How to Export/encode high quality for mpeg4/h264?

F

frosti7

Member
Hello fellow premier users
I've spent better half of this day of searching and combing the net for an answer and couldnt find one

source: gh1 avchd 720p
destination: mp4/h264 file

Premiers mainconcept h.264 encoder is awfull quality, is there any alternative to use?
My footage is 17mbs and i have to use 60mbs to reach similiar quality, this is nuts!

i've tried to download x264wfv codec but it crashes!

suggestions would be wellcomed!

thanx allot!
 
frosti7 said:
Hello fellow premier users
I've spent better half of this day of searching and combing the net for an answer and couldnt find one

source: gh1 avchd 720p
destination: mp4/h264 file

Premiers mainconcept h.264 encoder is awfull quality, is there any alternative to use?
My footage is 17mbs and i have to use 60mbs to reach similiar quality, this is nuts!

i've tried to download x264wfv codec but it crashes!

suggestions would be wellcomed!

thanx allot!
Click to expand...

The mainconcept encoder is only second to x264 in terms of software encoding. The reason why you're getting terrible results is due to the poor pre-processing built into Premiere Pro.

Take a look at some of the problems other users have had doing a HD to SD conversion.

http://www.dvxuser.com/V6/showthread.php?t=205348


You have thee options, Hire a profesional compressionist, attempt to spend a month learning the highly complicated Avisynth for better compression results, or live with crappy results.

Douglas Guerra wrote a pretty long post on freeware tools you can use to improve your compression quality:

http://www.dvxuser.com/V6/showthread.php?t=212392


Compression is easy. Pre-processing is hard. Good luck.
 
Demistate said:
You have thee options, Hire a profesional compressionist, attempt to spend a month learning the highly complicated Avisynth for better compression results, or live with crappy results.
Click to expand...

Or you can spend $30 on Quicktime Pro, export an uncompress AVI out of Premiere and use the h.264 compress on that. That's been my workflow for the past two years.
 
Huy Vu said:
Or you can spend $30 on Quicktime Pro, export an uncompress AVI out of Premiere and use the h.264 compress on that. That's been my workflow for the past two years.
Click to expand...

I would highly recommend against this solution, as Apple doesn't even have a standard way of determining Gamma between different software players that they make (Quicktime X and Quicktime 7). This means that it could appear too dark on one comptuer, and look just fine on another. This is a nightmare for paying clients who are picky.

Apple's QT h.264 encoder has been proven as being some of the worst h.264 encoder in terms of efficency compaired to other software encoders. You will have larger file sizes than other people using free software. This means your streaming will take longer to buffer or look worse.

I'm not sure if the QT Pro software supports creation of .mp4 containers. They tend to be more widly accepted than .mov containers, and still contain the same data.

Quicktime was never meant to be a delivery medium. It works well in the Final Cut world for passing files along to other editors. Since Final Cut doesn't interpret files differently from each version, you can guarentee that you will have consistant gamma as long as you use their tools. Adobe and Avid still have problems passing along Quicktime files to FCP that are gamma correct since Apple has done a poor job documenting how the gamma gets interpreted.

In short: its a big ? if your file will be delivered properly if you use Quicktime. Stay away if it's practical.
 
frosti7 said:
Quicktime sucks, mainconcept h264 sucks,
no solution?
Click to expand...

x264 is a clearly better implementation of h.264 software encoding than those above

Export uncompressed, then use x264CLI (or you can use a GUI for it , like handbrake, megui, ripbot264, staxrip, etc...)
 
frosti7 said:
Quicktime sucks, mainconcept h264 sucks,
no solution?
Click to expand...

Incorrect. Mainconcept does not suck.

http://www.compression.ru/video/codec_comparison/h264_2010/

Main concept is second to x264, the highest efficiency software codec on the market. MainConcept only trails by a very, very short amount.

Anyway, your encoder efficiency isn't what is making your videos look poor, unless you're trying to shove them into really small bitrates (less than 2Megabits per second). What's making your videos look poor is the pre-processing methods you are using. Make sure you are using a high quality scaler, a proper color space conversion (if necessary) and any de-noising if you aren't approaching blu-ray like bitrates.

Can you post any samples of your encodes? It might help us determine what's going wrong with your pipeline.
 
Demistate said:
Incorrect. Mainconcept does not suck.

http://www.compression.ru/video/codec_comparison/h264_2010/

Main concept is second to x264, the highest efficiency software codec on the market. MainConcept only trails by a very, very short amount.

Anyway, your encoder efficiency isn't what is making your videos look poor, unless you're trying to shove them into really small bitrates (less than 2Megabits per second). What's making your videos look poor is the pre-processing methods you are using. Make sure you are using a high quality scaler, a proper color space conversion (if necessary) and any de-noising if you aren't approaching blu-ray like bitrates.

Can you post any samples of your encodes? It might help us determine what's going wrong with your pipeline.
Click to expand...

Thanx for your informative reply!
i guess im expecting too much out of it,
i dont have "big issue" whit mainconcept, its just i use GH1 720p 17mbs files and when i'm exporting the clip (no image manipulations, only cutting) i have to use 35+ mbs to reach almost the same quality, its still wont be as good as the original, i get abit softer image and can notice h.264 compression abit more
 
frosti7 said:
i dont have "big issue" whit mainconcept, its just i use GH1 720p 17mbs files and when i'm exporting the clip (no image manipulations, only cutting) i have to use 35+ mbs to reach almost the same quality, its still wont be as good as the original, i get abit softer image and can notice h.264 compression abit more
Click to expand...


Well, yea. It doesn't seem intuitive at first but you have to understand that compression is about throwing away information. If you want to retain information after compression, regardless of what you did to the footage, you need to set a higher bitrate. That's why uncompressed files are so huge because they have to retain every bit of information from the source file, even if that source file is only a fraction of the size.
 
I'm not downconverting, i'm just cutting editing GH1 MTS file and i want to watch it on my tv, only i dont want to loose the IQ in the process, so i have to use double of data rate and its still looks *slightly* not as good as the original,
and i have max render quality checked.
 
Last edited:
Does the multiplexer tab does anything for quality?
and should i change the "set key frame distance" option?

Thanx!
 
I'm looking at this page for the settings it records in:

http://www.imaging-resource.com/PRODS/DMCGH1/DMCGH1VIDEO.HTM

If you said 720P it looks like it does

1280x720 at 60P 17mbps

Here are the encoding settings I would use to get a similar output:

(MAKE SURE FRAME BLENDING IS OFF FOR EVERY CLIP)

FORMAT: h.264
TV STANDARD : NTSC
1280x720
FPS 59.94 (I'm guessing it records 59.94, not 60. It should match your clip settings)
Field order: NONE
Pixel aspect ratio: SQUARE
Profile: HIGH
Level: 4.1 (Go lower if your device doesn't support playback, 4.1 should play back on all blu-ray capeable players.
Tick on Render maximum depth
Bitrate Encoding : 2 pass VBR
Target bitrate : 20
Max bitrate: 50
Ignore advanced settings

Make sure your audio bitrate is 256K or over.

You should get near identical settings as long as you aren't scaling your video. Make sure your project settings match your clip settings too. If you have a mis-matched frame size or framerate it can look really bad when you export.

Let me know how this works for you.
 
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