How RF works and finding the best setting?

General questions or discussion about HandBrake, Video and/or audio transcoding, trends etc.
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Nosnibor
Posts: 2
Joined: Wed Jul 11, 2018 8:43 pm

How RF works and finding the best setting?

Post by Nosnibor »

Description of problem or question:
I am new to handbrake. I am using this to try to bypass an issue I am having with exporting high res content from premiere/me to a lower res.

The RF caught me off-guard. I read the short description on the website here and it confused me more.

It states that higher number is worse quality but it recommends using a higher number for higher res footage? That doesn't seem to make sense so maybe someone can help me understand that.

Also I couldn't find much information with the optimize video functions and what they do specifically. I'm sure I am familiar with the functions but the naming may be different than what I am use to.

Please let me know if you need more information!

Thank you!

Steps to reproduce the problem (If Applicable):




HandBrake version (e.g., 1.0.0):
1.1.1



Operating system and version (e.g., Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, macOS 10.13 High Sierra, Windows 10 Creators Update):
Windows 10 Pro current



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JohnAStebbins
HandBrake Team
Posts: 5712
Joined: Sat Feb 09, 2008 7:21 pm

Re: How RF works and finding the best setting?

Post by JohnAStebbins »

It states that higher number is worse quality but it recommends using a higher number for higher res footage? That doesn't seem to make sense so maybe someone can help me understand that.
The RF controls how closely the output will match the input. If you do 2 encodes using the same RF, one with a high quality source and one with a low quality source, the resulting encode of the high quality source will be higher quality than the resulting encode of the low quality source. Seems self evident, but lots of people seem to miss that basic principle.

So if you are ultimately trying to produce "acceptable" quality output by some definition of acceptable, the quality of the original source will be a factor in the quality of the output. For some fixed definition of "acceptable" you can use a higher RF if your source is higher quality than if your source were lower quality.
mduell
Veteran User
Posts: 8187
Joined: Sat Apr 21, 2007 8:54 pm

Re: How RF works and finding the best setting?

Post by mduell »

RF is more like quality per pixel than total quality, so for higher res content (more pixels) you can get away with lower values and still look good.
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