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Long video in HD but low quality output, need a hand
Good day mine fine gentlemen and gals of the internet.
So I recently edited a long length video ( approx. 1hr45) and the resolution was at HD. Now, I am not necessarily a newbie but I am also no pro.
The Video itself was wrapped in quicktime MOV file so I wasn’t working with native files directly from the camera. So when I got around to export
the video I knew that I had to either rewrap the video but with an H.264 codec. However, I soon realized that the good quality video left me with a beefy file size.
So, I input the h.264 format and used the Vimeo 1080 HD preset. I then lowered the target bitrate so that my file size was max 1.5 gb. The quality was not the greatest to say the least but still presentable.My question is should I variate the target bitrate to reduce the filesize or the maximum bitrate? If so, in which ways do they affect my video quality ?
Also, I then uploaded this file to vimeo and it took hours for a file size this large. Funny enough, once uploaded to vimeo, I was suggested that the video size could look better if the video was at 10,000 kbs! What am I doing wrong?
Best regards!
chunky
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5 Replies
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You can have a small file, or a high-quality file…but not both, you decide.
What was the size of the original video file? You can’t expect to compress it 10 to 20x smaller and have it still look good.
2-Pass VBR will benefit the quality versus CBR when working with low bit rates, but the improvement would be slight, don’t expect miracles. You need bandwidth for quality and that means larger files unfortunately.
Thanks
Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers -
I’m trying to understand this… first you had camera files that you transcoded to an unnamed QT Movie codec. Then you rendered out an h.264 file, then put that file in AME and recompressed it to a smaller h.264 file? That’s what I’m getting from this. That’s a lot of recompressing! I don’t know what codec you transcoded to, but you don’t want to render your final out twice to h.264, that will make your video look bad. You only want one really lossy render if you have to. If you need to render out to a larger master file, use something like ProRes or DNXHD or something. Then use that to render out your really lossy h.264 for Vimeo. And yes, you can get a good looking h.264 file at under 10,000 kbps. Larger doesn’t mean it will be better.
As far as your Target and Maximum rates, it should render close to your target. You’ll want to set the maximum a little more than the target rate just for those higher detail scenes, but AME will stick close to the target.
TC -
Most of the original footage vary depending on the size but I believe all around saved as Prores files and because if this have a large file size. So compressing them down to H264 files is still within reason. I will give it a 2 pass VBR and see where it goes from there. Thanks for the response!
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Hey TC, So the unnamed QT MOV files are pro res files, they are all pretty big in size and though I cant say for sure they are Prores I am almost sure they are. In the end, I followed the same workflow that you had in mind but I think my problem is finding the sweet spot for a lossy H264 render and quality. Most of my exports renders end up being about 1.3 gb and are.. okay. Ill try to go at it again, my only problem aside from that are the looooong upload times with a file of 1.3gb. Thanks for the reply!
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1.3 GB isn’t bad for 1 hour 45 minutes. Some things to make it smaller: Drop the bit rate, shrink the image size (1080 to 720), have fewer fps (30 to 24).
Try some of the Vimeo presets as starting points.
Good Luck!
TC
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