Film grain and codec?

[tylercheung]

Just wanted to poll to see what people's experiences with older movies with a lot of film grain, and different codecs. I was not getting great results with H.265, and with some googling, it seems that that is sort of a neglected part of that codec, and AV1 seems better in that regard. OR H.264 but it is not as well suited to 4k content. Any thoughts?

[lisamelton]

@tylercheung In terms of grain retention, you'll get the best results using the x264 software encoder via the two-pass ratecontrol system with the default mode of transcode-video.rb.

For 4K HEVC output, your best bet is using the x265 software encoder via the hevc mode. However, it's very slooooow.

As for the hardware-based encoders, you'll get better grain retention from the Nvidia AV1 encoder, via the nvenc-av1 mode, than the Nvidia HEVC encoder.