Video Transcoding

My general goal for video transcoding is
to archive my personal media. I do not
aim for a lossless conversion but I
choose what level of conversion to do
based on how much of the original that I want to preserve.

• Descriptors
• Presets
• Audio
• Subtitles

Descriptors

Codec

I’ve chosen to use AV1 for my encoding
because it has an increasing amount of
support and I expect it to be readily
available in the future since it is open source.

• AV1 - SVT-AV1-PSY

Resolution

These resolutions are based on 16:9. I
generally choose to crop black bars so
the final resolution and aspect ratio
may be different than listed below.

• SD - Under 720p
• HD - 720p & 900p
• 2K - FHD (1080p)
• 4K - UHD 4K (2160p)
• 5K - UHD 5K (2880p)
• 8K - UHD 8K (4320p)
• 16K - UHD 16K (8640p)

Media Type

• Grainy - Media with film grain
• Anime - 2D Animation
• CG - 3D Animation
• Live - Live-action

Levels

• Insane
  • Imperceptible flaws
• Standard
  • No flaws during playback
• Economy
  • Optimized for encode size & time

Presets

AV1 2K Grainy Anime Insane

For 1080p 2D animation with film grain.

Options

--rc 0 --crf 12 --progress 3 --tune 3  
--preset 4 --variance-boost-strength 3
--variance-octile 2 --film-grain 6 
--frame-luma-bias 80 --chroma-qm-min 0

Performance

• Speed: ~0.6x (i7 15th gen)
• Size: ~0.75x (vs h.264 lossless)

Notes

• CRF 12
  • Seems a little high but the dynamic
    settings will boost when needed.
• Preset 4
  • Good balance between encode speed
    and quality.
• Tune 3
  • Perceptive SSIM tune
• Variance Boost 3
• Variance Octile 2/8
  • Quite aggressive. Will result in
    a lot of false positives but
    reduces chance of artifacts.
• Film Grain 6
  • Adjust this to match source.

Notes

AV1 HD Anime Standard

AV1 HD Anime Economy

Audio

Subtitles