Hey there,

I have about 100 hours of grainy 1080p source files, that were originally shot with an analog camera which I want to transcode with ffmpeg to HEVC for storage purposes.
When doing so, there are a lot of artifacts in gradient surfaces, especially in high motion scenes. Also I don't like all the grain that is in there. (I know, there are people that like analoge grain, but I don't.)
So I tried transcoding with hqdn3d at rather conservative settings, like 3:3:2:2 or 4:4:3:3. In both cases, the grain is gone and sharpness is still allright for my taste. But of course the result includes a lot of banding in the gradient surfaces, which i really dont like.

I thought maybe with all these relatively new 10 bit options (and all my hardware being able to play it) floating around maybe there is a way to introduce some 10 or even 12 bit dithering at some point in order to get nicer looing gradients and still filter out the annoying grain, while converting the files to the very efficient HEVC codec?

I'm not to experienced with video transcoding so I dont really know where to start and in which order to apply filters. Can you guys give me a hint?