.mp4 alternative? Need to see text written on a cellphone, .mp4 too blurry

[yabyum]

I'm creating some tutorial videos about how to use some software for cellphones.

I've noticed that the actual footage coming from my GH1 is sharper and easier to read the text on the phone itself, than .mp4 is giving me. And I'm rendering out to an overkill 10,000,000 bps for 640x360.

Original footage is 1080p 1920x1080. Using 640x360 right now as it will be the right resolution for the final delivery platform (or close to it). And it allows me to crop the footage how I need to.

Anyway, I need something that is still compressed so that I can send it to the client... max file size is probably ~200mb, and the longest single video I'd send them would be 1.5 minutes.

Thanks for the help guys! Hopefully someone knows the answer off the top of their head or something. I'm off to research it/try the different Vegas options right now myself.

 

[David Jimerson]

I've noticed that the actual footage coming from my GH1 is sharper and easier to read the text on the phone itself, than .mp4 is giving me.

Not 100% sure what you're asking here. Can you post some screen shots which show the problem?

 

[yabyum]

Not 100% sure what you're asking here. Can you post some screen shots which show the problem?

Yep!

Here's a screen shot of the screen from the .mp4, cropped, rotated, and cc'd.

And this is the raw footage (well, Neoscene converted avi) of the same thing.

Text is much clearer on the 2nd shot. Don't think it's because of the resolution necessarily, as I've rendered out a test 1280x720 version and it still looked somewhat blurry.

 

[PDR]

I suspect most of you quality issues are from resizing

When you export to a YV12 distribution format like (h.264 in .mp4 ), you undergo a YV12=>RGB=>YV12 conversion from source=>vegas interal RGB conversion=> export. And this colorspace conversion is lossy.

If you want to know the "best" you can do in vegas, export to a lagarith AVI format (or even uncompressed). Lagarith is a lossless compressed RGB format and avoids the final RGB=>YV12 conversion, and avoids losses due to compression

If this lagarith export looks similar, then the "damage" was done by your crop and resize. The only way to get around this is to use another program , perhaps with different crop and resize algorithms (e.g. through avisynth you might use lanczos resize, which is sharper). You can even stay in YV12 space with avisynth, but color correction is more difficult if you don't convert to RGB