Handbrake settings for archival copies

[Conor Keating]

So at this point I've finally nailed down my own Handbrake settings for my "archival" copies of SD DVDs in my collection (i.e. focusing on quality over size or speed), and I'm curious what settings other people use for their encodes.

My (usual) settings are:

• Non-anamorphic PAR (I've heard anamorphic PARs can cause issues with things like Topaz Video Enhance AI)
• Naively upscaled (Lanczos) from 480p to 720p
  • Preserve ultrafine detail that could/would be lost given lossy (MPEG-2) source and destination (H.265) formats if my side-by-side comparisons are anything to go by
  • Cleaner lines/transitions/edges between areas of similar color (chin/neck, etc)
  • Use x265's lookahead feature, which is disabled below 720p
• RF18 to preserve most of the detail of the scene (was using RF16 on my initial anamorphic 480p encodes) while still taking up about half the space of the original VOB files
• "Faster" preset, so that titles encode faster than their actual runtimes
• 10-bit x265 to keep dark scenes from being hideously blocky (along with "aq-mode=3")
• Light/Ultralight de-noising (depending on preset, UL for Film+Higmotion, Light for Tape)
• "Fast" de-interlacing using EEDI2

With all that said, what settings do you all use for your media? I've only got SD media at the moment owing to not having a Blu-ray drive, so I don't really have any custom presets ready to go for HD media.