Xvid Help-Xvid Guru

[firesoldier845]

Ok I've been posting a lot lately and this should be my last help request. In summary, I decided to use xvid codec for my Lomac movies. Thanks to those that recommended it. I can use it on my Windows PC to render the AVI and then put it on my Mac to do the video editing cause Xvid works on Apple too. It works great. The thing is I want the highest quality video setting using xvid and I'm no video compression guru. Most of my video work is just taking uncompressed DV video and using Final Cut or iMovie HD and then writing it directly to DVD. I don't know much about codecs and how to get the best quality. I noticed stuff in xvid like 1 pass or 2 passes, Adaptive Quanitzation, B-VOPs, CBR, Target Quantizer, Quality preset, etc. Truthfully, I am happy with the default quality, it's really not that bad. But if I could get better I would like to use the best if I knew what all these settings do. File size is really not an issue and neither is rendering time since I have 2 computers to work with. So any tips, suggestions, etc.? I'm rendering at 1280X720 widescreen too. Thanks again for all the friendly tips and advice.

 

cheers

 

firesoldier845

[AerialHawk]

Don't use Xvid. You can encode your vids with h264, they'll look MUCH better and can be 50% SMALLER in size if you do it right.

 

But alas, if you want to keep xvid: http://www.divx-digest.com/articles/xvid_setup.html

[Ironhand]

Although I use XviD almost exclusively, there's still a lot I don't know about its various settings.

• 1 pass 2 pass: You might get slightly smaller file sizes with 2 pass. The first pass analyzes the video, while the 2 compresses it. In 1 pass both processes are performed at the same time and some additional compression is not available.

 

• Target Quantizer: Without getting into what quartizing is, think of this as a compression preset. "1" is best video quality/largest file size, while "31" is the opposite. You can get levels in between the presets with the slider sitting below the quartizer box.

 

• For me, the biggest differences are made if you are resizing the video to a smaller resolution, something I almost always have to do. I often go from 1280x1024 to 720x576. I set the resize filter mode to either "Precise bicubic (A=0.60") or "Lanczos3". These provide the sharpest image when reducing the resolution. Though, actually, anything is an improvement over "Nearest neighbor" (the default). The latter provides speed at the cost of sharpness.

 

Rich