After all 261 shots are processed, they're stitched together and encoded into shareable video.
A lossless reassembly of a 16-minute HD reel would need hundreds of
gigabytes, so --clean stitches the per-shot finals
directly into the compressed outputs (via FFmpeg's concat
demuxer), no giant intermediate master ever touches disk.
Everything encodes at 10-bit, even though the source is humble 8mm. Why? Denoising and grading create smooth gradients (skies, walls, out-of-focus backgrounds), and 8-bit's 256 levels aren't enough to render them without visible banding (stair-steps). 10-bit gives 1024 levels.
AV1 (SVT-AV1), 10-bit, smallest file, best quality, modern. The one to watch.
H.264 (x264), 10-bit,
+faststart, universally playable anywhere, ideal for uploading.
That completes the pipeline: each stage in a fixed order, correcting one defect of a 40-year-old home movie and turning a flickering, scratched, faded reel back into a clean, watchable video.
av1_crf: 22,
x264_crf: 18, yuv420p10le (10-bit), baked grain only.