Agh! This has always been quite an annoyance to me. It seems that even when using the same script, there seems to be a great deal of variance between the quality of different movies. I know I sound like a n00b here, but just hear me out...

For example, I encoded The Ninth Gate with the default MovieStacker 528x480 settings. The movie turned out excellent, very sharp and finely detailed. But then, when I encode The Eye with the same settings, the movie comes out with horrible color and muddled detail. What's up with that? And to anyone who's seen both of the two movies, they both have about the same amount of light and dark - in fact, The Ninth Gate I believe has MORE bright scenes. Agh. Also, these are both from DivX files, as I forgot to mention. The quality of both seems to be about the same, and when I preview the scripts for both, they look excellent. It's only after I encode that The Eye looks like shite. Ah, one more thing - I believe that The Ninth Gate also used an even lower CQ value than The Eye did - The Eye maxed out @ 90 because it's a somewhat shorter movie and I was making it two discs just for comparison to The Ninth Gate.

Any help that can be given would be appreciated.

Thanks

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As long as there is evil in my trash can, I will never step on a rusty doorknob!

You said all the words you need to understand :"Divx" and "seems to be".

Nothing to say more. Execpt perharps : go BUY the DVD.

thanks GOD,
i have only one divx!

Me too
And I'm gonna buy this one when it hits our market..

crap in -> crap out

try dropping the res. to 352x240, add some sharpening and maybe some noise with BlockBuster. Much detail is lost in the divx encoding to start with. Try to stay with a DVD Source

Lmfao! I understand that DivX is shitty input quality, I'm more interested in "varying levels of shit". The fact that it's shitty input doesn't change the fact that one shitty one looks worse than another when encoded, even though they both look about on par with one another when played just from the AVS in vdub. And I understand that it depends on the complexity, but they're quite similar, in fact The Ninth Gate is longer and MORE complex.

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As long as there is evil in my trash can, I will never step on a rusty doorknob!

Ok, so I repeat "seems to be" isn't "are".

The basics of MPEG4 compression is to focus on the part where the human eye is very sensitive, and to remove more or less all the others.

So your two sources should "seem the same quality" for your eyes, but one of the two had a lot of "invisible" things that where filtered by the MPEG4 encoder, where the other one only have a little.

When you encode these two material into MPEG2, these little things that were invisible to your eyes, lead to a less sharpen picture that with the other, less filtered, source.

Thank you, Dialhot.

And btw, rendalunit, I'd originally tried sharpening it, and didn't pay much attention to the results - tried it again, and it's quite decent looking now, thanks.

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As long as there is evil in my trash can, I will never step on a rusty doorknob!

@EvilFactor, I forgot to mention that using Lanczos resizer will help a lot in the sharpening department. Also try to keep the CQ as high as possible (of course

hey EvilFactor
now you will understand why i "thanks GOD" to have only one divx!

divx is not too bad....
turning divx to mpeg1 or 2 need hard work to got good quality!
this is my reason of thankfulness...(exist this word?...thankfulness?)