Tutorial: High-Touch Encoding With Microsoft Expression Encoder 2

—Sample Rate: 44.1 kHz—This is the same as the source. Also, 44.1 is the native audio rendering mode for Silverlight, so it offers the same quality and better performance compared to 48 kHz.

—Bits per Sample: 16—This is the only option for WMA, and it also matches the source.

—Channels: Stereo—WMA VBR audio requires stereo. I’d use mono if I needed to do 32Kbps, since stereo separation isn’t important to the experience here. Like other modern codecs, WMA in stereo mode functions essentially as a mono codec when encoding mono sources.

—Audio peak bitrate: 96Kbps—Again, the total peak comes out as 1Mbps. The audio isn’t that difficult or variable, so a higher bitrate likely wouldn’t sound any different.

—Audio peak buffer size: 1.5Kbps—The default is almost always fine.

Advanced Codec Settings
—Video Complexity: Best (5)—It’s a short clip at a reasonable frame size. The default Complexity (3) probably would have been just as good, but the encode only takes about 12 minutes at 5, so I didn’t bother doing anything less than the max (I love my new eight-core workstation). Even on a slower machine, the encoding time would still be less than I spent setting up all my markers.

Perceptual Optimizations
—Adaptive Dead Zone: Conservative—This is the default setting. It softens out edges and flatter areas that might otherwise ring or get too blocky, but not by too much. I tried both Off and Aggressive with this source, and Conservative definitely looked the best, as usual.

—Dquant: I-Frames Only—Differential Quantization is a codec mode that applies less aggressive compression in smoother parts of the image. There aren’t many keyframes/I-frames (mainly the few dozen we set manually, and perhaps a few more natural ones), but they contain the important visual data of the faces on the cards, so we want them to be as high quality as possible. DQuant spends too many bits on smooth parts of the image to use on every frame, but upping the bitrates on a few dozen I-frames won’t hurt overall quality much, and it improves the quality of the static parts of the card we wind up staring at for those many seconds.

Filters
—In-Loop: On—In-Loop should always be on unless using Simple Profile; it helps reduce artifacts and improves quality (particularly at these aggressive bitrates) with no real downside.

—Overlap: On—The Overlap filter further hides artifacts, which are a challenge with motion graphics at such a low bitrate. It can reduce detail a bit at higher bitrates, but that’s not the scenario here.