Why am I losing quality when exporting in 1×1 aspect ratio?

[Eric Santiago]

I am not sure how you are viewing this?
1:1 is only relevant to your pixel res.

[Anton Nordstrand]

The left video is exported to 1920×1080 and the right one is exported to 1080×1080. I don’t understand why the quality gets so much worse for the latter. I mean if you slice the 1920×1080 one in half (kinda), you have a square. Why can’t I get the same quality with a square format video?

[Anton Nordstrand]

Just to clarify, the image is a print screen of me viewing the videos in 2 different media players and is supposed to show you the difference in quality.

[Todd Perchert]

The one on the right looks stretched out. How are you rendering these out? Render settings. What is your sequence settings? What is the original? And you say they are two different media players? That’s not a fair comparison. Since media players can vary a great deal.

[Anton Nordstrand]

Sorry for making it confusing with that screenshot, its literally just a screenshot of a portion of my screen and i opened them in 2 different media players cause I was too lazy to compose my own side by side comparison. The only thing that is relevant on the screenshot is the quality difference.

Sequence settings are 1080×1080, 2 pass vbr 45-50, square pixels

I guess all I need to know is if I should expect worse quality in 1×1 aspect ratio or not, cause it doesn’t make sense to me.

[Bouke Vahl]

[Anton Nordstrand] “1080×1080, 2 pass vbr 45-50”

here is (at least one of) your problems.
You render to a delivery codec, probably H264, we can’t know in probably 420, again, we can’t know.
So, you loose half your color resolution and get compression artefacts.
Now I don’t know the encoding software, but perhaps there is kicking in a scaler as well (that should not do that, just a crop.)

But, before posting here, did you spent an hour or so testing other encoders / codecs / settings like the rest of us does here to learn how it works and be able to answer questions like this?

Bouke
http://www.videotoolshed.com

[Joby Anthony jr]

Could this, by chance, be related to the difference between ‘Scale to Frame Size’ and ‘Set to Frame Size’?

— Joby.

[Todd Perchert]

I did a test on my system. I took a 1920×1080 file dragged it to New Sequence – made a sequence that matched. Rendered that out to H264 to match video settings – high quality. Then changed the Sequence settings to be 1080×1080, did the same render. They both match. So I can only guess that it is somewhere in a difference of Sequence settings or Render settings. You haven’t provided those. A screen grab of each would help a great deal to figure out where the problem is.
TC