Reducing Compression Artifacts in Vegas, plugins?

[SaintEuphoria]

Are there any commercially available plugins that can reduce compression artifacting significantly in Sony Vegas? I have a film I'm working on that's in the final stages and there are a couple of shots that are driving me nuts that I would LOVE to be able to reduce some of the "compression squares" if at all possible.

The film was shot on a DVX100a and edited in Vegas. Anything anyone can do to help would be greatly appreciated!

 

[JohnnyRoy]

Compression artifacts (i.e, macroblocking) occur when you run out of bits to encode the video. This can be caused by an overly complicated scene, or by noise in dark areas. There is no solution for the first problem but for the noise you could clean up the video as much as possible before you encode the scene. Use the Dynamic Noise Reduction or Smart Smoother plugin by Mike Crash or get the excellent noise remover from Neat Video.

If it's not really noise but just a dark scene, you could try the Sony Black Restore plugin to crush the blacks. Used sparingly this will make many shades of black into one and help the encoder out. A slight Gaussian Blur might also help the encoder out by eliminating sharp contrasting edges. If the encoder has a 2 Pass option use it, so that it can make the most of the bits that are there. In the end, if you just have a busy scene, none of this will work and you will have to increase the bitrate.

Hope this helps,

~jr