AV1 Rendering 101: Why Grain is the Most Important Setting (Handbrake & FFmpeg)

anyone who thinks they can spot the "detail" that is removed from a denoise, could never tell me what that detail is if doing an a-b comparison.

just setting color space WILL NOT properly change an HDR file to SDR...I tried it, and there is clearly an issue with an overly bright and washed out image. There has to be other settings that are required...but I don't know what they are...likely something with dynamic range.

I honestly do not like AV1. Granted, it does a good job with file sizes, but the down size is that if you try to play these on most typical blueray players, they just won't work I personally like HEVC 10BIT better. It gives you a faster encode, and the file sizes are reasonable. I've been using Handbrake for several years now and this is my go to file preference. I have converted all of my movies to HEVC X265 10BIT and I couldn't be happier.

I hate grain lol

i cant be the only one that see no difference between grain or not ? WTF is this video to super picky eyes or something ?

Gotta say I dislike the grain at 1080p but prefer it at 4k. At 1080p on a modern large TV the pixels are big enough that the noise is distracting. Keep in mind you're not seeing the actual grain just a very high bitraite H264/VC1 encode from the bluray source which has already done some averaging itself and introduced its own set of codec/encoder setting specific artifacts. You aren't seeing the original picture even on the bluray..

While some blurays are better than others, some of the noise is horrid and incredibly distracting due to the constant movement in the background of every scene.

One thing it is worth mentioning is that any encoder will even out the grain unless you provide a very, very low CRF. With a low-ish CRF (22-24 for AV1, 20-23 for HEVC) you end up with denoising that blurs some of the grain and often gives really horrible artifacting in the scene because it's trying its best to retain it. This can look a lot worse than bumping the CRF up a bit and removing more of the grain. Though at that point you're better off just applying a denoise filter.

I tried SVT-AV1's film grain but denoising only to renoise is so backwards in what we're trying to achieve. The reason denoising can be bad is that you lose small details (hair, stubble, fabric texture, etc). By denoising then adding grain, you're removing those details anyway then masking the fact they've been removed by drawing noise over the top. You're further away from the original image than you are with just the denoiser step because you're drawing over the top of an already altered image.

I'll stick with hqdn3d prior to encoding, I'd rather remove the artifacts added in the original encode and not have that jarring dancing scenery in the background.

First thing, what is Av1?

You r god of decoding

exploring more stuff to utilize webm, i usually use my nvidia shadow play thing to record gameplay to mp4, then use hand brake to convert to webm to save like, 80% space which is awesome. it converts pretty quick, but i wish it was faster. any dedicated hardware to get webm conversion on like vp9 to go faster?

The grain is one of the things that makes Mushoku Tensei so beautiful visually, making it a perfect match to the story... So lucky to have a guy uploading weekly AV1 releases for the new season.

I'm working with converting the "Chuck" TV series for my Plex server right now. The first season has constant grain, but later seasons (eg. 4) have grain on a scene-by-scene basis. My best guess is that there is some effect (eg. green screen) in many of those shots that resulted in the original being modified. It has made guessing the right encode settings very difficult. While 720p is not ideal, I've quickly discovered that a 720p encode with grain mostly preserved with ultralight "nlmeans" denoise (where it exists) tends to look a lot better than a 1080p encode with regular light nlmeans. (Note: I'm using RF19 for the 720p h264 encode)

i really don't need the film grain. i do a light nlmeans denoise and light sharpening. this way i get back most of the details. it would be better to have a more sophisticated denoiser to better distinguish between wanted information and noise but that probably needs a kind of 15x15 pixel window, a kind of transformation into the frequency domain, applying the noise filter there, and transform it back to the pixel-domain to get that single pixel and do this for every pixel?
or do a transformation into the frequency domain of the whole picture and apply the noise filter there and transform the whole picture back?
something like that. or maybe try to make 3-dimensional data with more than one frame and try to solve the problem in a transformed 3-dimensional frequency domain, if possible.
and the last step would be to do ai object recognition to eliminate noise.

So...if the grain isn't encoded into the video, but applied during playback, can the grain be changed after a file is rendered? It sounds like the grain setting is akin to a playback instruction in metadata, which would be great if true.

Yoo, been a while since i have been recommended one of your videos. Nice stuff man

Thank you, Logan. I love AV1 but this is the first video I've come across actually showing the film grain in HandBrake. Much appreciated.

why was i unsubbed ?wtf ???

Nazis are people too........but when you see them, you can still choke them. I'm pretty sure it's legal in like 23 states

You mentioned ripping a 4k bluray. I’ve been meaning to do this for a while for my own collection but the makemkv forums guide seems to be a bit of mess. Would love a video on that.

I'm a very sad man sometimes.
Hi Logan.
I like your face.

Awesome video dude

❤

I've been fiddling with AV1 for a couple months now. Picking the correct synthesis level is crucial to grain retention. George Romero's Martin took almost 48 hours to transcode. But, the quality and size are unmatched when compared to x265 with all the tweaks. Picking a front-end depends on your knowledge of AV1 and ffmpeg. Fastflix and Handbrake are good for average users. NMkoder and NEAV1E are good starting points if you want chunk encoding. My daily driver is StaxRip and is for intermediate users. If I need to adjust brightness, contrast or saturation, I'll use Fastflix. Ffmpeg with AV1an via command line is above my skill level.

I am just starting to get my head around opening Davinci Resolve so this is going to come in handy (🙄)

Well you have just sent me down a whole new rabbit hole. Not sure I should be thanking you, but thanks😂

This solved a problem I was having. I use Rambo first blood UHD to setup my reference handbrake settings. The grain in that movie is the reason. AV1 just does weird stuff for some shots when you don’t mess with the grain settings.

I went to buy a few shirts from epic pants the other day and shipping was $157

Do we need nvidia 4000 series for this?

Star Trek Narration video when?

Which player are you using?
I tried to download a few av1 files to test with Potplayer and the audio is missing even after installing opencodec... Might be time to switch program.

For a while there, it felt like my life had become replying "Have you tried adding 'film-grain=25:film-grain-denoise=0' to the Advanced Options field?" at least twice a day.

Great info. I'm in the experimentation phase with encoding my small media collection. I keep reencoding things in different ways and comparing results etc. But honestly since I'm keeping the rips on my NAS as backups anyway I'm not sure recoding is worthwhile.

thank you logan for addressing grain, theres a lot of misinformation and people believing grain is undesired or jpeg artifacting and then wonder why their renders look like a garbled mess when they try to filter it out, in all cases it's ideal to try and replicate the original look as much as possible

zero

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