Impossible footage

First off, I want to say that I've been encoding MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 video for nearly a decade, so I'm familiar with the concepts behind MPEG-2 (discrete cosine transforms, quantization matrices, luma vs. chroma, subsampling, etc.). I say this to let you know you can use any terminology you like in your replies. Here's my problem: I've got some incredibly difficult PAL material to encode for an upcoming DVD, and I have access to CCE SP 2.70.02.01. The material has, in some sections, what is essentially a concentric interference circle test pattern moving at the full 25i (50 images per second). Here's a sample frame (demosceners will recognize this): [IMG]ftp://ftp.fusecon.com/pub/SOTAChallenge/SOTA_original.png[/IMG] (I duplicated one field for demonstration purposes; the actual footage is interlaced). Now, no matter how I try to encode it, I get enough quantization and blocking artifacts that I'm unhappy with the end result. Here's the same frame using CCE SP's CBR @ 8500 (my maximum bitrate allowed for video on the DVD due to reserved space for audio tracks) at five passes and no extended options/filtering: [IMG]ftp://ftp.fusecon.com/pub/SOTAChallenge/SOTA_MPEG_artifacts.png[/IMG] As you can see, the chroma has become completely blurred. In motion it's not as noticable, but it's nowhere near the crispness of the original footage. And this is @ 8500kbps! If anyone can come up with one or more settings I may have missed that clearly improve the quality of the footage over my efforts, I'll send you a free copy of the DVD when it's finished. (Or, if I should be using some other encoder, that information would be helpful too, but I really like CCE and would like to stay with it.) Here's a link to the sample footage I used that you can use for testing: It's 720x576 25i PAL, uncompressed YUV. VirtualDub loads it just fine, as does CCE; if you have a problem viewing it, snag the Blackmagic Design codecs from ) If anyone can help, I'd be most appreciative! I've spent a week dorking around with the filtering and various quality options and all it does it make the edges blurrier (which degrades some fine detail earlier in the video). I've also messed around with the quanization matrix, but I think CCE discards that if you run multipass, yes? All I ask is that the footage must stay interlaced -- If you deinterlace it, half the motion will be thrown away and it looks like crap. (PS: It's *not* emulator output, but analog Amiga RGB run through a broadcast scan converter to YUV 4:2:2 and captured through a DeckLink SP via component cables -- pretty nice capture, eh?)

oh sorry, I missed the bitrate thing. of course I can redo it with 8500 kbps:

I used Canopus Procoder 2 and its Fieldbased encoding mode (Frame type = AUtomatic). The other parameters were left at defaults except I set: DC-precision: 8 Encoding Quality: Mastering Quality I do not have such immense problem with the fieldbased encoding as you experienced. In Mediaplayer classic with the dscaler mpeg decoder filter they play fine for me. The m2p's were muxed by the encoder itself. WHen I author DVDs I create elementary streams which I then put into ifoedit or muxman directly. And that works pretty good. btw.: In that particular scene Half D1 didn't damage a thing ;) after figuring out that pointresize(width/2,height,1,0,width,height) took the right pixels without blurring them. But with 640x200 sources you will loose detail, of course.

Here's my effort with CCE 2.70.02.06 SP :(12Mb). I deinterlaced first, and encoded VBR@ 8500kbps max, 8000kbps average. I think the big mistake you made was to encode CBR. If you leave adaptive Q-matrix on(recomended)[under template\advanced] it won't make a blind bit of difference what matrix you use.

1) the video is interlaced. there are 50 movements per second 2) then your setup is wrong. 3) I don't understand. you seem to contradict yourself here. but I agree that another GOP structure can help here. I-Frame only GOPs just will make it worse but a GOP without B-Frames may help pretty much: IPPPPPPPPPPPPPP

Use ProCoder 2. How you said CCE has poor Motion Estimation algorithm. Maybe it will change, because I've already reported that for CCE support. Andrew

Maybe ProCoder Express may be an option for you. It costs about 54€. IMO it uses the encoding engine of Procoder 2 and has downgraded features and flexibility compared to Procoder 2. However. This won't be such a disadvantage, because I mostly used standard-settings.

For anyone interested, the problem was "solved" (not really) by not trying to encode the problem footage all by itself and splicing it into the 3+ hour project, but just letting CCE do an n-pass encode on the entire thing and deal with it as best it could. The results aren't perfect, but they're at least as good as my custom efforts without the pain of CBR slammed at 9mbit/s.