Dark Scene Quality - Harry Potter

I just finished encoding Harry Potter with CCE. DVD2AVI said 99% film so I forced film and encoded One-pass as indicated in "getting the most out of CCE" except to add a checkmark in "progressive flag" and then using one pass in multipass VBR, selected average bitrate to shrink it to fit on one DVD. I then ran "pulldown" to be able to import it to Maestro. Everything went as planned. My question revolves around the quality at the beginning of the movie. It opens with a very dark scene at night. I distinctly see various shades of black/dark blue (pixelation ?) swirling around during this opening part of the movie. When it reaches the daytime or lighted scenes, the quality is "original" perfect. Any thoughts on CCE setting adjustments that might deal with this? I searched for "Harry Potter", "dark scene quality", etc. and didn't get the posts I hoped might explain it.

Maybe the minimum bitrate is too low? You could try encoding the beginning with different minimum bitrates and see if it helps.

Minimum Bitrate 

Raising the minimum bitrate makes sense. If there's little to no activity in the scene, then the bitrate used would be the minimum bitrate in the settings. I've always followed the CCE guides and other suggestions that have rarely mentioned raising the minimum bitrate. The guides suggest leaving the minimum at zero (0) during the first pass and don't mention any adjustment to that setting for the following multipass settings. I'll drop in another reply after I've tested this. Thanks.

Minimum Bitrate 

Demuxed vob1 to process the first 15 minutes of Harry Potter with DVD2AVI and CCE using a higher minimum bitrate (2000 vs. 0). No noticeable improvement in the black/dark blue background. Might be the 1% NTSC since I forced film for the entire movie which DVD2AVI showed as 99% film.

Saw the same problem in "Dances with Wolves". Just for grins, I encoded using REMPEG. Dark scenes encoded properly however, the overall quality was not as good as CCE. Anyone know what REMPEG does that CCE won't do to handle dark scenes? Better yet, does anyone know what to set in the encoding options of CCE so it will process the dark scenes properly? I know REMPEG processes each GOP so that may be what solves my encoding problem on dark scenes. By the way, I'm only encoding to reduce movie to fit on single DVD+r not to shrink for VCD or SVCD.

bweeston, had the same problem with HP. But those pixelation is already on the original DVD but re-encoding w/CCE seem to enforce that effect. I tried using bitrates up to 6000 kbps during the first chapter but still didn't get the original quality. Also tried to use a temporal smoother; best I got was when I used 16..235 luminance level in CCE. But, to make a long story short, I ended up with combining the original chapter 1 with my CCE encoded rest of the movie (done with Maestro). -sundance-

If you can clean the source with some heavy filtering (I recommend Convolution3d for any noise reduction), you can do an Avisynth script which would filter the necessary points and leave the rest as they are. This way you could encode the whole movie with CCE and wouldn't need to join the files later.

Is Convolution3d a standard filter in avisynth? I don't see any syntax for it in the docs that came with AVISYNTH 2.06.