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Why does rendering to .mp4 (mainconcept AVC) take WAY longer than rendering to .wmv?
Hello everyone,
I record gameplay footage for youtube and lately when uploading .wmv footage it comes out all artifacted and pixelated on youtube in certain busy scenes or transitions so I decided to make the transition to .mp4. My only issue it when I rendered say a 15 minute video with .wmv it was taking 40 or so minutes give or take, but when rendering it with .mp4 it could take up to 1 hour 30 mins to do it.
I had seen tutorials and comparisons on youtube saying there wasn’t much difference between the two for both file size and render times but it’s a huge difference for me and I have no idea why. Even if I use my GTX 670 as “render using CUDA” it still takes ages and sometimes longer than “CPU only”
Could anyone shed some light on the topic or any advice?
I will note that for the .wmv videos I set it to “Quality VBR” and it gave me a quality slider instead of a bit rate number so I used to render to about 83%-90% depending on the length of video. With .mp4 I choose the bit rate (obviously) to try get the same amount as the .wmv video give or take a bit
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4 Replies
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Simple. The Main Concept encoder is just plain slower than the Microsoft encoder for WMV because itd algorithms are not very fast.
In Vegas the Sony AVC encoder is faster than the Main Concept AVC encoder. Taking into account the external world the x264 AVC encoder is much faster than both Main Concept AVC and Sony AVC with higher quality as well. These are all examples targeting the same encoding format, AVC.
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You sum it up perfectly Norman…
Steve Rhoden
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Film Editor & Compositor.
Filmex Creative Media.
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Thanks Norman for explaining.I have some more questions that I’d like to ask too without spamming new threads if that’s ok?
The way I record gameplay is with a capture card and sometimes it records at different framerates that cause sync issues in Vegas, so to combat this I encode in Handbrake first and set it to “constant framerate” to eliminate this issue. I always encode to “MP4 container” and try to have almost the exact same settings as the original video to have it the same but synced up better.
Could the encoding be part of the reason why I’m getting pixelation on youtube? When my videos are rendered in .wmv they play fine on my computer and on Vegas or whatever but on youtube then they get heavy black pixelation in certain sections.
I am too fond of .wmvs results with quality and rendering speed to move to .mp4 though but it seems .wmv is causing the problem
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Since you are recording PC video you should use the Sony Levels Computer to Studio RGB video effect to keep from crushing the blacks. This is needed when encoding to AVC (H.264) MP4 files. I don;t know about WMV. I have never used it.
Youtube re-encodes anything you send them into AVC video streams.
You get pixelation most likely because internet video streaming site are all pretty low bitrate. This works okay with most video sources and AVC can compress really well. However for a source that does not compress well quality really does suffer and there is nothing we can really do about it.
I don’t know about gameplay sources, but I do know about what I have done. Mountain bike videos with the camera mounted to the bike or helmet. This video stream do not compress well at all. The camera is constantly in motion as the bike is rolling and also bouncing around due to the bumpy trail surface. Contrast this with a stationary handheld camera filming someone riding by and I get very good quality with a source like that.
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