@almosely: i don't understand anything about what you wrote!!! I will try a higher bitrate next time and hope it works...in my little computer screen the videos look fine but maybe on a 55 inch led is not the same...
He, he, sorry!! I only want to help making high quality videos with optimal bitrates. There are several options to determine the bitrate of a video encoding.
CBR (constant bitrate): YOU determine the bitrate. It stays the same, every frame, independent of quality and content of the frames. This is only a option of choice, if a hardware-buffer of a mobile device or a specific standalone player has to be maintained. For the highlights here, it's not a good choice.
ABR (arbitrary bitrate): YOU determine the average bitrate of the video. The encoder is allowed to higher or lower the bitrate sometimes (different frames), but in the end, the full video is going to have the bitrate you determined.
2-Pass: This is a good option, if you want a specific filesize of your video. With x264-CoDec I have only few experience yet. But with Xvid/DivX, normally you encode the video the first pass with Quantizer 2 (frames can be encoded with Quantizers from 1 to 31; best - badest). After this first encoding pass, you have a specific file-size for the "best" possible quality (there's no really visible difference between quantizer 1 and 2, but a huge one in file-size). Usually 75% of this file-size is good enough to get a still very good looking video. So, you calculate 75% from the 1st-pass-file-size and tell the encoder in a 2nd encoding-pass to keep that new, lower file-size, to get a video with 75% of full quality in the end. This takes more time, but is a good option, if the file-size is not important.
CRF (Constant Rate Factor): With x264 now there's a new option for the bitrate. You can choose a CRF value between 1 to 51. The standard value is 23. This is pretty the same as a 70% quality 2-pass Xvid-encoding. A good value is between 20-22. With this option (CRF), the x264-encoder chooses the bitrates for every frame himself, to maintain a specific quality. Now you can get a 2-Pass encoding with a specific quality with only one pass. And the bitrate could be higher oder lower in the end, but this is depending of the qualtiy and complexity of the original filmmaterial. There has to be an option for CRF in your encoding program, it's a standard-option of x264. This is the best choice for x264-encoding! ONLY, if you have a blueray-movie with very high grain, it could be, that CRF calculates very high bitrates, to maintain the grain, but in that case, a 2-pass with a self determined bitrate could be a wiser option, to lower the bitrate.
Now, your encoded highlights have flickering beneath the field-lines of the court. Sometimes, theres is blocking in the blue areas. And almost everytime, the field-lines are a little bit distorted. This would be better, if the bitrate is higher. So, simply use CRF (20-23) and let the encoder decide, how much bitrate a frame needs to get good quality. To self-determine the bitrate via CBR/ABR makes no sense, if the video is not for streaming purpose or to play on a hardware restricted mobile phone. If you can't find the CRF-option, tell me, which tool you use, to encode. I will install it and find the option for you!
And, perhaps there are other options to tune, like me, subme, mb-tree, ref, bframes etc. which have big influence in quality.
