I'm still not exactly sure what encoder settings they use, but the end result is the video no longer consumes any space on the drive. I did ask someone about the logic behind reducing the quality so dramatically, and he explained reducing it to zero effectively allows the drive to hold an infinite number of files and therefore the drive's capacity becomes limitless.

(I did read somewhere that an older BIOS and Windows XP can't read all of the files on an infinite capacity drive, or can't access it's entire capacity, but I've not reduced the quality of enough video on this drive to test that claim yet)

[Tylerr]

There could be good reasons for converting a video, there could also be good reasons for lowering the bitrate of a video.

But I think that compromising quality should be done only when there are no alternatives, not just for the heck of it or because "1 GB is a lot".

Quality videos take space and storage nowadays is dirt cheap.

How anyone could not think that is a reasonable position is beyond me.

I agree.... it's a reasonable position, although some people have totally different viewpoints. I know a few people who place so little importance on quality, once they've watched a video they reduce it quite dramatically to save on storage costs. I'm still not exactly sure what encoder settings they use, but the end result is the video no longer consumes any space on the drive. I did ask someone about the logic behind reducing the quality so dramatically, and he explained reducing it to zero effectively allows the drive to hold an infinite number of files and therefore the drive's capacity becomes limitless.

That makes no sense at all, the video would just end up as a bunch of unwatchable pixels making keeping it pointless.

[hello_hello]

That makes no sense at all, the video would just end up as a bunch of unwatchable pixels making keeping it pointless.

Maybe my sense of humour is a little off, but that was kind of the point. It was meant to be a joke. "Drive's capacity limitless" didn't give it away?

but the end result is the video no longer consumes any space on the drive.

I'm fairly tired, or maybe my sense of humour is just odd, but the above was suppose to be a humour(ish) way of describing the files being deleted. The opposite end of newpball's "buy more drives and never touch the video" spectrum.

Well it worked in rehearsal, I thought.