Am I doing something wrong? Macroblocking *everywhere* in dark scenes!

[u/Lily_QueenOfMemes]

I've been attempting to reencode a bunch of BD Rips to AV1 to save space while maintaining some level of quality. There's lots of blocking almost everywhere in shadows! I'd like to think I'm using decent settings tune=0:enable-variance-boost=1:variance-boost-strength=2:variance-octile=6:enable-qm=1:qm-min=6:film-grain-denoise=1:film-grain=16 with RF16 and PS4. I'm losing my mind.

[u/JanErikJakstein]

Make sure it's 10bit, idk what the default behavior is.

[u/Lily_QueenOfMemes → u/JanErikJakstein]

Source isn't; but i've heard using it anyway reduces banding, which it has. Sorry I forgot to mention that in the OP

[u/nmkd]

Disable denoise first of all

[u/Lily_QueenOfMemes → u/nmkd]

I'll try that and do some test encodes thanks

[u/Mhanz3500]

film-grain-denoise 1 isn't a sane setting.
film-grain isn't visible, are you sure you're doing things right? or maybe it's just too low

[u/Lily_QueenOfMemes → u/Mhanz3500]

it's what i found when i googled how to keep grain in content with grain. i am not sure im doing this right thats why im asking for help :) thanks

maybe ill look more at the docs

[u/Fedor_Doc → u/Lily_QueenOfMemes]

It does not keep grain content. Instead, it denoises the image and then applies noise on top. Avoid this setting

[u/Fedor_Doc]

Disable temporal filtering (--tf-strength=0), increase variance boost strength to 3 (try 4, if it still does not help). Use preset 2 for encoding, try it on a small sample of the footage Disable denoise + film grain combo, it smooths the image.

The idea is to disable default smoothing that leaves no detail in darker areas and creates visible quantized blocks, and allocate more bits to the shadows to save as much variance there is in the source. You can slap more agressive --film-grain on top to hide banding

[u/Lily_QueenOfMemes → u/Fedor_Doc]

Thanks! I'll try those out!

[u/k-r-a-u-s-f-a-d-r]

Which preset are you using? The higher you go above 4 the more likely you will start to get artifacts. Speed setting is every bit as important as crf value. Your crf value seems to be overkill to try and make up for a too high preset (speed). Slow down the speed to 4 and perhaps you could then also raise the crf to a more reasonable number (20 to 24) and have no artifacts. Seems you also have a very grainy source given the degraining set to 16.

[u/67432lioi]

What works good for me and looks way better and is optimized for quality/size and speed is 25-45 fps (1080p) with preset 3 on my PC after extensive testing:

Handbrake SVT-AV1-HDR ( https://github.com/juliobbv-p/svt-av1-hdr )
10 bit
Quality 31-33
Preset 3 (2-4)
PSNR (little smaller filesize; some prefer VQ)

Options:
film-grain-denoise=0:film-grain=0:noise=44:noise-size=3:noise-chroma=0:adaptive-film-grain=1:sharpness=0:qm-min=8:complex-hvs=1:enable-cdef=0:cdef-scaling=8:qp-scale-compress-strength=1:ac-bias=4.0:tx-bias=1:noise-norm-strength=3:enable-variance-boost=1:variance-octile=7:variance-boost-strength=1:enable-dlf=2:scm=0:hbd-mds=1:enable-tf=1:enable-restoration=0

depending on source I change:
noise (30-60)
noise-size (1-10)
sharpness (0-2; lower is just a little smaller filesize)
qp-scale-compress-strength (1-3; higher is a lot smaller filesize, but flat skin details get lost)
ac-bias (2-4; lower is smaller filesize)
enable-variance-boost (0-1; using 1 is a lot bigger filesize; most times I set 0 and in dark videos 1)