- In my opinion, a total size of about 25GB is sufficient for a 1080p encode at a very good quality (just compare it to encodes of other movies available on various file sharing sites), if the encoding settings were to be somewhat enhanced compared to your V1.0. As you’re aiming for a final file size, 2pass encoding fits the purpose much better than CRF. Additionally, some other settings might need adjustments. Overall, the settings suggested at the official x264 website (see link below) are quite a good starting point. The one thing I would change though is --tune grain instead of --tune film for obvious reasons. Any other possible, manual change of the encoding settings is just fine-tuning in my point of view. With these settings, the encoding quality will be quite a bit better and fine details as well as grain will be be preserved much better! BTW, I helped Harmy with his encodes of the Despecialized Edition😃
Hi Jan, sorry to say you’re wrong on this one. The best h264 commercially available encoders are about 40% more efficient than x264. And I’m not talking about Mainconcept which is the encoder everyone compares x264 to, I’m talking about Sirius Pixels which is much better than x264, hence the reason that top authoring houses prefer it. So if you have a Bluray that’s already encoded using the Sirius Pixels encoder then no matter what you do, the x264 encode will be significantly lower quality at the same size (beyond just the generational loss). A single-layer movie encoded using the Sirius Pixels encoder can match the quality of a double-layer movie encoded using Mainconcept or x264. Also, the 2pass option does not produce better quality at the same size as CRF.
Additionally, movies are made more compressible before encoding as well. Such as removing film grain - especially in the effects shots.
With this release we have neither option - the -1 team don’t have access to the best encoders (and if they do they don’t want us to know), and they want to release the film as it is, and not cleaned up to a point that makes it much more compressible. So in my view it’s not the x264 settings that are an issue, rather it’s the CRF value itself. In this case, CRF = 19, which is just not quite good enough, and leads to visible compression artefacts, at least in some parts of the movie. If it were up to me, which it isn’t as I’m not a part of their team, I’d suggest a CRF value of 16. This might result in a 34-50GB file size, but I’d personally rather see that.
Yes it is much larger, but we have a v1.0 now so I say go all out for v1.5 and so I say: let the material truly shine!
Also: many thanks to the Team -1 - what a terrific effort with this release!!
V
While we don’t have access to Sirius Pixels, or whatever the most expensive solution currently is, isn’t it fair to say that that, regardless of who has licensed the x264 codec and built a shiny wrapper around it with some custom presets designed for maximum quality, the codec at the heart of the application is probably exactly the same as the free version it was built on? All we have to do is find out what those settings are and feed them into the free encoder. Perhaps I’m wrong, the codec is after all open source so the companies that license it may have made some code changes, but I still believe that we can tweak the settings of the free version and improve the quality at the same file size.
In any case, unless somebody wants to buy us a $100,000 license for the Sirius Pixels encoder, it’s a moot point. Tweaking the settings is all we can do…
In other news, I’d like to add some motion menus to the bluray. You may have noticed that there is one motion menu background in the extras folder, but personally I think that one is more suitable for a Grindhouse version - this release is after all supposed to be the “clean” version. If anyone out there would like to come up with some alternative motion menu backgrounds we’d love to see them.