Having tried AV1, I found that it was worse than h265 for what I use it for: high quality movie encodes.
It doesn’t preserve grain well, and if struggles with maintaining quality in low light scenes.
On top of all of this it tends to be more CPU intensive than h265.
For this testing, I used Handbrakes CPU encoder.
I realise that this is maybe not what AV1 is intended for. It’s probably best suited to making low bitrate streams more tolerable. Maybe AV2 will be better 🤷
I use VBR and adjust the quality slider until I cannot see artifacts. I don’t do anything particularly special and maybe there’s more that could be done.
I once heard of an approach where you remove all grain and reapply it live to reduce the bitrate. That sounds interesting but denoising usually results in quality loss and it will likely look pretty artificial. My tooling also does not support it, so I’ve not bothered.
If someone can recommend me a good encoder or tool I can try that is better than whatever comes with handbrake I’m happy to give it a go.
Having tried AV1, I found that it was worse than h265 for what I use it for: high quality movie encodes.
It doesn’t preserve grain well, and if struggles with maintaining quality in low light scenes.
On top of all of this it tends to be more CPU intensive than h265.
For this testing, I used Handbrakes CPU encoder.
I realise that this is maybe not what AV1 is intended for. It’s probably best suited to making low bitrate streams more tolerable. Maybe AV2 will be better 🤷
interesting, when reading this article a while back, it sounded like av1 was pretty good at preserving grain, the best even.
am wondering whether it comes down to the settings used.
I use VBR and adjust the quality slider until I cannot see artifacts. I don’t do anything particularly special and maybe there’s more that could be done.
I once heard of an approach where you remove all grain and reapply it live to reduce the bitrate. That sounds interesting but denoising usually results in quality loss and it will likely look pretty artificial. My tooling also does not support it, so I’ve not bothered.
If someone can recommend me a good encoder or tool I can try that is better than whatever comes with handbrake I’m happy to give it a go.