In this extended session we have four authors presenting current research on two important topics – encoder optimisations and film grain processing. The encoder optimisation papers include a means to optimize the trade-off between bit storage and transcoding in multi-profile video delivery systems, whilst the other uses a Large Modal Model (LMM) to successfully improve content-aware encoding decisions. Next, film grain. A well-known problem which presents increasing challenges as codec efficiency improves - and it is not going away, as movie directors continue to choose film for artistic effect. One of our papers presents and illustrates the Film Grain Synthesis system employed in VVC, while the other aims to produce an objective perceptual assessment metric by training a model with examples from expert viewers’ subjective assessments. This is important as typical video coding assessment metrics do not work well when comparing synthesized film grain. This session is further supported by a paper providing an update on the adoption and inter-operability status of VVC.