Anamorphic Settings and Deblocking/Psychovisual Help

[3282868]

Anamorphic
Strict, Loose or Custom (untouched w/ no cropping)? I've been using Anamorphic = Loose and Modulus = 16. I've read this allows the m4v to be properly displayed on various sized screens. Yet the Source and Output sizes differ. Now I've read using "Custom" and manually entering the height/width to "Source" is best (ex Source=720x480, Output=720x480). Using Loose, a 720x480 source would encode to 853x480 with cropping.Using aTV 2 (50" Pioneer Elite Kuru), sometimes watch movies on my Mac Pro w/ dual 24" LED LCD's (very rare if I watch on my iPad, I'll simply make a compatible copy).

Grain and Sharpness:
Deblocking and Psychovisual settings (sharpness strength/grain). Made various m4v's of the same DVD using various settings:

Deblocking: -1,-1, 1,1, or 0,0 (default) w/ various psy-rd and trellis settings

Differences are extremely subtle, but apparent (esp in dark/white). My rips are SD DVDs (no animations) and a few BD's. I'm guessing leaving deblocking at default and tuning Psychovisual may be best (read Psy-rd at max and Psy Trellis around 0.20 is recommended)?

Any suggestions would be hugely welcomed. This is the last encoding tweak I need to settle. Thanks!

 

[NightStorm]

Anamorphic
Strict, Loose or Custom (untouched w/ no cropping)? I've been using Anamorphic = Loose and Modulus = 16. I've read this allows the m4v to be properly displayed on various sized screens. Yet the Source and Output sizes differ. Now I've read using "Custom" and manually entering the height/width to "Source" is best (ex Source=720x480, Output=720x480). Using Loose, a 720x480 source would encode to 853x480 with cropping.Using aTV 2 (50" Pioneer Elite Kuru), sometimes watch movies on my Mac Pro w/ dual 24" LED LCD's (very rare if I watch on my iPad, I'll simply make a compatible copy).

Grain and Sharpness:
Deblocking and Psychovisual settings (sharpness strength/grain). Made various m4v's of the same DVD using various settings:

Deblocking: -1,-1, 1,1, or 0,0 (default) w/ various psy-rd and trellis settings

Differences are extremely subtle, but apparent (esp in dark/white). My rips are SD DVDs (no animations) and a few BD's. I'm guessing leaving deblocking at default and tuning Psychovisual may be best (read Psy-rd at max and Psy Trellis around 0.20 is recommended)?

Any suggestions would be hugely welcomed. This is the last encoding tweak I need to settle. Thanks!

For DVDs, I use anamorphic strict. For HDDVD/BR, I use anamorphic custom and set the dimensions to 1280x720 (mod 2). While the latter does not have any visual impact on my target platform (AppleTV v2), they do look better on my iMac and may be somewhat "future proof" depending on what Apple does in future AppleTV updates.

I'm going to keep an eye on this thread as the deblock and psychovisual settings are really the part of HB that I haven't really played around with much. I have done testing, and have found I like to use deblock=-1,-1 for film. Unfortunately I've been away from the HB IRC channel for awhile now as I'm sure the devs/users there have discussed this at length. Perhaps I'll see what I can find in the logs.

EDIT: Rodeo has posted a good guide on translating the x264 tune settings into Handbrake. https://forum.handbrake.fr/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=19426&p=89408&hilit=psychovisual#p89408

 

[3282868]

For DVDs, I use anamorphic strict. For HDDVD/BR, I use anamorphic custom and set the dimensions to 1280x720 (mod 2). While the latter does not have any visual impact on my target platform (AppleTV v2), they do look better on my iMac and may be somewhat "future proof" depending on what Apple does in future AppleTV updates.

I'm going to keep an eye on this thread as the deblock and psychovisual settings are really the part of HB that I haven't really played around with much. I have done testing, and have found I like to use deblock=-1,-1 for film. Unfortunately I've been away from the HB IRC channel for awhile now as I'm sure the devs/users there have discussed this at length. Perhaps I'll see what I can find in the logs.

EDIT: Rodeo has posted a good guide on translating the x264 tune settings into Handbrake. https://forum.handbrake.fr/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=19426&p=89408&hilit=psychovisual#p89408

Thanks for the reply From what I've learned/read Deblocking and Psychovisual settings apply to sharpness/grain. They almost over-lap one another making it difficult to tweak. I know Deblocking set at Strength -1 w/ -1 means less deblocking (similar to the Photoshop "Blur" filter), good for grainy images. Psychovisual RD supposedly "heightens" visual aspects such as blacks and finer details, and Trellis, well, I'm working on that lol.

I don't know if all of this is dependent on the quality of the DVD, or if it's better for SD than BD or if it's not necessary or subjective. Encoding lossy sources man, I'm telling ya, I'd rather pry my fingernails off lol. I'll give Deblocking -1,-1 a try, I'm setting my Psy-rd to 1.5 and Psy-trellis to 0.20 based on what I've been told. Viewing encodes on my LED LCD's then on my 50" display makes it even more difficult as my LED LCD's seem to show more grain and such.

 

[slothrob]

Viewing encodes on my LED LCD's then on my 50" display makes it even more difficult as my LED LCD's seem to show more grain and such.

Some of these settings will just have a smoothing/smearing effect on the original video. It will look cleaner in the wide open spaces, but you may be trading smoothness for detail and reproduction of the original film quality.

The parallel to this is the Sharpness setting on your TV. Beware of that artificial cartoon-like visual quality that turning it way down can create. Low settings can result in weak edges and loss of depth and high settings can cause a halo effect and weird cutout-like quality.

On the other hand, reducing the Sharpness setting on your TV judiciously can hide subtle blocking and patchiness on digitally encoded TV broadcasts, DVDs, and transcoded video. The native or adjusted sharpness of the individual displays may be why you are seeing differences between the same video on different TVs, and could possibly be adjusted away.

 

[NightStorm]

Encoded the latest Chronicles of Narnia Bluray a few days ago using the x264 string below (basically the "slow" x264 preset and "film" x264 tune) and was pretty happy with the results. The file was slightly larger than using my usual settings (a slightly-tweaked version of the High-Profile preset in HB), 3.9GB vs. 4.23GB, but the picture was noticeably better.

b-adapt=2:rc-lookahead=50:ref=5:direct=auto:me=umh:subq=8:deblock=-1,-1sy-rd=1.0,0.15