Watching this episode via a clean H264 render reveals something cruel. The editors use constantly—Claire’s face dissolving into a map, the campfire dissolving into a memory of Jamie. In a low-bitrate encode (say, a 500MB AVI from the dark ages), those dissolves become artifact-ridden slush.
Episode 14 is drenched in atmospheric diffusion—morning mist over Glencoe, the muted greens of a Scottish autumn, the gray-blue of Claire’s despair. H264 handles gradients remarkably well. A lesser codec (looking at you, early MPEG-4) would band the sky into ugly color blocks. H264’s 4:2:0 chroma subsampling, when given a decent bitrate, preserves the painterly quality of the cinematography. outlander s01e14 h264
This is the deep cut. This is The Search . Watching this episode via a clean H264 render
Have a preferred release group for your Outlander collection? Or a scene that looked terrible in a bad encode? Sound off in the comments below. H264’s 4:2:0 chroma subsampling, when given a decent
After Jenny returns home to her baby, Claire joins forces with Murtagh.