been a while since I've seen blocking and smearing this bad in an HEVC release, and right at the beginning too. The source is kinda nasty yeah but you made it 100x worse, come on now.

Worse encode quality I've seen so far, needs some serious improvement on your method.

i'd be shocked if they could actually manage to condense this down to 300-500mb. The style is crazy as most have pointed out, and the filesize for usualy hevc recipes is over a gig.

@Infinion yeah for "psychovisually lossless compared to BD" HEVC encodes, over a gig is normal. Even over 2 GB. But it's possible to make 300-400 MB HEVC encodes of visually complex anime. You just have to understand how the codec works, how the encoder you're using works, and have various tools and filterchains in place to deal with source problems like banding, and grain which drives up bitrate. Judas makes acceptable HEVC encodes (I say "acceptable" because they are just so) that regularly come in under 400 MB, and often under 300 MB depending on source complexity. And of course AV1 can't be beat for compression on sources with lots of simple and flat animation.