I'm curious as to why you're using 12-bit HEVC, when your source is 8 bit, and the quality improvements from using a higher bit depth in transcoding are similar with 10-bit. Is it saving much space? When I played around with it last, there wasn't much to speak of.

Hi.. Thanks for your feedback. That is quite a debatable question. These I'm afraid you will have to try yourself and compare. It varies from time to time. With same CRF, encoding to 10 bit most of the time results in smaller filesize to its 12-bit counterpart. However, same CRF doesn't translate to same quality. You'll have to be the judge. From my experiments, I find that 12-bit most of the time is quite better with same CRF. This, however, is subjective. The quality difference is "probably not meaningful" for the other times though, or just like you said, "there wasn't much to speak of".

It's okay. No complaints. I watched on k-lite MPC (1440p monitor) and I didn't notice any apparent difference from last week when I watched ep1 source 1080p HS. Anyway, HS rips or CR source is mostly abysmal so any loss of quality is barely noticeable even on sub-optimal encoding settings. If we want to get picky about the quality you need to encode bluray version when it comes out. I also think 12bit is not worth a hassle and latest stable version of VLC won't even play this video (green screen and voice don't know if it's due to 12bit support or just this particular video).

marked as remake since this is a reencode

I really was just curious. Using both objective metrics and subjective quality assessments, I noticed a substantial improvement for 10-bit over 8-bit at the same bitrate or CRF when I first started testing x265, but the highest crf I tested was 20. I didn't bother testing 12 bit, because there's not much in the way of hardware support for it planned yet. You may want to update your x265 library to 2.4 or higher - the revised lambda tables in 2.4 increased the quality of my encodes quite a bit.

@Merithyn Thanks for your feedback. I might try to encode the Bluray version if I got spare time when it comes out. Thanks for pointing out the incompatibility issue with VLC. Yes, I just tried, and also got a green screen on the latest stable version. From there, I tried installing the Nightly version of VLC and it seems to handle the 12-bit video. I may just do 10-bit, just for the broader compatibility. @CheekyKoala Thank you. I’m sorry it’s my first time posting here. I’ll mark it myself in the future. @coffeemilk Yes, it is substantial going from 8-bit to 10-bit. The extra bit depth seems to help provide a smoother shading and better retention of details on some frames. I don’t know why but it also seems to produce slightly smaller size on same CRF. Alright man. I’ll give it a shot maybe with the 2.5. Thanks a lot.