Quote:
Originally Posted by FranceBB
Yep, x264 is my de-facto choice for H.264 encodes and official BD releases, not only 'cause it's open source, but because it's the best.
I say it also 'cause it has been proven to be better than closed-source encodes in terms of SSIM/PSNR/VMAF with tests I've made internally in the company I work for.
Sure, since it's an official BD, I'm gonna use a two-pass encode with x264.
I see. That would be great 'cause this way I won't have to upscale the chroma when I got to 4:4:4 12bit MJPEG2000 for the cinema version and of course it's gonna be more than enough for the yv12 8bit encode.
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If you use relatively high bitrates (30Mbit+) Cinemacrfat can be better than x264. It has better quality distribution between I,P,B frames. At lower bitrates x264 is better. x264 can also produce nasty artefacts at high contrast edges as well (even at 30Mbit+), up to level which makes (otherwise very good encode) unacceptable. As for bigger studio Cinemacraft has also plenty other features which can be useful (segment re-encode/replace, SDI preview, etc). It's also faster than x264 as in order to be at reference level you need to run x264 at slow or even very slow preset. In the same time you can make nice BDs with x264 as well
For interlaced content my choice was actually Sony's Blu-Code encoder, which wasn't that popular. As for today BD authoring business brings no money (well you can make money if you get good contracts, but it's a lot of work), so I moved away from it
Cineform is also good as it's wavelet based, so re-encoding to JPEG2000 will cause less quality loss due to same nature of the encoding technique.