How to increase rendered video quality?

[Dave Haynie]

[Tyler Kemp] “As soon as I put the footage on my computer it doesn’t look as nice. (could just be my laptop’s monitor at that point?)”

Yeah, and for several reasons. For one, a good TV has a high contrast display, usually a 1:15,000 or better dynamic range. Most laptops have a 1:1000 or lower dynamic range, and while some do have better displays, most use a TN-LCD which may only deliver 6-bits per pixel, rather than the 8-bits (for 24-bit color) that you normally expect.

Second problem is timing. When you play a video on a TV display, the refresh is synchronized…. each video field is a television field. On a PC, your video plays into a frame buffer at the video display rate, but it’s refreshed by the PC’s graphic card at that graphics card’s display rate. There are some players that can sync it up, maybe. Most of the time, no. So, simply put, don’t expect video to look as good on most laptops as on a good television.

[Tyler Kemp] “When I render the footage in Vegas using “best” quality, and 100 for sharpness, it looks nothing like the quality that I know the camera is recording.

I usually render as a 8mb/s WMV file, although I’ve tried a few others that didn’t increase the quality noticeably, but did make the file size tremendously large and couldn’t even play back on my computer.”

Well, let’s consider your camera video. The Vixia HF R32 is a mid-range consumer quality HD camcorder, that records 1920×1080 at 24Mb/s in the AVCHD format. You didn’t describe the resolution of your WMV conversion, but think about this: WMV has a lower “coding efficiency” than the AVC that’s part of AVCHD. “Coding efficiency” basically means, how much can I compress a video and have it look as good as some specific reference. In short, if I’m recording AVC at 24Mb/s, I might need to record WMV at the same resolution, but at 35Mb/s, to look just as good as my original video. And you’re converting, so there will be some small loss doing that.

But you’re also crunching it way down. Given the difference in coding efficiency, your 8Mb/s WMV is effectively compressed about 4x more than your original video. So there is absolutely no reason to not expect it to look much worse.

Before anyone can make a recommendation on your recoding efforts, the big question: why? What’s your goal? Why are you recompressing the video to a much lower bitrate? What’s your intention for this video? If you’re thinking about online uploads, I recommend one of the “Internet” formats (Sony AVC or Main Concept AVC presets).. these will look pretty good on your PC, and they’re generally good enough that, when YouTube or Vimeo or whoever recompresses them again after you upload, you’ve probably done as well as possible (eg, higher bitrates wouldn’t look better in most cases).

-Dave