-
Youtube pixelation?
-
Lukas, I really enjoy trying to figure out problems, such as the one you are experiencing. I just want to experiment with one of the original files with different render settings, like maybe XDCAM as Aaron suggest. Aaron I downloaded the good looking video from YouTube and its at 50 frames per second FYI. I believe the high bit rate renders Lukas is making are over kill. Look at the mediainfo of the good looking video I downloaded.
Danny Hays
Samples of my Work can be seen here:
https://www.youtube.com/user/ErnestDaniels/videos -
[Lukas Hajk] “Well… and how did they do it? That’s the whole point. Is it like random that Youtube compresses someone’s videos better or something? I don’t understand it. Thanks for a reply!”
No it is not random. It is entirely dependent on the source video content. Some things compress better than others. I’ll give the long winded answer.
Consider a talking head interview, where most of the video is stationary and then consider a video with a stabilized camera attached to the front of some vehicle moving down a trail/road. This video has constant movement, which is itself is not purely a problem, but scale of everything is constantly changing because the camera is moving through the scene. The later is a big problem. Sophisticated codecs like AVC have mechanisms to deal with motion on screen, and eliminate redundancies and gain better compression. These things handle stuff like shaky handheld cameras and people moving/walking across screen, moving their head and such. It does not handle changes in scale like a zoom or a camera moving forward.
There are two ways video can be compressed. The encoder can find redundancies like things that don’t move, or things that did move an in a sense copy it from one frame to the next. The other item is exactly like using a lower quality level when you save a jpeg image. In the later the image becomes blocky and blurry.
So when a video encoder is targeting a bitrate, and not a video quality level, then if the encoder cannot find enough redundancies across a sequence of frames in time, then all that is left for it to do is “lower the jpeg quality level”. If an encoder is targeting a quality level, then material that compresses well would result in much smaller files than those that those that do not compress well.
The hard part about Youtube, aka internet, video delivery is that the bitrates are very low so videos have very high compression levels. Those videos where the the encoder cannot find enough redundancies result of poorer, possibly unacceptable visual quality.
One other thing to remember is that images with lots of fine detail never compress very well unless fairly static. Fine detail is the first thing an encoder is going to drop when it is attempting to encode a video stream.
I know all about the internet video delivery problem. GoPro cameras attached to my mountain bike, DO NOT compress very well. Stabilization is necessary to help this out.
-
Norman, Thanks for that info. I know a little how compression works, but not like you do I believe. Frame rate makes little or no difference as I downloaded the highest quality game video from you tube, 1080 50p 69,882 KB and the next highest, 1080 25p 51,571 KB and pulled them into Vegas on two separate tracks, set preview to Full/Best on external monitor, so I could mute the top track and see the lower. I let Vegas set project settings to the 1080 50p clip. There was almost no difference other than the amount of view-able frames. Lukas’s game has more detail and more shades of color than the good looking You Tube video. Look at these screen shots full screen.
Good looking video
Lukas’s original
Lukas’s You Tube
Look at the front of the truck in the last pic.
There’s got to be a better render setting from Vegas to get better than that, don’t you think?Danny Hays
Samples of my Work can be seen here:
https://www.youtube.com/user/ErnestDaniels/videos -
Danny,
In the examples you posted of the good game there is very little high frequency (fine) detail so it compresses better. Not only would that compress better, but we are less likely to notice technical losses in quality even in a static pixel peep.
In Lukas example there is tons of high frequency detail. Also this is a first person view so when the game character is running compression suffers more.
I don’t know about the actual footage of this example but very often game footage looks like a squirrel on speed. The dart their view around abruptly. Generally the more camera movement the worse compression is. Movement of characters in front of a relatively still camera is not so much of a problem. The sophisticated codecs have mechanisms to help deal with that, and the best low bitrate encoders using said codecs, like x264, implement those features very well.
[Danny Hays] “There’s got to be a better render setting from Vegas to get better than that, don’t you think?”
If the original from Vegas looks good, nothing you can do. The complaint result is about the one from Youtube. How can giving Youtube something even better than “good” going to help the Youtube result become better. Youtube already cannot maintain quality with what they are being given that is already good.
I saw a setting screen from Luka with a 50Mbps average bitrate. Youtube will always be worse than that since it’s bitrate is way lower. He would probably be better off bailing on 60p. Most are not going to be able to watch that and Youtube only gives maybe 50% more bitrate for twice the frame rate. If someone has a video that does not compress well, then there is less bitrate available per frame than at 30p. Youtube is counting on 60p videos being able to compress better than 30p for similar quality.
-
Are you saying that Sony Vegas Pro can’t render as something YouTube can make look better than that? I believe it can. That’s why I want a very small sample of his original footage. Sorry Lukas, I know you’re just looking for some presets that will give you a better quality YouTube video. With a small sample of an original file, I believe I can do that for you.
Danny Hays
Samples of my Work can be seen here:
https://www.youtube.com/user/ErnestDaniels/videos -
Hello guys,
I’m kinda in hurry now, but I just saw your long posts and wanted to say I appreciate your help and I will read all of them later today!
To Danny: Yes man, you can count on that, I will get it for you! 🙂
// Edit 1: Would raw game footage compressed by Lagarith lossless codec be ok for you? In these examples I didn’t use it but I know that a lot of moviemakers use that codec while compressing the .avi file to make it 1/2 size without losing quality.
// Edit 2: Just to let you know how the whole process goes. In the game, I set it to run at framerate of 300 (to make later editing easier while doing slow motion etc.) then I start capturing thousands of .tga pictures which I then connect in a program called VirtualDub to make an .avi file from all those pictures. This is a standard process of doing videos from this game at the highest possible quality.
// Edit 3: I’m just uploading the file for you to dropbox. The file has 1,8GB and it only has 2 seconds. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to upload more since I only have 2GB of free space :/
// Edit4 : Here’s the file! https://www.dropbox.com/s/p21k4zm35tear40/1080p-Lagarith-300fps.avi?dl=0
Don’t be suprised when you won’t be able to playback it in Windows, it’s perfectly fine in Vegas though. Don’t know exactly why, maybe it has something to do with the fps things I mentioned above 😉 Let me know if you find something! Thanks! -
Also, wanted to show you another thing which I don’t understand.
Take a look at this video, this is probably the best quality I’ve seen from CS:GO (the game’s name) videos.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BrbAfUczsWIOne thing is the awesome image quality, I think I didn’t see a single pixel.
The second thing is the “movement” quality – is it just me or this is neither a Smart resample nor a No resample? Smart resample looks usually terrible in gaming videos, no resample makes the image sharper but at the same time the video looks a bit laggy even in 60fps– for understanding here’s an example of 60fps no resample video – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ao-z8Qh7IXw
The first video in this post is just… something different, I feel like. It has a great quality and basically no motion blur. Is it possible that he rendered it in a program different than Sony Vegas/After Effects to achieve this great result?
Danny, if you’ll be able to achieve nearly the same quality as the first video I posted, I’ll be forever grateful for that 😀 Take it as a challenge maybe!
Thanks a lot for your help.
Some contents or functionalities here are not available due to your cookie preferences!This happens because the functionality/content marked as “Google Youtube” uses cookies that you choosed to keep disabled. In order to view this content or use this functionality, please enable cookies: click here to open your cookie preferences.
-
[Danny Hays] “Are you saying that Sony Vegas Pro can’t render as something YouTube can make look better than that? I believe it can. “
Vegas did not render the the Youtube result. The Vegas result, the original, is good. If Youtube cannot maintain the Vegas quality level then how is improving the Vegas result going to help any.
——–
LukaI have a 50Mbps connection so I downloaded the 1.8GB file, installed the Lagarith codec, and rendered to 20Mbps MC AVC at 60.0p one pass VBR, resampling disabled. As expected the Vegas result looks fine. I rendered the 300p Lagarith to down to 60.0p and of course at 20Mbps the AVC version is not identical to the Lagarith 60p but it is close and quite good.
As expected a Youtube upload loses a bunch of quality compared to the Vegas AVC render. It looses it for all the reasons I have previously mentioned. I’ll not repeat myself. I even saw detail jump in/out which would be expected in a bitrate starved situation. e.g. The stone building on the right starts blurry and then the detail suddenly jumps in when we get closer.
Good luck on your quest for the Holy Grail.
-
Lukas, You removed the post with the download link of your original footage? I didn’t get a chance to download it.
Danny Hays
Samples of my Work can be seen here:
https://www.youtube.com/user/ErnestDaniels/videos -
Norman,
I understand that Youtube can’t handle the quality I give it from the source files, but if you take a look at the 2 videos I provided above, you can’t deny the quality is just so much better, it even looks like they are source files. I just don’t believe there isn’t a solution. It’s the same game and editors use the same way as I do to make the first .avi file which we edit afterwards. The only difference is that their youtube videos appear to be 10x better quality than mine.
I’m sorry if I overlook something in your statements and I sound stupid now, I’d believe it if I didn’t know those editors and saw their videos. They of course refuse to show their render settings etc.
To Danny: No I didn’t, in fact I can see it in my previous post 🙂 But if you still can’t see it, here you go!
https://www.dropbox.com/s/p21k4zm35tear40/1080p-Lagarith-300fps.avi?dl=0Nevertheless, thank you guys for your patience, I didn’t really expect someone would even try to help, at least not this much! 🙂
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up