5 replies to this topic

[Dick]

I am editing my video with Sony Vegas. I render it as a wmv. When I convert to swish I lose a lot of the sharpness.
Can anyone tell what the best combination of settings in "Swish Video" for maximum sharpness are and if you use Sony Vegas what the best settings are for it?

Thanks in advance, Dick

[Wolf Gross]

..the "best possible resolution" can be a very big file and probably not practical to use on the net - the bitrate would be "not limited" "Key frame interval:1sec" and "Format"Flash8" - I've got pretty good results with a bitrate of 900 and the same other settings at: http://di3d.info
- using avi files.

wolf

[Olivier Debon]

The input file MUST have a very good quality (lossless content) to be compressed. Otherwise if you compress a compressed content you'll lose sharpness. Using WMV is a bad idea, it's a lossless codec (I assume WMV3). Use HuffYUV which is the preferred codec for storing lossless compressed data for video.

Default SV settings is PSNR driven (Quality slider). It will try to preserve a given quality but file size may be big.
Bitrate controlled compression will preserve a given bitrate at the risk to lose details.

Make also sure you have Flash 8 codec installed, it's quite a huge enhancement compared to Sorenson.
It can't preserve asked bitrate all the time though. Always check final bitrate reported by SV (Video + Audio).

One important thing: prefer down scaled movies, you can't expect good result from a 720x576 size video. Unless you want unlimited bitrate content, not suitable for internet use.

-Olivier

[Dick]

Thanks to you both for your help.

[TyantA]

Olivier Debon, on Nov 20 2008, 02:35 AM, said:

The input file MUST have a very good quality (lossless content) to be compressed. Otherwise if you compress a compressed content you'll lose sharpness. Using WMV is a bad idea, it's a lossless codec (I assume WMV3). Use HuffYUV which is the preferred codec for storing lossless compressed data for video.

Default SV settings is PSNR driven (Quality slider). It will try to preserve a given quality but file size may be big.
Bitrate controlled compression will preserve a given bitrate at the risk to lose details.

Make also sure you have Flash 8 codec installed, it's quite a huge enhancement compared to Sorenson.
It can't preserve asked bitrate all the time though. Always check final bitrate reported by SV (Video + Audio).

One important thing: prefer down scaled movies, you can't expect good result from a 720x576 size video. Unless you want unlimited bitrate content, not suitable for internet use.

-Olivier

This is some good info, thanks.

I had been playing around with outputting uncompressed video from camtasia to encode with Video 3 but that was resulting in 8+gb files for 4mins of video. I will try using the HuffYUV codec as an alternative. Are there any recommended HuffYUV settings to use? I tried the default and would say there is a perceptible difference between uncompressed and its results. Then again, there's also a 6+ GB filesize difference too. Given the amount of videos I'm playing with, if the quality can be nearly equal I would rather stick with the HuffYUV codec.

I'll run it through Video 3 and compare the results.

On another tangent - does one HAVE to have the flash 8 codec installed or does having 9 or 10 negate that requirement? My guess is the latter but I just wanted to be sure given the way the above quote was worded.

[Olivier Debon]

TyantA, on Jan 29 2009, 08:36 PM, said:

On another tangent - does one HAVE to have the flash 8 codec installed or does having 9 or 10 negate that requirement? My guess is the latter but I just wanted to be sure given the way the above quote was worded.

The Flash 8 Codec is to encode video into VP6 content. The result is playable with Flash Player 8 and above.
I'm not aware of Flash 9 or 10 codecs.

As per HuffYUV settings, as they say, mileage may vary.

-Olivier