Odd sparkles in dark areas on a new divx I just created.

[Rooster6975]

Hi,

I just backup up a movie, making a 2-CD AC3 avi. The image quality is very good, but I have noticed that there are odd sparkles in the very dark sections of some scenes. For instance, the scene is inside the back of a truck, and it looks like some dark pixels have been lost. I can see tiny squares of light flash by, but only in the dark spots. It doesn't happen very often, but you can see traces of it throughout the movie.

I assume that I didn't have some advanced settings set correctly. I followed the divx-digest guide for creating an AVI with Gordian Knot and DivX 5.02. I'll try it with XVID to see if it is better, but I wondered if anyone knew what caused it.

- Gordian Knot 0.28.5
- DivX 5.02 Standard (not pro)
- 2-pass encoding using the AC3 5.1 soundtrack extracted using DVD2AVI

Created a DVD2AVI project AVS File with the following options :
- Noise Filter - None
- Resize filter - Lanczos (Sharp)
- Field Operations - None
- Trim movie & credits

In Gordian Knot, selected the following options :
- Bits/(Pixels*Frame) a very healthy .274
- no audio, just mux (used the AC3 file extracted above)
- res 576*240 (Smart Crop All)
- the original movie is 2h04 mins
- Psychovisual enhancements set to Normal
- Performance/Quality set to Slowest

I have heard different opinions about the Resize filter, some people say it should be set to Neutral Bicubic. I can certainly try that, but I would like to know if other people have seen this phenomenon before. I have used these settings for other backups successfully, this is the first one that I noticed obvious image corruption.

Thanks,
Rooster.

[setarip]

Try playing the CDs on another system. If the "sparkles" don't show up on another system, it could be indicative of a loosely seated videocard in your primary system...