Standard Extreme UP!
In the MFEL product, when defining services there are three options available that help to determine Picture Quality. These are Standard, Extreme and UP!. Each of these settings enables a different set of tools, or the way each tool works. UP! will generally produce the best PQ, while Standard will give the highest density.
The Extreme setting tries to maintain density and PQ.
There are 8 parameters that are changed depending on the setting used. Some parameters are the same between settings and not all 8 parameters will change between the different Standard-Extreme-UP! Settings.
Note: These are not user definable settings, a user can only pick either Standard, Extreme or UP!. A user does not have access to the individual parameter settings.
Interlace Management
The decision to use PAFF/MBAFF is (like all the settings here) a trade off between achieving the best picture quality or best density. More tools equals more processing power equals less density.
When using PAFF, the MFEL encodes each image in either field or frame mode.
MBAFF can encode parts of the image using either field or frame mode at the macro block level.
PAFF is generally better when encoding fast moving content, MBAFF is better when encoding slower scenes, especially where a moving object is present on a static background.
PAFF+MBAFF are H.264 only
Remember, HEVC is not optimised for Interlaced content, you can only switch between frame and field encoding per GOP.
UP! has advantages at lower bit rates, for example in H.264 HD, if you operating at around 12Mb/s then UP! has no advantages in terms of PQ over Extreme, but Extreme will still give you better density.