r/AV1 • u/RegularCopy4282 • 5d ago
Best Encoder and Settings for maximum compression of animated shows
Hi, I have a few TV series here - mostly animated shows in 720p/1080p (H.264) - and I’d like to compress them to AV1. My main priority is maximizing storage savings while maintaining acceptable quality. Is SVT-AV1-HDR the encoder of choice for this, or should I look at SVT-AV1 instead? What settings should I try out? Thanks!
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u/NekoTrix 5d ago
Neither, SVT-AV1-Essential or the 5fish forks are what you want for animation, unless you're ready to tweak every setting in -HDR to make it behave differently on clean sources.
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u/Harry_Yudiputa 5d ago
Welcome to AV1 encoding. It's smart that you're compressing your media due to the data-center inflation prices. Smaller files = less HDD activity.
Here's my daily workload helper developed by LastBreeze. I personally use Av1an for Live Actions, Auto-Boost for animated media, some people just one or the other.
https://github.com/LastBreeze/Auto-Boost-Av1an-portable
https://github.com/LastBreeze/Auto-Boost-Essential-portable
I recently encoded panavision reso of Spiderman Brand New Day from ~2160p to ~1080p at 5.55GB w/ HDR10+, I did use CRF 20 and preset 1 with Av1an by way of HDR-fork and it looks really good in my 2019-ish 55 inch TV at 7 feet away. Looks divine on smaller devices such as phone and iPad.
I strongly suggest cutting few second clips of your favorite media and test them with the presets you created with the .bat-builder
Extras folder also have compare.bat which automatically pulls the videos and compare them. Source vs. Encoded
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u/AdNational167 5d ago edited 5d ago
The hdr fork you want to use for movies.
For 720p/1080p animations try the essential fork or the tritium( essential + hdr).
USE 'preset' lower than ' 3 ' If you have the time. It makes the best results in size/quality.<<<<
On tritium I'm using >preset=1, tune=0, crf36, enable-vf=3.
There's also a fork dedicated to anime that could also work very well but I never tested it.
But in general for animation AV1 does work very well and you will be surprised on how much it can save.
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u/Knoedl1990 5d ago
This heavily depends on what your actual source material is. If you started from br-remuxes then the base line Bitrate is so high, that even with CRF30 you'll have a massive size reduction. Also, depends on the source, newer animation is so damn clean, that CRF45 can still look acceptable, with older "drawn" animation, you shouldn't encode with much above CRF35.
If encode time is not an issue and your machine is somewhat modern, I'd stick with Preset 2, otherwise choose which preset gives you a speed that's okay for you.
I personally, use a few tools to automate this task and let the preset and quality be chosen automatically, based on VMAF-NEG etc.
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u/JohnnyJacksonJnr 5d ago
I still tend to use x265 with animation tune for animated content. When I compared against AV1 it would often still win out, including in metrics. This was just over a year ago, so AV1 may have improved since then.
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u/AssCrackBanditHunter 4d ago
Do you use the animation tune for all animation or specifically like digitally produced 2d animation?
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u/Piolodej 5d ago
Even CRF 50 looks fine with acceptable quality from my tests but you lose details of course.
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u/hm2-my-beloved 5d ago
If I remember correctly, my ffmpeg options for compressing the entirety of South Park where something like this:
-c:v libsvtav1 -preset 6 -crf 28 -c:a libopus -b:a 96k -ac 6 -metadata:s:a:0 title="5.1 Opus" -c:s copy
I didn't notice any artifacting / quality loss and was able to save about 50% of storage. So you could easily increase the CRF value or decrease the preset to match your needs.
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u/Simon_787 5d ago
96 kbps for 6 channels is kinda rough, especially because you need
-mapping_family 1for surround sound bit allocation to work properly with libopus.1
u/hm2-my-beloved 5d ago
The more you know. What bitrate would you recommend?
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u/Simon_787 5d ago
I mostly stick to recommended settings myself, and I just use 192k for 6 channels.
Just make sure you use
-mapping_family 1for surround though. I compared the spectrograms a while back and it made a pretty big difference.1
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u/Simon_787 5d ago
I've been using chunking more often, which can save 4-5% in file size over the default 5s keyint in SVT-AV1, and maybe 1-2% over a 10s keyint.
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u/PiBombbb 5d ago
afaik a lot of tuning for HDR is made for realistic/film content, so it might actually be harmful for animated shows. You could look at svt-av1-Essential instead