I’ve been doing some tests with Blender sequencer and I’ve found that, excpet for AVI raw output, all the other encodings (h.264, mpeg, avi jpeg) have some loss of saturation on the final output (didn’t try xvid yet, but im not expecting different results by now). So, if I wanted a real high quality output, I would just go for avi raw, but there isn’t any option for sound. Is there any way I can get a similar result for output like AVI raw and have sound included?
Also, maybe I didn’t get the settings right. If you wanted a good quality encoding, what configuration would you use? I went for 14000 kb/s (min 9k, max 14k) bitrate for all the tests, and still got that loss of saturation in the output. Is there some configuration I’m missing?
My input is a strip of pngs from a previously rendered scene. After that there is also another strip of pngs with alpha, and a white color strip beneath it. But that second one is not that important; My problem is the loss of saturation I get for the first sequence of pngs, the one that comes from a previously blender rendered scene. I am using Blender 2.65.
First Raw has not compression that is why there is no affect on quality but it makes the file huge because it is saving every single little bit. If you are speaking about sound not sure if this will help. If you are talking about the image quality then Do XVID in output with rgb and then below that in Encoding click H.264 and then to the right of that you should see lossless make sure that is check marked. Remember you are compressing data and when the video player plays the video it uncrompresses it. The more compressed the smaller the file but based upon how its compressed the more error you can get in the final product. Lossless helps give the least amount of error but it won’t matter if you make the quality to low. Quality indicating how much error you can have. See image to know what to select. [ATTACH=CONFIG]219664[/ATTACH]
thanks for the advice, softwarespecial! I’ve tried it out and I got some surprising results. After compressing using the configuration you just passed me, I got the same loss of saturation in this compressed version. Then I tried to make a print screen of both videos side by side to post here, so you can see what I am talking about. In VLC player, I captured the displayed image and, surprisingly, the captured images are the same in terms of quality and saturation, for both compressed and un-compressed videos. Whats going on? I tried other players, and they also display a loss of saturation in the compressed versions of my video. In this a problem with video players? my graphics card?
If you are using PNG those are compressed images. So you are using a already compressed image that will have some small data loss or in other words some error. Then you are compressing it again. Or if you are doing it raw and you see this. Well try doing it on another monitor. Adjust your monitor and change the settings to see what you get.
Note that PNGs are compressed but this is lossless compression so that wouldn’t really explain the loss of saturation reported by libre.wanderer.
I’d suggest testing it on another system just to make sure that what you think see is actually there and not a result of monitor/graphics chip.
Other than that, I’d simply use the scopes to get a precise measure of saturation if that’s the main thing you see is off. Use the same frame from the source files and the rendered one and see what vectorscope shows in terms of overall saturation.
You could also use the compositor–>mix–>difference node to compare the frames and see what might be causing the problem.
As for encoding, I’d recommend DNxHD if you don’t wanna go for Aviraw. HuffyUV is also a possibility for lossless compression but note that the filesizes will be huge.
In any case, posting a frame or two will increase your chances of getting more specific suggestions.
raw avi is RGB, so your images are basically just wrapped up in an avi container.
h264 and many of the other codecs are not RGB, but YCbCr color space and have subsampled chroma 4:2:0, even so called lossless h264 may have lossless compression but it’s still 4:2:0, a lot of color info has been lost.
That been said, loss of saturation is very possibly due to whatever media player you’re using to play the none raw avi files, like h264. Are you sure that is giving you proper output.
I just did a quick test in the VSE with a png still image, encoded to h264 at 6000k and extracted an image frame, compared it to the original in Gimp and see no difference in saturation or otherwise.
So what OS are you on and how are you comparing your render against output? For example if you’re looking at h264 on a mac or PC where Apple QT is involved then there are known issues with gamma, it may not be the codec you’re encoding to but the media players interpretation and conversion back to RGB that is the issue.