Recommended Tools - Sorry guys, Windows Only!

[JeganRX]

I've been messing around with Stax and your guide definitely helped a lot! So thank you!

I have a question though, I'm trying to render out some low light HDSLR footage that has a bit of noise in it and I can't seem to find a happy medium that reduces noise but also doesn't create the pixel blocking artificialness of compressed video. I'm rendering out for Blu-Ray so I'm using that preset. I tried a CFR based render and bumped it all the way up (down) to 18 to get the highest quality and then rendered on placebo. Have any suggestions about getting a better render without all of the pixel blocking?

Did you try cleaning the noise at all? If you wish to maintain the noise, you can perhaps "trick" (closer to exploit) x264's grain preset, which may be a better idea. The psy-RD, and mb-tree parameters of x264 are usually most helpful in grain retention, but if your noise is too significant to compress well, definitely use AVISynth beforehand. I had low light footage from a short film a few months back, and due to how adaptive MDegrain is, I simply applied it to the entire edit (rather than the raw footage). Here's the results (and yes, I'm aware of the slight moireing):

Uncleaned Footage
http://www.douglasguerra.com/SC_noisy.png

Cleaned Footage (look at the bench, the jacket, and the car door)
http://www.douglasguerra.com/SC_cleaned.png

 

[MagicMountainMan]

^Thank you! I'm still new to the program so I'll definitely explore that and try to figure it out. Do you have a solution for the blocky-ness of the blacks though? That's even worse then my noise problems.

 

[JeganRX]

^Thank you! I'm still new to the program so I'll definitely explore that and try to figure it out. Do you have a solution for the blocky-ness of the blacks though? That's even worse then my noise problems.

There are heavier deblocking scripts and filters out there, some based on MVTools (like MDegrain) as well, but I seldom use them, so I can't provide one instantly. For something simple, but possibly smeary, use the simple deblock filter, which should be included in my zip file.

If the blocking is light, you may actually be able to get away with dithering the blocks with gradfun2db, a personal favorite of mine for removing banding.

 

[MagicMountainMan]

Thank you for all of your help man, I really appreciate it. I've actually run into another problem! For some reason Staxrip won't open any avi files that I encoded using the Lagarith lossless codec. It's extremely frustrating because Lagarith is my go-to codec for most everything... I've tried installing and reinstalling everything but nothing has changed. Just curious to know if you have any suggestions. Thanks!

 

[JeganRX]

To my knowledge, Staxrip opens everything via AVISynth, so create a simple AVS file just calling your Lagarith-AVI, and see if it loads in a viewer like AvsP or VirtualDub.