-
vob files always look pixelated after import.
Hi guys, hello once again 🙂
What ever I do this footage always looks terrible in AE, it plays and looks great in every media player but as soon as it’s loaded in to AE it go’s pixelated and washed out with a severe drop in quality.
I don’t know what to do, they’re vob rips mostly from public domain dvd’s, I’m guessing it has something to do with mpeg, so I’ve tried different conversion apps and it seems what ever format I convert to these clips never look any good.
Would you guys have a look at a clip? I’m praying someone here will be able to crack this with me. It’s an uncompressed raw vob/mpeg. you will see the imediatly the pixilataion and if you playback straight out of a media player the difference between playback quality of AE previews/renders imediatly, it’s pretty bad.
So, if these vob files are actually mpeg what should I do? I realise they have to be converted, but every converter I have used has somehow failed to propperly convert them, they allways still look the same in AE. Are these converters just putting the mpeg’s in to a different container and not acutually converting them? I’ve tried most converters and never gotten anywhere.
Please. . . . Help!!
Coda – musical selections; in film, the ending or last section of a film (often wordless).
-
17 Replies
-
it looks like the chroma sampling is poor. if you add the tint effect (which only uses the luminance) it looks fine, but in areas, like the red in the cheerleaders sweater, the red is pixelated. i do notice this in vlc and to a lesser extent in quicktime, but neither are nearly as bad as ae. this may be due to their par conversion being somewhat softer than ae’s.
you could do a quick chroma blur… duplicate the footage in ae. add tint to the bottom layer, and fast blur to the top layer. set the blur amount to 1 – 2 and direction to vertical. then set the top layer’s blending mode to color.
or you could convert the mpeg to lossless mov… i used mpeg-streamclip to convert the mpg to lossless mov, and it did look better in ae. however, it stripped the par and the color profile from the export, so you’d need to reset that in ae — the color profile being the hard one to deal with.
you could look at a different utility, maybe adobe’s media encoder would fair better….
Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW -
[Kevin Camp] ” i do notice this in vlc and to a lesser extent in quicktime, but neither are nearly as bad as ae. this may be due to their par conversion being somewhat softer than ae’s.”
actually, now that i think about it, the reason the players may display it better and why converting to lossless mov may help, is that the mpeg color space is yuv… the players may handle that better than ae, and the lossless mov is rgb, which is what ae works in natively…
Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW -
“uncompressed raw vob/mpeg”
MPEG is compressed…a lot. Plus, this one is encoded at a very low 5500 Kbps. Might be trying to make something out of a sow’s ear. Still, you would imagine that AE would at least be able to present it at the same quality as it plays in various players.
Steve Brame
creative illusions Productions -
Two references to a ‘Sow’s Ear’ almost simultaneously! May be a record…or perhaps we’re just showing our age.
Steve Brame
creative illusions Productions -
Hey…a very few years ago when I was going to college(again), the professor asked us to divide into 3 groups. I dubbed ours ‘Group W’.
The prof was the only one who got it.
Steve Brame
creative illusions Productions -
Thanks for all chipping in you guy’s, I’m still nowhere near understanding this unfortunately. I had some luck using a Deinterlacing filter in Virtualdub, it completly removed all of the pixelation on the red colors, but added a substantial amount of blurring and also made the pixelation on the cars silver window a lot worse. I also tried converting to uncompressed mov, but it’s no different to the straight mpeg import.
I am intrigued to know just how these media players can make this footage look so good, bellow are three screenshots of the same file playing in Power dvd, pdvd has actually upscaled the output to 1080p, also notice there’s virtually no pixelation anywhere and the colours look amazing.
https://c.imagehost.org/0446/Uzi.png
https://c.imagehost.org/0477/Comet_Car.png
https://c.imagehost.org/0042/Dress.png
The problem I’m facing is that these vob rips make up %100 percent of my compositions, ok so this one is an extreme example because of the red, red and jpeg or Mpeg obviously isnt good, but what is power dvd doing that I’m not? I don’t understand.
If anyone has any more free time to spend on this I’d be more than grateful. I’d welcome any more suggestions, Kevin I’m still working through some of your ideas, I’m affraid you have me a little lost though, so I’m going to try some different conversion and ripping apps as well and just hope I can hit it. You guys should have a look at these png’s though as well, considering the source file, this is very impressive for a bundled dvd app imo.
Steve and Dave, thanks also.
Coda – musical selections; in film, the ending or last section of a film (often wordless).
-
First of all, converting or transcoding an compressed video to an uncompressed format doesn’t increase the quality, it merely gives you an uncompressed file of the same data that was in the compressed version.
We’ve been remiss in asking what your comp’s size is? If you are placing a 720 x 480 image into a 1080 comp and making the image match the comp, you’re asking for a lot of pixelation.
Another thought, what is your Resolution/Down Sample Factor set for the comp viewer?
Steve Brame
creative illusions Productions -
Sure I realize that, I just dont want to add any more compression, and even uncompressed the file size is fine as it is.
I’m working with my comp res at full with a comp size thats the same as the footage 720 x 480, if you look at the clip in AE you can see the pixelation imediately, infact it already looks like it’s lost resolution so the first thing I did was check the comp resolution.
Ideally I would like to get the picture quality and upscaling shown in the screen shots above, however I’ve never had much success with plugins that upscale, they kind of work but I’d still be left with pixelation on the red areas.
What I might have to do is use screen recording software to grab power dvd’s playback, it’s a botchy way to do it but it may give the best results. Unless anyone can think of anything else? I really cant see how to get that picture quality.
Coda – musical selections; in film, the ending or last section of a film (often wordless).
-
Cool…just throwing out thoughts. I don’t use PowerDVD, so I was just wondering why it would be playing at 1080.
Steve Brame
creative illusions Productions -
OK…just tried importing your MPEG into Premiere Pro CS5, and no pixelation. Here’s a screen cap of the Program Monitor…
Now, I import this PNG into AE, and it pixelates, again, mainly at the edge of the red, or perhaps the red is just more noticeable than the other more muted colors.
Now…I export to an AVI, and bring that into AE – pixelation. So I guess we can say it’s definitely how AE is interpreting the file.
Steve Brame
creative illusions Productions
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up