settings for dark movies

[benderman]

I converted a very dark, interlaced, low-quality DVD-horror-movie to MPEG4/DivX. I deinterlaced, increased brightness and contrast by 12% and resized it to 512*384. When I encode it with DivX3.11 low- or fast-motion with 6000kbps I always get very bad quality. Is there any trick for encoding dark videos?

[tomnhanni]

I know what you're talking about. I did a Schwarzenegger movie I think it was called 6th Day and it was very dark and came out very low quality. Forget fast motion it is always low quality. I re-did it several times increasing the bit rate and it kept coming out the same size and low quality. I really don't have any solutions yet but I'm trying Nandubs two-pass system and from what I've heared it has the best results.

[khp]

I don't think there are any special tricks for dark movies.

But in general two things will help

1. Filtering in virtualdub/nandub.

2. 2-pass encoding with either divx4 or divx3 using nandub.