• Adobe Media Encoder

  Horrible artifacting with h.264

  Posted by Mike Watts on June 9, 2015 at 4:07 pm

  I have a mograph piece I’m trying to compress and at a certain point it just looks horribly degraded. My workflow is DNxHD 175 8 bit out of Premier, which looks great. Then use ME with QT-h.264 at 14000kbps. Normally this looks good with footage but it’s looking terrible with the large blocks of colors in this mograph piece. It needs to be uploaded to youtube and played from a crappy laptop smoothly. Anyone have any advice?

  EDIT* I seem to have improved this issue quite a bit by using the h.264 container on it’s own rather than the QT one. Weird since I’ve been told to use QT multiple times. Maybe it is better for footage but not graphics.

  Mike Watts replied 10 years, 10 months ago 2 Members · 2 Replies
• 2 Replies

• 

  Ryan Holmes

  June 9, 2015 at 9:47 pm

  Use the mp4 format and the h.264 codec. If you’re uploading it to YouTube why does your data rate matter? YouTube will choke down just about anything. Typically for a YouTube upload I’ll export out a h.264 piece at 15mbps (or as high as 65mbps depending on video length and content). YouTube will reencode anything you put up anyway, so feed it something high quality for it to make the derivative resolutions from (144p, 240p, 480p, 720p, 1080p, etc).

  If you want something that will play smoothly on a person’s laptop that’s a different story. I’ve found that a 1280×720 h.264 mp4 at 5mbps seems to run well on most laptops made within the last 5-6 years.

  Ryan Holmes
  http://www.ryanholmes.me
  @CutColorPost
• 

  Mike Watts

  October 21, 2015 at 5:34 pm

  Never answered this but thanks. I don’t know why QT h.264 is so bad but just putting it in the mp4 container did the trick. You can go down to 3-4mps and it still looks good. QT has to be absurdly high to not look terrible for some reason.

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