trythil wrote:Radical_Yue wrote:I was wondering what everyone's thought was about the "Intel Indeo 4.5" codec. It's what I use to compress clips that will be used in my vids. (My computer is too pitiful to handle clips with lossless codecs)
I find it does the job okay. What is your opinion?
It's a time-consuming, quality-damaging, and absolutely unnecessary transcode, unless you're doing something like using the Indeo clips for preview and rendering from the original sources on final export. (Though, you might as well just use something like MJPEG for that...)
To back up what I've said:
A high-motion scene from ADV's release of Kaleido Star, compressed with Indeo 4.5 and XviD. Original DVD frame and subtraction results provided for reference. Click the image for the full-size PNG.
The noise that Indeo introduces into the picture is quite evident even without looking at the subtractions (look around the edges if you're having trouble).
Another frame capture. Notice how much of the red and blue information is distorted, especially at sharp edges.
This isn't a good thing in stuff like anime, where you deal with sharp edges all the time.
One last capture.
I included XviD because lots of people (unfortunately) also use it. While the differences aren't quite so blatant, they're still there.
So what exactly is the problem with this picture degradation?
This sort of noise makes the picture more complex. This can really mess with your final compression, and, in general, produces a final product of lower quality. (It is possible to clean up affected areas in the transcode result, but that's just wasting time -- you might as well just operate on the original!)
This noise can also affect operations that rely heavily on color information, such as color correction and chroma keying. (Try applying a chroma key effect on two clips, one compressed with something lossy like Indeo and the other on the original source. You'll find that the areas affected will be quite different.)
If you cannot edit with the original sources at an acceptable speed, the method
described here is often preferable to damaging the source video.
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