Nice, can really notice the image quality difference. Something is up with the frame count though. Maybe Badaboom dropped some.
ARGH
The Badaboom video is 2536 frames. The original video (and other encodes from it) are 2432 frames. On replay it seems that frames in the Badaboom video are actually skipped, as the frame number jumps, e.g. 542, 543, 544, 545, 546, 547, 548, 550
So, ahem, the matching frame should be:
That's a relief, I thought I was going mad, trying to work out how the frames could be so different yet the sequence "looked fine". I guess the 104 superfluous frames are actually fully encoded, just never shown. I suppose they're wasting bitrate, but who knows?
You used b-pyramid? That's cool, I think the PS3 can handle that, so can a PC, but any other standalone player might choke on an encode that uses it.
My encode profiles normally target my own personal use - I adapted a crf 22 profile to make that crf 25 profile. So I've made the profile fast but efficient, which means I've turned down a lot of settings from their maximum (i.e. motion estimation range, partitions, reference frame count and rate-distortion optimisation level plus no use of trellis) as they're very costly in terms of encode speed with very little benefit in quality per bit.
As a comparison, for the same clip I've just run with these settings:
Code:
--crf 25 --ref 5 --mixed-refs --no-fast-pskip --bframes 3 --b-adapt 2 --b-pyramid --weightb --subme 9 --trellis 2 --partitions all --8x8dct --qpmin 16 --vbv-maxrate 29400 --me umh
Comparing this with the encode I made earlier:
- 1.98fps - 20m29s - 32% of encoding speed
- 26134KB - 110% of the file size (i.e. larger!)
I am comparing the x264 encodes only, i.e. video encode speed and size of the video alone. The earlier encode came in at 23831KB.
The frame looks a little better, too:
That encode speed though is atrocious.
Finally, here's the same frame at crf 29:
Compared with the crf 25 encode I first posted (comparing video, only):
- 6.24fps - 6m30s - 101% of encoding speed
- 12894KB - 54% of the file size
I'd say this video, overall, has about the same quality as the Badaboom video. It's noisier and has less blocking.
I've just uploaded two videos:
x264 crf 25
x264 crf 29
Hope they work.
Jawed