Hal 9000 said:
I exported a ProRes master file from FCP7 to import into FCPX for color grading. Then exported a ProRes master from FCPX and fed that to Compressor 4 (current version) for multi-pass, max bitrate encoding to a BluRay-compliant format. (Source material was ripped from BluRay, after all.)
Can you give any examples of compression artifacting you noticed? I can compare and see if they’re in the source, or the ProRes master file.
In the 1080p 30+ GB release, there’s some significant banding and blocking in darker scenes which isn’t in the source. Check out the cave at 29m 33s as one example (cave walls have some extreme banding going on which shouldn’t be there in a 30+ GB file. I noticed similar blocking in the early Exegol scenes with Kylo as well.
My initial guess would be the Compressor encoder itself is the culprit (Apple doesn’t handle H264 and H265 well). If not that then the color grading application. It will probably be noticeable on all darker Exegol scenes. I had to use zone settings on an edit of the same title to give extra bitrate to most of the scenes on Exegol to avoid a very large filesize.
EDIT: Here’s what I mean by zones:
–zones <zone0>/<zone1>/… Tweak the bitrate of regions of the video
Each zone is of the form
<start frame>,<end frame>,<option>
where <option> is either
q=<integer> (force QP)
or b=<float> (bitrate multiplier)
Example: This x264 encoder command line would lower the crf to 13 (increasing quality) for frames 0 through 5000 and for frames 8000 through 9000 (note command formatting for Handbrake might be a little different). I found a quantizer of about 13 was pretty good on the Exegol scenes (and a few other scenes) with a crf for everything else around 20. In x264 you can zone the crf instead of q which is much better (note there should be two dashes below, this thread changes it to a long dash).
–zones 0,5000,crf=13/8000,9000,crf=13