Mosquitoes, blurriness & macroblocks in dark scenes?
 

I've been doing some recording off of TV with pretty good results except for darker scenes. I'm not talking about black scenes with high contrast (i.e. like the samples Kwag posted) but scenes where they are dimly lit with few contrasting colours.

I find that the quality in bright scenes or scenes with good contrast look perfect but the quality drops dramatically on the others. An example is in U-571, all the water scenes are blurry and have macro blocks. The "barrels" are poorly lit so they look horrible but the brightly lit bubbles look great. Nearly all scenes inside the subs or above the water look great. Another example (the project I'm working on now) is the animated "Atlantis". Unfortunately, much of the movie occurs in dimly lit caves.

I've tried nearly every old and new template, old and new filters combinations but I can't get a good result in anything under 100CQ. The movie (without commercials) is only 83 minutes and it still won't fit onto a CD! (Yes, I converted it to wide screen and I've blacked out overscan.)

There has got to be a trick that I'm aware of.

Help...

What about using BlockBuster noise for that movie :idea:

Suggested settings for blockbuster?

(Blockbuster seemed to fall out of favour in the latest scripts. Why?)

Try: BlockBuster(method="noise", detail_min=1, detail_max=10, variance=1.0, seed=0)Depends on the resolution and on the source material. It shouldn't be needed above 480x resolutions, but there might be exceptions 8)

-kwag

Thanks! I'll give it a try tonight.