Is there a way to improve quality for videos with snow/confetti/LCD in background? The effect I'm referring to:


                
            

Essentially, the snow/confetti in the shot means lots of motion, hence a lot of the available bitrate is taken up by it, thereby reducing the quality of the other elements in the shot.

In particular, I see this problem with videos that have animated LCD displays in the background:


                
            


                
            

Those videos are uploaded by the original TV broadcaster (with access to the highest quality original video), and more or less top out looking like 480p, even when viewing at 720p or 1080p. The same quality issues appear in videos on the broadcaster's own site, so it's not just YouTube's compression going overboard:

http://www.mbcplus.com/Player/MusicBox/RetrieveClipInfo.aspx?clipId=736

If a human were deciding what elements in the shot to dedicate the bitrate to, they would obviously allocate it to the foreground objects (the people) at the expense of lowering the quality of the background (the LCD).

Is there any technique (encoding/compression/etc.) that can improve the quality of the foreground elements when such a background is present in the shot?

And I'm sure some people would also be interesting in any techniques that can be done at the time of filming that would produce better results, when they cannot change the content of the shot and have to deal with snow/confetti/animated LCD in the background.
Yes this feature exists, but it is not widely used yet.

Texas Instrument developped such solution, called SmartCodec, which looks to be implemented in a Samsung video surveillance system: Megapixel Camera This is a HW based solution, that is for market of video surveillance.

I think it would be implemented in future video codecs HEVC, adopted by many boradcaster, and it's called Region-of-Interest Based Rate Control Scheme
HEVC is already released, and in used today, but this feature really looks new. And it will take months~years for it to be implemented in the encoder on the production house, I guess. Apparently, it is something really new, since a paper about that has been accepted for presentation at the ICIP 2016, which took place in september.