Color Banding while decoding MJPEG

[John Rofrano]

[Carlos Zapater] “Maybe it will enlight us :)”

Yes it has grasshopper… 😉 They say a picture is worth a 1000 words.

Those “jaggies” are just normal interlacing. There is nothing wrong with the footage. You are watching interlaced video on a progressive device. The Vegas preview is deinterlacing just for viewing purposes. Watch that footage on a TV and it will look great. Watch it in VLC and tell it to deinterlace and it will look great.

If you want the footage to be progressive then you probably have to press the configure button under the advanced render template settings and configure Morgan to produce progressive video. Simply changing the template to progressive in Vegas does not configure the codec to do the same. You must configure the codec too.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Carlos Zapater]

[John Rofrano] “If you want the footage to be progressive then you probably have to press the configure button under the advanced render template settings and configure Morgan to produce progressive video.”

I must be stupid… I know in older versions of vegas you could access to codec settings pressing that button but in Vegas 11 I’m not able to locate it. It seems like you only can make changes in the template without changing the codec or codec settings.

Also, you cannot create a template from scratch defining the codec to use.

Anyway when I said that preview looked great I was wrong. In my home pc I only have one monitor and preview window was small, so it looked good.

But when I arrived to pc2 with two monitors I saw in preview monitor that I was wrong. The jaggy picture was there.

Looking at the picture more accurately it doesn’t seem an interlace issue to me. The jagged lines of the interlacing appear when there’s some movement and they are thinner than those. In this picture all the image is afected, even the static text that says “Zapa_ESP grabbed and stabbed…” and the other one at the bottom. I would say that it is like a picture with half the lines needed to complete the real resolution and that’s why when it was small it looked good. If it was about interlacing it would look bad despite dimensions, I think.

In Premiere CS6 it also appear jagged in preview in real dimensions which take things weirder as it uses directshow If I’m not wrong. It seems indeed a codec setting or limitation (again). If you click morgan codec properties in the system tray quick access there are some deinterlace related checkboxes that doesn’t affect the preview of both editors.

You said that you have a good picture in preview. Was it at original size? Are you using 32 or 64 bits OS? Is your Vegas 64 or 32 bits?

I really appreciate your help and time, John. This thing is driving me crazy!

[John Rofrano]

[Carlos Zapater] “I must be stupid… I know in older versions of vegas you could access to codec settings pressing that button but in Vegas 11 I’m not able to locate it. It seems like you only can make changes in the template without changing the codec or codec settings.”

You have to select the correct format to begin with. The Morgan and PicVideo codecs are Video for Windows (VFW) coded so you must start with the Video for Windows (*.avi). In your screen shot you are using the MainConcept AVC which always uses the AVC H.264 codec. You’ll see the Configure button after you select the Morgan MJPEG Codec under Video for Windows.

I’ve looked into this further and I believe that the Morgan M-JPEG codec only supports interlaced rendering (i.e., it will not render progressive).

[Carlos Zapater] “Looking at the picture more accurately it doesn’t seem an interlace issue to me. “

It may be an interlace issue with the project settings. Can you post a screenshot of your project video properties?

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Carlos Zapater]

[John Rofrano] “You have to select the correct format to begin with. The Morgan and PicVideo codecs are Video for Windows (VFW) coded so you must start with the Video for Windows (*.avi). In your screen shot you are using the MainConcept AVC which always uses the AVC H.264 codec. You’ll see the Configure button after you select the Morgan MJPEG Codec under Video for Windows. “

I see… but the final format must be an H264 .mp4 video. Do you think that first I have to render it to Morgan an then again to H264? The thing is that original clips are captured in MJPEG but final video has to be in H264.

About the properties. There you have the screenshot.

The size of the picture is 1280×800 because is the closest to 720p but in a 16:10 proportion instead of 16:9. That is because the screen capture is also 16:10 and didn’t want to crop it or stretch it. I tried also with a 720p project but results were the same, so I went back to original size.

[John Rofrano]

[Carlos Zapater] “I see… but the final format must be an H264 .mp4 video. Do you think that first I have to render it to Morgan an then again to H264?”

Sorry I got confused with all of this talk about M-JPEG. Yes, you can render your final format to directly to MP4. The Morgan codec was to REPLACE the PicVideo codec as a capture format. There is no need for that… read below what your problem is:

[Carlos Zapater] “About the properties. There you have the screenshot.”

Here is what I believe your problem is judging from your project properties:

You are capturing with the PicVideo M-JPEG codec which is INTERLACED! Your project is set to Progressive and your DEINTERLACE method is set to NONE. This is why you have an INTERLACE problem. (i.e., your jaggie lines) You are not handling the interlacing properly.

This is what you need to do:

Set your project to Interlaced either Upper Field or Lower Field depending on how PicVideo captures. You MUST get this right! Use a free utility like MediaInfo to see if the captured files are upper field first or lower field first and set your project to match. Alternately, use the Match Media button:

Set your Deinterlace Method to Blend Fields. You MUST set this so that Vegas Pro will deinterlace your video correctly. This is the primary reason you have jaggie lines which are interlace lines and yes there are two sets of interlace lines… the fat ones caused by your project being set up incorrectly and the thin ones that are added by rendering improperly handled interlaced video back to interlaced again.

Once you have your project set up correctly your problems should go away.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Carlos Zapater]

I’ve done something that have messed up Morgan codec. I was following your indications and it didn’t solve the problem. Mediainfo confirmed what you said. Raw videos were encoded interlaced top field first which kind of shocked me as when I played them in VLC with deinterlace disabled didn’saw anything that suggested it was not progressive. But when I saw video in preview window it was ‘double-jagged’. Tried all combinations and field orders but it didn’t fix the preview or the render.

Then I decided to install back PicVideo to search for an option to encode in progressive and that made something that for now I couldn’t fix. Morgan can be installed but it is not active. No matter if it is alone or not. I’ve passed all afternoon installing and uninstaling codecs and neither Vegas nor media players detected it.

So, I think I’m going to give it up for the time being. The only workflow that actually ‘worked’ was PicVideo with Premiere and that’s the one I’m going to adopt although I hate Premiere and it doesn’t recognize different audio streams in a single avi as Vegas does. It is a shame but … 🙁

Thank you very much for your guidance John. I hope to return you a favor in future.

[John Rofrano]

[Carlos Zapater] “So, I think I’m going to give it up for the time being. The only workflow that actually ‘worked’ was PicVideo with Premiere and that’s the one I’m going to adopt although I hate Premiere and it doesn’t recognize different audio streams in a single avi as Vegas does. It is a shame but … :(“

I assume you got PicVideo capture working again. Did you set your Vegas Pro project up with Field Order Upper Field First, set your Deinterlace Method to Blend Fields, and render to MainConcept AVC progressive? That should have worked. You could try setting the Deinterlace Method to Interpolate Fields and see if that works better. One of those should solve your problem.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Carlos Zapater]

Yes, I did it when I read your lasts suggestions and before I messed up all the things with the Morgan codec (remember that with PicVideo and Vegas the only issue I had was the color banding)and as I said in last post the result was bad. It mixed the jagged edges with the interlaced effect. Some kind of “double jagging”. Then I switched back to PicVideo to see the interlace settings and couldn’t switch again to Morgan.

[John Rofrano]

So you you need further help or are you just going to use Premiere?

I would uninstall Morgan, uninstall PicVideo, then install Morgan and capture with that codec to see if it solves your banding problem. Then set your project to match the interlaced video that you captured and it should all work.

~jr

http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com

[Carlos Zapater]

[John Rofrano] “I would uninstall Morgan, uninstall PicVideo, then install Morgan and capture with that codec to see if it solves your banding problem. Then set your project to match the interlaced video that you captured and it should all work.”

Does Morgan encodes in interlaced as well?

Believe me. I have tried that and a hundred more combinations, rebooting always when I changed something and the system didn’t recognize Morgan again. Neither Vegas nor video players.

Hmm… now that I’m thinking about it maybe I can restore the system to a point before things began to misbehave. Let me try and I’ll tell you.