HKO
Well-known member
Hey Blackout - The Vitaliy rocks vid you reference was the 110 mbps hack from a few months ago. The 20 meg/sec stuff was uploaded in the last week and yes that video has artifacts from origination through to final render.
The recent stuff is in a different league IMHO. It definitely grades better. Less artifacts in Firstlight. A bit more spread of colour info with less blockiness and jumps from one gradation to another. There is no more chroma info ( Still 4.2.0 ) but it is a noticeably better grade. Put it this way, it will always have artifacts, but the lower the bit rate the more the artifacts get in the way. Hope that makes sense? For example - let's say someone is wearing a red shirt in a video. At 24 mbps If I attempt to grade using luts - the blockiness makes an uneven change in that colour so that some parts of the shirt are shifted to the new values while others aren't. With the higher bit rates the whole shirt is more cohesive in the colour change. It is still the same colour but there appears to be less confusion on which pixels are RED. I hope that makes sense.
If you do not use LUTs then you may see little to no advantage to the high bit rates as you state. But I am hooked and love the way they can radically change the look of the footage. For example
My workflow is like this after shooting.
Grab the files and encode them to Cineform. (Or process them with the workflow using neat video to get rid of underlying compression artifacts and light noise reduction plus lower the contrast - I have a vimeo tutorial for that) Then I edit ( while grading in Firstlight if required ) in Vegas. I then export to Cineform and finally export in Microsoft expression encoder - a recent purchase.
The recent stuff is in a different league IMHO. It definitely grades better. Less artifacts in Firstlight. A bit more spread of colour info with less blockiness and jumps from one gradation to another. There is no more chroma info ( Still 4.2.0 ) but it is a noticeably better grade. Put it this way, it will always have artifacts, but the lower the bit rate the more the artifacts get in the way. Hope that makes sense? For example - let's say someone is wearing a red shirt in a video. At 24 mbps If I attempt to grade using luts - the blockiness makes an uneven change in that colour so that some parts of the shirt are shifted to the new values while others aren't. With the higher bit rates the whole shirt is more cohesive in the colour change. It is still the same colour but there appears to be less confusion on which pixels are RED. I hope that makes sense.
If you do not use LUTs then you may see little to no advantage to the high bit rates as you state. But I am hooked and love the way they can radically change the look of the footage. For example
My workflow is like this after shooting.
Grab the files and encode them to Cineform. (Or process them with the workflow using neat video to get rid of underlying compression artifacts and light noise reduction plus lower the contrast - I have a vimeo tutorial for that) Then I edit ( while grading in Firstlight if required ) in Vegas. I then export to Cineform and finally export in Microsoft expression encoder - a recent purchase.
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