Grain FX from three different Video Event FX = Render Errors/Macroblocking

[Norman Black]

[Neil Randall] “all my FX render fine, apart from any variation of grain from Film Effects, Add Noise, or Film Grain. “

Maybe you can show us a screen shot of your noise/grain. This is the most difficult thing to encode and requires the most bitrate. I notice your encode settings are extremely tight, almost constant bitrate. You might try raising the max bitate to 40.

The reason I asked about seeing a screen shot is that I once added noise as an effect. Heavy noise that then faded out in a few seconds. I rendered that uncompressed and then used Handbrake to encode at constant quality (crf 22). My media PC could not play that bit smoothly and I looked at the bitrate in BitrateViewer and saw the bitrate of that section rocket up to 110Mbps from an average of about 20Mbps. Of course when I render for internet it does not look even remotely like the editor, but such is life at lower bitrates.

Your bitrate seems good for high quality encodes, but the level of noise may be too much to properly encode. If your noise/grain section is short like I had, then you can raise your max bitrate to help that noise section. If the noise is over long sections then you will have to raise the bitrate or abandon the visual effect. AVC might do better than mpeg-2.

[Neil Randall]

Hello,

Thanks for the advice. I’ll try to get a screenshot, but it’s relatively heavy grain for long sections, so it is probably what you suggest: not enough horsepower and too low a bitrate.

I’ll try a higher bitrate and see what happens, but I already have a pass minus the grain as a backup – delivery is very soon. If it becomes too ridiculous in terms of bitrate, I’ll stick to the new pass.

Thanks again,

NR.