Encoding black en white movies

Hi, I'm a newbie and I have started encoding with to old black and white films: "Hiroshima mon amour" and "Magnificient Ambersons". Both of them are pal 4:3 films. I've followed the GKnot method and I changed a little bit the avs script to add some other filters. The filters I have applied are (that's the case of Hiroshima mon amour, Magnificient Ambersons it's very similar): greyscale FieldDeinterlace() crop(15,0,693,568) BicubicResize(448,336,0,0.75) SpatialSoften(2,5,5) Resolution: 448x336 And I've used divx 5.02 pro codecs with 2 passes with a bitrate of 980. The options I have checked are: -GMC -Bidirectional encoding -Maximum interval keyfram 60 -Maximum quantizer: I've tried with 8 and 6 -Minimum quantizier: I've tried 2 and 1 With this settings I've come across the following problems: -With "Hiroshima mon amour" my file is smaller than what it was suposed. I've tried rising the bitrate to 1000 kbps, but the final avi still was 25 MB of what was supposed (although the minimum quantizier I've tried was 1) -With both films, I get black squares in the image in the dark scenes. That's the BIG problem I have, I don't know how to get rid of them. Does anybody know how can I reduce the effect of black squares in the image ?? And what's the reason why "Hiroshima mo amour" cannot bigger then 575 MB ?? Thanks for any help.

Some movies just compress very well. I don't know the length of your movies, but old black & white movies are usually quite hard to compress so it doesn't really fit in your case. Do you have such such low maximum key-frame interval just to increase the filesize? Otherwise I recommend using ~125 with 25 fps movies. In my tests that has been "the magic limit" where size and "searchiblity" comes together. If you disable B-frames you are quite likely to reach your desired filesize. Also check

Hi and Welcome to the Forum- Hiroshima Mon Amour is only 88 minutes long. So I think if you increased the resolution, you'd come up with a larger file size. Next time run a Compress Test first to help choose the proper resolution. As for the blocks in dark areas, well, welcome to the wonderful world of MPEG4. Not much you can do about them except perhaps to use the MPEG2DEC3.dll with the lumafilter option. You can find more information about the problem and the solutions proposed . Warning-this is a very long thread and some of it applies only to XviD.

Thanks for the answer. About the resolution, using GKnot, I did the compression test and if the resolution was greater I came up with ratios of 50%. And besides this, if I raise the resolution, wouldn't I have more problems with blocks ?? Right now I'm gonna read this thread. Thanks for the information.