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

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AV1 is the new thing... it takes forever to render, but once you're finished you should get a file that is 20-30% smaller than an h.265 file at about the same quality... but there's a catch. The settings need to be right or else it'll look like ugly muddy glamorous smudgy nasty putrescent clay.
If you don't want to watch the video, just take this and run: The most important thing is the film grain setting. I enter this and change the amount of film grain depending upon what I'm rendering. You have to turn off the denoise unless you want a mess.
film-grain-denoise=0:film-grain=20
Watch the video to learn about how AV1 handles grain, because it's totally wild and different.
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#av1 #handbrake #tutorial #rendering #encoding #ffmpeg

[@tech360gamer]

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.

[@brafya]

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

[@ZAGAN-OZ]

grain is an artifact of film. we dont need it.

[@brafya]

@@ZAGAN-OZ there is a lot of effort being put into retaining grain, even in the newest of new codecs and technologies as logan demonstrates in this video with av1, it's desired by many, including myself, including logan and many others who want to keep it

[@teksyndicate]

Don't want it, watch modern anime then

[@theandroidguide8848]

@@teksyndicate Wait what? Was this a wrong @ comment? Logan err, Franky is DEFENDING grain.

[@teksyndicate]

@@theandroidguide8848 grain is beautiful and amazing. it's pattern changes with every image so we aren't staring at the same aberration like we are with something like that ugly chromatic purple fringe around highlights or lens flares from bad lenses. Grain gives the image a softer look, makes the bokeh look interesting, and makes the dark areas look more textured. It's used statistically and directors would pick types of file for their grain pattern... they also do the same thing for lens flares, like how they always go for anamorphic lens flares in blade runner and star trek (the horizontal lights). Those are still aberrations, but used artistically. When they are an error, it's pretty obvious. When you try to remove grain, you destroy the original character of the film or even old anime. Those who remove grain are destroying art and I'll die on this hill. Digital noise is a different thing entirely and I don't think it looks as good (usually).

[@JeradBenge]

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.

[@teksyndicate]

It should be default. AV1 doesn't look very good without it imo.

[@mgord9518]

​@@teksyndicateThat's arguable, the quality is more than good enough for a majority of people and the space reduction is significant

[@masterflitzer]

@@teksyndicate grain is individual per video, you cannot really make a default of 25, but denoise 0 should be default and in fact was merged from svt-av1-psy into upstream svt-av1 (thankfully)

[@Abrasive-Heat]

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.

[@TheSlyMouse]

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

[@into.the.wood.chipper.]

I started getting accustomed to grainless movies, but just watched Child's Play from 1988 this morning, and it is just crawling with grain. This appears to be an AV1 stream on Prime Video. Very happy they have finally implemented that, and I have a device that can see it. Rather watch grainy video than color banding, any day.

[@adamgarlow5347]

Thank you so much for this. I got an Arc A380 for Jellyfin server and wanted to try AV1 for transcoding stored media but every video is all about streaming/twitch/etc with precious little about handbrake of blu rays.

[@Manco654]

In the latest version of SVT-AV1 the denoise filter is disabled by default.

[@WatsitTooyah]

Have been using CQ 30 based on a research post on reddit and preset 2 and have been happy with the results. Also use the film grain settings, thanks for the info

[@YumanoidPontifex]

good video. i'm saying that as someone who detests film grain, i consider it totally vestigial and i have no interest in seeing it or replicating it anywhere :D

[@davidkish4475]

I'm all for maximizing the preservation of source detail but not specifically grain - the per-frame speckles attributable to the larger crystals that made it into a negative, especially in low-light scenes. One would think faster lenses should be expected on equipment that is already hugely expensive for the industry, it wouldn't negate the atmosphere or immersion of the darker scenes - ah, well. Most of what I saw presented with the grainy sources was actually compression noise; though of course some of the original grain was buried in there as well. Film also degrades quickly over time so older titles brought to Blu-ray usually need to be carefully selected, cleaned and processed to prevent further age related graining and color fade from transferring to our digital copies - a labor intensive process that doesn't appear to happen very often, at least so far. I own over 800 licenses and recently started moving them to Plex as I view them, mostly to reduce the annoyance of blu-ray disc-read issues and wear, and for the convenience. I use Handbrake and FFmpeg but I recommend VMAF and VQMT for serious individuals to measure output quality in a least-biased form. At least, to the extent possible.

[@EmilioExploring]

I keep trying but I am not seeing grain? Does the source footage have to have some grain for it to work?

[@user-ru3il1br8j]

There must be auto-grain compensation feature in the future to reproduce the original. Even without the use of AI

[@Tz-eg2dk]

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.

[@Die-Coughman]

I used to do this in vlc when I watched specific anime that used film-grain. I'd just turn on a light film-grain shader and as long as the quality was in the ballpark of bluray it would look great. Covers up a lot of artifacting.

[@ThisOldChris]

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.

[@teksyndicate]

Jellyfin, media player classic, VLC, mpv player all work fine

[@MrAlivallo]

Off topic features I'd like to see in Handbrake: A more robust Preview Tool: Sliding Bar Comparison in the "Preview" section with EST render time, EST Filesize output. And a Historical preview comparison cache/stat would be nice too, with an Estimated filesize tool...Example: If the original file size is 1mb, preview one is rendered at 970kb and took 22sec with xyz settings, preview two is 500k at 30sec with xyyz settings, etc... HUGE time saver IMO.

[@bobclarke5913]

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.

[@stefanweilhartner4415]

theoretically yes. but getting the grain out is not possible without a filter. this is why i do not understand this video. theoretically you would need the denoiser and secondly you would need two parameters for the grain setting, size and intensity.

[@jasonx7803]

@@stefanweilhartner4415 the film-grain=25 setting actually says "denoise it at level 25" not "add 25 of grain" (according to the docs/source) The grain parameters are determined procedurally by comparing the denoised frame to the source frame, so if 25 produces overly smoothed images you should just set it to a value less than 25, so that it doesn't denoise it as much. From the source/docs: "The process of removing grain can sometimes delete very fine detail from the original image, so it should not be used too aggressively. The level passed to the film-grain parameter controls how aggressively this procedure is employed. As a general rule, a film-grain level of around 8 is sufficient for live action video with a normal amount of grain. Noisier video benefits from higher levels in the 10-15 range. 2-D animation typically has less grain, so a level of around 4 works well with standard (hand-drawn) animation. Grainy animation can benefit from higher levels up to around 10." The reference: gitlab.com/AOMediaCodec/SVT-AV1/-/blob/master/Docs/Appendix-Film-Grain-Synthesis.md

[@OctopusPrime138]

You mentioned your background, while the video was informative all I could see was that “Amritage 3: Polymatrix” poster… I thought I was the only person who remembered that movie thanks to “Saturday Anime” on the Sci-Fi channel back in the mid to late 90’s.

[@bar7381]

7:35 only live preview shows what it will look like, if you set your settings to something absurdly bad the preview will still look fine, unless you render out a live preview

[@hdmoviesource]

Can you encode normally like x265? Where you encode frame by frame and include the grain? Di yu have ti encode with AV1 this way?

[@jonscot8393]

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

[@TheMonsterSculpter]

Is this exclusive to SVT AV1 in Handbrake? I tried putting in this code into the field at the bottom on the new Nvenc AV1 10 bit and I'm seeing nothing at all. Ive even tried boosting to something crazy like grain=1000 and there's no difference. Curious if I'm missing something. Before people start saying "never use GPU encoding" I'd like to point out it works very well for me and produces fantastic results at lightning fast speed and comparable size to h265. Only with some certain sources, i lose too much quality and the grain is replaced with some heavy banding and blotching/smoothing of colors. I'm just trying the preserve the grain if I can. Also, are there any codes for preserving things like gamma, contrast and color? Sometimes those get altered and I can't figure out how to stop that.

[@Marvin-dc9rz]

Have you checked the activity log in handbrake? It tells me an allowed range of 0 to 50 for film grain.

[@jaredanson]

What song of yours were you using during the section around 3:39 ?

[@WaddleQwacker]

Maybe the denoise thing is for people doing CGI using ray tracing, as it produces grainy images that you want to denoise. But I would have made the denoising behavior a non-default behavior in that case, it's pretty niche.

[@strkilla89]

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.

[@stefanweilhartner4415]

what' the problem with it? i nevery used it on 4k so far but fhd always works great.

[@strkilla89]

@@stefanweilhartner4415 4k blurays are very much a different beast as they have annoying encryption.

[@quarteratom]

What if I don't want st,upid grain?

[@teksyndicate]

Then blur your footage into a smudgy mess

[@ryan258147]

Looks like film-grain-denoise=0 turning off the film-grain synthesis completely. Try set film-grain-denoise=0 and film-grain to any number, the file size are around the same for any film-grain values.

[@sem_skywalker]

Thanks! This is *exactly* what I wanted to know. ;) Btw... I also have entire TNG on Blu. Great release, except the compression of the grain field definitely could have been better.

[@ingridmoran]

How does this compare to the NLmeans filter options?

[@ajstrobus]

correct about the denoise, but 11:55 that's poorly encoded video blocking bands in the background not grain, i chuckled when you said look at the pretty grain :) that didn't come from the camera :)

[@JeffBourke]

I would only use 10 bit encoding if you're transcoding for use later inside an NLE. 8 bit will only lead to banding in special cases and for 99% of people here, the input file and the display are all 8 bit video. Sure the size might be similar BUT the data is now spread thinner and result may actually be worse than encoding in 8 bit.

[@brandonodon]

Hey Logan, just curious: for anime with grain, would you now recommend AV1 with film grain on and denoise off, or would you still recommend H265 with the grain filter mode as you did in your previous video on encoding anime?

[@teksyndicate]

I render it with av1, grain on, denoise off. The h265 sometimes does look better but it is usually larger

[@lgmnowkondo938]

I stumbled on a 750mb rip of the Naked Gun...it looks so clean on my plasma, like no other movie...is this because they used denoise?

[@toto99303]

Very informative, thanks! I would love to see if the nVidia AV1 hardware encoder has the same grain issues.

[@toxotis70]

Do we need nvidia 4000 series for this?

[@teksyndicate]

The best cards for av1 are the Intel arc gpus right now. Even the cheapest is better than the most expensive Nvidia or AMD

[@jaredanson]

You can get an Intel Arc A380 for like $130, sometimes $100-110 on sale.

[@ralegar1]

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?

[@MrAlivallo]

@11:50 would like to see all three side by side, I constantly do Frame cherry picking with videos, past the point where the time I spend cherry picking could have been spent on more quality Encode. Ahhh the constant search for the perfect settings. You know what would be cool? An AI-companion; that predicts and applies the settings you will most likely pick when you load the video based on the video characteristics and previous settings chosen. Is it Anime? Ahhh, you like this. Is it Film and you want to compress? Here is what you chose last time...

[@Mr_Wh1]

11:56 Now the question is; Can you correctly identify one?

[@teksyndicate]

They are out and about these days... Burning books, calling everything, "woke," and being insecure as fuck.

[@Blink_____]

@@teksyndicate This is some next level irony on display right here. Take all my reddit gold sir, you earned it.🏦

[@dondamon443]

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.

[@ktfjulien]

Awesome video dude

[@praetorxyn]

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.

[@teksyndicate]

If you're keeping the rips, I'd just watch those... why not watch in the highest quality you have.

[@praetorxyn]

@@teksyndicate Yeah. I've thought about getting another NAS to use my existing one as a backup, so I thought about putting the rips on there and the encodes on the main one for Jellyfin. I'm tinkering with it, but I'll have to try your settings and see how long an encode takes.

[@sem_skywalker]

I'd encode everything to high-quality low-bitrate AV1, so you can burn it all on dual-layer DVDs or Blu-rays (if you have a burner for that)... Several copies, to hide in different safe locations. In case of a strong EMF blast, in which case all drives and SSDs could be wiped... But if it is not your own produstions, I would not care too much about doing it, as it would take a lot of time to encode. :P

[@praetorxyn]

@@sem_skywalker Nah, it's just rips from Blu-Rays and DVDs I've bought. AV1 is ideal, but at the moment only my desktop has full support for it (Nvidia Shield Pro with Jellyfin and libvlc seems to Direct Play it, but Shield is not supposed to support AV1 at all, so that may be fishy). Hopefully by the time I start running out of space with full-fat rips, AV1 support will be better and I can consider doing that.

[@lgmnowkondo938]

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.

[@Blink_____]

you need to apply a transformation matrix to the colorspace. There are ways to do it with ffmpeg but they seem a bit tedious and involve math. A quicker way to do it if you have a Nvidia GPU is to index your HDR source file with DGIndexNV, which has a feature to let you preview an HDR - > SDR conversion. The DGDecNV suite of tools offers a workflow that will let you preview the colorspace conversion in realtime, and then be able to load the needed stuff via Avisynth and some plugins, then you can just feed the Avisynth script to ffmpeg as an input source, and render out to a normal Rec.709 colorspace

[@lgmnowkondo938]

@@Blink_____ I figured it out, all you need to do is add the -no-hrd switch in hevc and hdr-enabled=0 for av1. The resulting files are indeed correct! But...following this video will result in an incorrect rip. I may not have written the switches properly above, so just consult the documentation for the codec you are using. Either way, it's a simple last step...and also, the resulting 1080p files can be even smaller than if you rip from a 1080p source...which is nice.

[@OssLess.FreePS]

thx a lot brotha

[@stefanweilhartner4415]

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.

[@ahmetrefikeryilmaz4432]

I have a 4060 on a laptop and 10 bit slowest preset CQC 22 is fucking 63 fps. It is going to take me, wait for it, 1 hour 35 minutes to encode zack snyder's 4 hour long 4K thingy. This thing is nuts. Meanwhile the iGPU, radeon 780m has another av1 encoder that is at least as good as the nvidia one, and yes I ran two ffmmpeg scripts on them simultaneously, I was getting a little bit CPU bottleneck from that monstrous 7840HS but the performance was roughly 1.8X of either encoder by itself.

[@skevenshow]

You r god of decoding

[@bingobaz6402]

First thing, what is Av1?

[@teksyndicate]

The new algorithm... Open... About 2x as good as h.265 (with the right settings), and requires less overhead to play back and stream... But more to render at this point.

[@mgord9518]

A "new" video codec that is a lot more efficient than most things being used currently, it's also completely open source

[@howdyhowdyhowdyhowdyhowdy]

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

[@teksyndicate]

It does some auto calculations if you are outside of the USA. Where are you based? I can manually check and see if I can send you a coupon to override it

[@howdyhowdyhowdyhowdyhowdy]

@@teksyndicate Surrey BC Canada

[@jonnypanteloni]

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

[@VolodkaBobovich]

try to use HandBrake-SVT-AV1-PSY

[@SiimKuusik]

Star Trek Narration video when?

[@teksyndicate]

We made a hilarious one in high school.. no idea where it is

[@asdfgh-mr2lu]

These videos are great. Make more videos about handbrake. But please upload them in 4k, KZbin is compressing the video too much on 1080p , so all of you original grain and AV1 rendered grain differences didn't appear on this video.

[@VladBagrus]

film-grain-denoise=0 gives a least +20% to file size and sometimes +180% and double encode speed compared to film-grain-denoise=1.

[@Carlos-cu4ms]

11:55 "BTW" hahahahahhaha nice

[@teksyndicate]

It's true!

[@quarteratom]

WTF is film grain?

[@unitybeing777]

❤

[@lgmnowkondo938]

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.

[@jonnypanteloni]

I stop at 3:15, I don't like that the codec manipulates the footage, and KZbin has been exhibiting the phenomenon for 4 years at the least.

[@tommik1283]

Better just leave the original remux, even DVD, and just make sure you have enough space... problem solved. Endless time left to do reasonable things now...

[@Fiberton]

I hate grain lol

[@CubeG1]

zero

[@khov]

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

[@espiralproductora]

a large part of this target audience has OCD, so yeah kinda, looks great :D

[@bbrunorocha]

if you are not working everyday with footage with grain, then it might be hard to spot, for me, working as Cinematographer and Colorist, this tutorial helped a lot, I could clearly see the difference and the AV1 codec gave and impressive result, too bad Vimeo didn't properly support it, got a lot of artifacts, had to use h265 instead and lose a lot of the grain quality

[@0penyafaceup]

why was i unsubbed ?wtf ???

[@LordCohliani]

first

[@torguy5763]

I wish you would review new tech, this stuff is so boring. I know KZbin is over saturated with tech content, but it's really who people want to see review tech, too bad.

[@teksyndicate]

This is exactly the opposite of how I feel. New tech is ephemeral... it means nothing in the long run. It's hype and marketing for something that is 3% better than last generation. It makes people constantly desire upgrades they don't need. I will only review stuff if it's something I am getting myself. My top 10 videos are information and tutorials... they don't get as many hits on day 1, but after a year they are still relevant. Then, there's also the fact that tech has always been very boring a depressing to me. I don't care about it. I care about what I can do with it. I care about the games, the creative projects, and stuff like rendering old movies... the tech is only relevant if it enables this. I'm just not an enthusiast.

[@matslarsson5988]

​@@teksyndicateI just want to say, what you are doing is EXACTLY why I come back to your channel year after year while I'm unsubscribing from the ones that ONLY do new stuff. I'm 100% with you. Thanks for the video. I found it extremely interesting!❤

[@richardthemagician8991]

​@Tek Syndicate I feel like if you were to try and keep up with all the latest tech, you'd never have time for anything else. And by the time your video is uploaded, it's already outdated. Not to mention all the nerds that will troll your comments, calling you everything from a sellout to those who feel the need to "correct" you. Sounds like a nightmare.

[@torguy5763]

Yea I get all that, I'm just the kind of person that enjoys new tech, it excites me, however I don't go and buy it everytime it comes out, I just enjoy watching it, but that's me. You do you, I just miss the tech stuff, I've been watching you since I was in my early teens on Tiger Direct lol.

[@torguy5763]

@@abowers What makes you happy may not make someone else happy, this is the fact of life, everyone has their own likes and dislikes. I happen to love new tech, so I was pointing out my personal sadness that he has moved away from tech, be it for the better or worse.

[@SorinAlexandruStuparu]

Man I just watched all your video, caus' you let me the shortcut for the setup string on "If you don't want to watch the video..." Invers Psychol...