Thanks for the help Brian. From an Internet search I find there is very little useful information about these options. I tried the -intra option and added -bv 50M so my libx264 filter lineup is:
-c:v libx264 -intra -vb 50M -crf 18 ouput.mov
MediaInfo says 14.7 Mb/s ! (this is with a lighter noise filter setting)
If it’s any consolation I can’t see degradation in the video. But, then it’s old cruddy video anyway. Is it worth the extra trouble getting the bitrate up?
-=Ken=-
EDIT: Shoot! I messed up the video bitrate configuration. No complaints on my command line though. I will try this yet another time…
I have been fiddling with various encoder configurations for a while now and gotten very frustrated. I have tried to “do the math” and such to get things to work right but find myself unable to do that properly. I did try using Shotcut as a simple converter and that looks promising. I’m not anything near a rocket scientist (or programer) so I have ordered a 4 TB drive to hold all my converted assets.
It takes a while, especially for me, to understand what I am seeing regarding defects in my video. I finally figured out what I was really seeing in my second frame-grab. It is called “moire” and we are not going to be able to remove it from our video. I tried using at least a half dozen filters to get rid of it but it wouldn’t go away. It occurs because of the video camera sensor aliasing with strong parallel lines. The only correction is to apply a blur filter to the affected area of the frame - or maybe just ignore it.