Encoding cast away quality is awful, how to improve

Hi, I've been trying to backup the DVD cast away and I cannot get satisfactory results. Particularly in the end, when Tom Hanks goes back to his former wife, the walls in the house exhibit macroblocks and artefacts like it was a VCD. I wasted a DVD-R on this since I didn't check these scenes on the "test DVD+RW". After checking, same problems occur. I used the 10% tweaked 1 pass VBR from Bach (selectrangeevery) to calculate the good Q factor, which always gives great results, but here it is awful. Parameters I finally used in CCE so the movie would fit on one reauthored CD were : 1pass VBR, QFactor=26, Image quality =10, min bitrate 300, max bitrate 9100. I know increasing Image quality value would help improving results on flat surfaces (lie these damn walls), but I cannot believe there are so many artefacts and I don't want to ruin detailed scenes encoding with a too high value for image quality. Is this movie known to be hard to encode ? Should I give a shot at 2 (or more) passes with fine tuning (you know, these grey and green areas, Markrb if you read this, you see I was probably wrong in one previous answer to one of your posts, saying you wouldn't notice the difference). Can anybody who succeeded in getting great quality with this movie (check the scenes I mentioned before) help me on encoding parameters ? My resulting m2v file must not be bigger than 3.6 GB to fit. Thanks in advance for you help Waldok:cool:

Sorry I cant be of more help but it always aids to experiment experiment. Try that second pass, try the standard Q's like 60 and 40 and just for the hell of it try an increased image quality.

Damn, I'm so stupid.. 

You're having to go awfully low on the movie to fit everything. You've also not mentioned re-encoding your extras. They must be fairly large to force you to such a low bitrate on the movie. I suggest re-encoding the extras first and then moving on to the movie. The process I personally follow is all laid out in Das UberGuide at my site. I would do the same with this particular title.

You're exactly right. In fact, now that I look at what I said again, I cannot for the life of me remember what the hell I was thinking at the time. LOL!! :D Far be it from me not to admit when I had my head straight up my arse on something. hehe ;) I really don't know why I said what I did. Sorry.

yet.. 

Well, I never really go on one pass VBR only so I don't know precisely what to tell you. I have a hard time accepting it as a method because there just isn't enough information to go on IMO. Now if you were doing multipass VBR, I would suggest the following (some of which you might try anyway)... 1) Make sure your Intra DC precision is set to "auto" 2) Change your Image Quality slider so that it's set to about 20. 3) In the "Advanced" section (multipass only), set the "bias" to around 20-25. You might even try as high as 40 if the ABR was as high as around 3500-4000 or so. Those are the best suggestions I can give you for affecting the contouring you're seeing in the flat areas.

Some bitrate information 

I just checked bitrates. The original "problematic" scenes are 5.8 MBits/s, and it turns out the reencoded ones are 2.5 Mb/s :eek: I don't really understand this, since I asked for a min 0 to max 9100 bitrate, Q = 26. So the only thing I can think of is increasing Image quality value since it seems the encoder does not allocate enough bits to these "flat" scenes. I'll have to rip the difficult chapter separately and see what combination of bitrate and Image quality level I must use to get acceptable picture. I think continuing this thread would be more appropriate to the CCE forum now. Well, I'm in for some more in depth parameters.... Waldok:cool:

Re: Damn, I'm so stupid..