New to Handbreak. Looking for settings for American cartoons

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gamecaptor
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Posts: 87
Joined: Tue Nov 23, 2010 10:32 pm

New to Handbreak. Looking for settings for American cartoons

Post by gamecaptor »

Hello all,

I’m making the switch from DVDFab to Handbreak for all of my encoding needs, primarily for the sake of quality. I was encoding some American cartoons (Family Guy and Wolverine & the X-Men) and the quality of DVDFab looked horrible. I gave Handbreak a try and it looks decidedly better.

I’ve been playing around with the settings to try and find the “optimal” quality when converting these and it seems like default High Profile setting is pretty good. Does anyone have any suggestions on any tweaks to the settings I should be aware of as I know that American cartoons tend to be difficult to get quality encodes for.

Regards.
mduell
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Re: New to Handbreak. Looking for settings for American cart

Post by mduell »

Here's what x264's --tune animation does:

Code: Select all

- animation (psy tuning):
	--bframes {+2} --deblock 1:1
	--psy-rd 0.4:<unset> --aq-strength 0.6
	--ref {Double if >1 else 1}
That would be b-adapt=2:rc-lookahead=50:bframes=5:deblock=1,1:psy-rd=0.4:aq-strength=0.6:ref=6 for the string in HB's Advanced tab if you're starting from the High Profile preset.
gamecaptor
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Joined: Tue Nov 23, 2010 10:32 pm

Re: New to Handbreak. Looking for settings for American cart

Post by gamecaptor »

Thank you mduell. I'll create a new profile with your suggestions and give it a try.
gamecaptor
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Joined: Tue Nov 23, 2010 10:32 pm

Re: New to Handbreak. Looking for settings for American cart

Post by gamecaptor »

Ya, that does look a little better. Do you have any suggestions for the Detelecine/Decomb/Deinterlace/Denoise options?
mduell
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Re: New to Handbreak. Looking for settings for American cart

Post by mduell »

I doubt detelecine will do anything, it's probably all 30 fps content, so you can disable it.

You'll need decomb, and if decomb default isn't good enough you'll need to read up on the decomb parameters to tweak it, and if that's not good enough go to full deinterlacing.

I doubt you'll need denoise or deblock.
thompson
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Re: New to Handbreak. Looking for settings for American cart

Post by thompson »

I can't remember off hand, but some searching will probably indicate whether I'm right... but just FYI, I think the first season(s) of Family Guy on DVD had some serious mastering issues that resulted in kind of crappy video.
mduell
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Re: New to Handbreak. Looking for settings for American cart

Post by mduell »

thompson wrote:I can't remember off hand, but some searching will probably indicate whether I'm right... but just FYI, I think the first season(s) of Family Guy on DVD had some serious mastering issues that resulted in kind of crappy video.
Was the awful mastering PAL only or NTSC too?
gamecaptor
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Joined: Tue Nov 23, 2010 10:32 pm

Re: New to Handbreak. Looking for settings for American cart

Post by gamecaptor »

Thompson, your right, the first (NTSC) season looks awful. There are these weird "squiggly" effects that happen from time to time.
mduell
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Re: New to Handbreak. Looking for settings for American cart

Post by mduell »

It's known as combing, an all attempts I've seen in the forum to make decomb sensitive enough have failed. You'll have to go with deinterlace slower to avoid them.
TedC
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Re: New to Handbreak. Looking for settings for American cart

Post by TedC »

decomb custom 11 seemed to work wonders for me on Family Guy season 1
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