Preprocessing

There are great benefits from processing videos prior to encoding. The right preprocessing can gain you time, bandwidth and increase the image quality of your final video.
There are six important processes that you should consider applying to your source video prior to encoding:

1) De-interlacing. Will avoid creating line crawling artifacts.

2) Noise reduction. Motion adaptive noise reduction can greatly improve the performance of your encoder as random noise in images produce artifacts in the encoded image.

3) Color Space Conversion. Use of high quality color space conversion algorithms can reduce color bands and “blotches” as bit reduction and color plane decimation (going from RGB or 4:4:4 to 4:2:0 for example.)

4) Resampling and resizing. Will greatly reduce encoding time and improve quality. Specially true if you are down sampling or reducing sizes.

5) Cropping. Same as above.

6) Frame Rate Conversion. Will allow you to use high quality frame rate conversion algorithms. If you are reducing the frame rate, you’ll have the added benefit of faster encodes.