The Walking Dead S06E01 First Time Again 1080p WebDL x265 HEVC 5.1 noobless[UTR]

Rick and the group continue to have trouble assimilating into Alexandria. Multiple threats lead the community to adopt a mindset of hardness, while Rick's group must take a step back from the violence they've come to embrace.

The source filename is mislabeled. This is S06E01.

Season: 6
Episode: 1
Video: 1080p | x265 (H.265/HEVC) | CRF 22 | slow preset
Audio: English | AAC LC | 6 channels | Target Quality 0.4 | 332 Kbps Variable (378 Kbps max)
Subtitles: English SRT, English SDH
Source: The.Walking.Dead.S06E02.1080p.WEB-DL.DD5.1.H.264-Cyphanix.mkv (5535 Kbps)

This has got to be just about the ugliest source material I've ever had the displeasure of working with. For one thing, the bitrate is too low in places, revealing artifacts. The grain is also horrendous and there is some color banding present. Why the studio allowed the network to release a product this poor is beyond me. On top of all that, the B&W segments of this episode wreaked havoc on x265's efficiency. This is most of the reason for the weighty file size.

Pre-processing the grain and color banding out took quite a bit of tweaking for me to get right. The steps involved were: removing the source's grain, gradient scaling the existing color banding, and adding in ordered grain (good, compressible grain which will retain detail to prevent x265's own notorious color banding). Anyway, the end result is a print that has much higher quality than all of those available to date (PSA's x265, DIMENSION's 10GB HDTV, and the Cyphanix source). I did multiple screenshot comparisons and a three-way split of video segments in an NLE to come to this conclusion. These comparisons included PSA's 1080p print. See screenshots below.

Until we get a BluRay, I believe this is the best (shitty) product we're going to get. Even then I suspect the quality will only maginally improve. I'm willing to bet that they purposely dithered the color sequences because they didn't want to spend enough time improving the opening scenes' CGI.

As for the timeliness, or lack thereof, of this encode, I ran out of disk space 80% of the way into the first encode and had to restart. I did start encoding the HDTV source as well, but since E02 is upon us, I think I will abandon that approach.



Full media info:


These screens are not representative of the actual file. They are comparisons to demonstrate the quality difference between the source, this encode, and the PSA encode.