CS5 H.264 Looks Export... Looks Terrible?

A

alkota

Active member
Bouncing my project from GH2 edited natively to h.264 (youtube hd preset) and the resulting footage is pixelated, noisy, and doesnt look good at all. Editing 1080 and 720 footage on a 720 24p timeline.

What settings are people using to get good quality videos for Vimeo, etc. right out of CS5?

http://vimeo.com/23096642 <----- just did this one.
 
From how it played on my machine, in the standard small window, I don't see what you indicate. When I select HD and play 'full frame', I see jerkyness, but I see that because my machine is not really up to playing HD... I have to put stuff out on Bluray to see things 'correctly' in that regard... I did not see any pixelation, or other artifacts.
 
I've personally not found the right settings yet with H.264 output from CS5. I spent quite a few days trying to get the footage to look as good as what I was feeding it, but the compressor just does a bad job to me. This was for Vimeo. The two issues I had was banding starting happening and anywhere with lots of fast changing motion (waterfall) I was getting areas of compression noise. Everytime I exported with different settings, I compared the frames in question I knew had problems and once again, still there.

Someone else told me the H.264 compressor that comes with CS5 is more of a light version, and the company that makes it does offer a better one, at a cost. For now, I export to ProRes 422 and compress to H.264 elsewhere.
 
90% of how good a file looks relies on your pre-processing methods. A seasoned compressionist or post house will know this and give you better results, even if you were to encode the file with the same encoder, using the same settings.

De-noising, and dithering are both huge in making your video look good when you upload it to a video sharing site like Youtube. On the flipside, A small noise pattern can help improve your picture quality before it hits an OTA broadcast box. So it just depends on where you're sending your video, and what's going to mangle it.
 
But in this case, the same starting video in FCP and Premiere CS5 using H.264 export is VERY different. I don't think the H.264 that ships with CS5 is very good.
 
Adobe uses the mainconcept encoding engine for all their H264 stuff. It has been tested and found to be far superior to quicktime H264 any way you cut it. Only x264 bests mainconcept in some areas... so potentially you should have no issues.

I'm not claiming to be an expert, but seeing as editing is my full time job I've had to compress quite the stack of content in my day.

I've found Adobe's H264 to produce "mostly" better files, with the odd exception. You are encoding to MP4 and not using quicktime through Premiere Pro, are you? Because that would indeed create files inferior to encoding to h264 quicktime via FCP or Apple compressor.
 
Hmmm, not sure. I'll revisit it again soon and see. I was searching all over the web for help on exporting for VimeoHD and nothing I tried inside Premiere gave me something I was satisfied with. But just to double check, I will try it again and make sure.
 
Uncompressed of course.
You can feed a lot of codecs, but that degrades the quality.

That´s why I sing the gospel of UTD (uncompressed till delivery).

Frank
 
Rick Burnett said:
Hmmm, not sure. I'll revisit it again soon and see. I was searching all over the web for help on exporting for VimeoHD and nothing I tried inside Premiere gave me something I was satisfied with. But just to double check, I will try it again and make sure.
Click to expand...

Keep in mind Quicktime player is not a good software player to validate your files. Bring them back into Premiere Pro and place them over your original edit to verify quality, and color space.

The h.264 decoders built into Quicktime player won't get the gamma correct. Hell there is a discrepancy between QT player 7 and QT X at the moment. And don't use Quicktime's h.264 encoder, its really really poor.
 
This is DEFINITELY not a gamma problem. I did bring the files back into Premiere and the same issues existed. It's compression issues for sure, I can tell with how it looks.
 
alkota said:
resulting footage is pixelated, noisy, and doesnt look good at all.

What settings are people using to get good quality videos for Vimeo, etc. right out of CS5?
Click to expand...

I had the same problem with just about every compressed file type I exported my footage to except Uncompressed Quicktime 8 bit, 10 bit, or no compression. I export all my films to Uncompressed 8bit usually regardless if the huge file output size. If it's too big it can be exported to 720p instead of 1080p and will look the same for Vimeo. Then I convert with Procoder to any delivery compressed file I need and it always looks fantastic. When I'm done I delete the large export file. For Vimeo I've converted to WMV 1080p which is about 1% to 3% of my export file and this is the file I save for screening. Below is a test video

http://www.vimeo.com/22791691
 
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Demistate said:
The h.264 decoders built into Quicktime player won't get the gamma correct. Hell there is a discrepancy between QT player 7 and QT X at the moment. And don't use Quicktime's h.264 encoder, its really really poor.
Click to expand...

Ok here here, that's my problem. I was under the impression that CS5.5 would fix it but it hasn't. If I need to export to .mov from Premiere, what do I do? I have handbrake but I don't want to have to go through an extra step.

Thanks
 
Demistate said:
Keep in mind Quicktime player is not a good software player to validate your files. Bring them back into Premiere Pro and place them over your original edit to verify quality, and color space.

The h.264 decoders built into Quicktime player won't get the gamma correct. Hell there is a discrepancy between QT player 7 and QT X at the moment. And don't use Quicktime's h.264 encoder, its really really poor.
Click to expand...


Given the ubiquity of QT... exactly what does this mean??? If the video does not look good in QT, then it would seem that one needs to make 'adjustments' for QT if it is the final deliverable.

If one uses Adobe Media Encoder, is not one using the Main Concepts H.264 encoder?

I would also point out that 'gamma' is not 'noise', or artifacts due to wrong bitrates, profiles, etc. being selected, or the original footage just being 'noisy'...
 
chromeboy007 said:
Ok here here, that's my problem. I was under the impression that CS5.5 would fix it but it hasn't. If I need to export to .mov from Premiere, what do I do? I have handbrake but I don't want to have to go through an extra step.

Thanks
Click to expand...

How can the encoder fix the problem of a decoder not doing the 'correct' thing... the only fix would be to find out what the gamma is that is produced by the QT decode, and 'adjust' the media, in anticipation of that incorrect decoding.

While I don't doubt there may be a problem with QT, H.264, etc. I also think there is a great amount of misinformation about encoding and what parameters give rise to what observables.

There is a grave confusion about the difference between the 'containers' (MOV, AVI, etc.) and the 'codec', (H.264, H.263, MPEG-2(the codec, not the container...)), etc. In addition there are profiles on the codecs that yield varying quality differences, because they are intended to indicate the 'quality' in the first place... (In the stills world, for many situations, there is no apparent difference between 100% quality and 50%... there is a big difference in file size, and therefore download bit rates...)

The same holds for the video parameters...
 
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