I've been playing with various smoothing filters and have come up with a nice combination for adding some serious numbers to the CQ level of a given movie.

Of all the combinations I've tried so far, what gives me the best compression increase is:

I got my 2-disc version of Death To Smoochy up from about 73 to 85 with these two filters .

The script's output is quite smooth when viewed from WMP, and likely wouldn't be suitable for MPEG-4 encoding (or even high-bitrate MPEG-1), but for low-bitrate MPEG-1 it seems that the encoding process masks the lack of details fairly effectively. If you find this too much smoothing, try preset="movieHQ" for Convolution3D instead.

These two filters are very slow, though .

Anyway, that's what I've been playing with this evening. Make sure you get v4 of Dust since it fixes one of the bugs I mentioned earlier...

Test and post .

Forgot to mention, I also used

to pull down the contrast and saturation a little. It is a very bright and highly coloured movie, and I think that was messing with the encoder somewhat.

Oh, and I also put a

before the GripFit to enlarge the top and bottom borders a little.

Hehe, this just never ends
I can see it clearly in the (not too distant) future: The KVCD 300 minute (U)ltraLBR
-kwag

May it ever be so .

Hey, I've got Death To Smoochy (2-disc, 192kbps audio) up from 73 to 96 and counting. I'm still a meg or so from the target .

Maxed out at CQ 100 -- about 300kB below target size. I'm now going to watch the sample on the TV... Back in a bit .

.................................................. .................................................. ............................................. .................................................. ........................ .................................................. ........... .................................................. ....... WAITING

Looks very nice -- perhaps a little softer than usual, but not a lot. I'm thinking of trying the DVD trick (i.e. heavy smoothing followed by an edge-enhancement) next...

Of course the real test is an HDTV. Want a sample?

What happens if you remove the C3D line . I just did a sample and it looks really great in the PC, but I did notice some very slight "screening" effect on the film. You bet

-kwag

Still get nice compression benefits from Tweak and FaeryDust, but not as much as with C3D movieLQ. CQ would maybe drop from 100 to 95 or so (that's just a wild guess).

You mean when you watch it on the TV? Try using preset="movieHQ". Bear in mind that Death To Smoochy is very difficult source material, and is quite noisy.

Uploading now. I'll edit when it's finished .

Edit: Here it is, 6.5mB.

Just watching on the monitor.
I did use preset="movieHQ" on "Count of Monte Cristo" movie which is very dark with smoke or dust ( haven't seen the movie yet, just the sample )

-kwag

It's not great -- nowhere near as much swashbuckling as there should be .

Check the file name

It's late . Fixed.

There should be a "Hall of fame" sample gallery, because that definitively looks like a DVD
I'm going to re-encode "Count of Monte Cristo" again, which I had done at 352x480. I think that it can go on 528x480 with these filters
Just AMAZING

-kwag

What was your .avs script for that SansGrip

Ah, remember that's for two discs. If I could get it looking like that for one disc I'd be very happy . I'm playing with one-disc settings now. I'll post a sample, but probably not until the morning. I'm almost asleep .

Ok, so I lied. Here's the same 30 seconds from the one-disc version (112kbps audio). It's nowhere near as good as the two-disc (particularly anything very saturated in colour) but it's a heck of a lot better than without the extra compression from the preprocessing.

It's starting to look like I might get it on one disc at 528x480 after all .

There's no Blockbuster or Fluxsmoot there right

That looks perfectly good for one CD

-kwag