How do you keep the original quality for your video?

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FlamingMangos
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How do you keep the original quality for your video?

Post by FlamingMangos » Tue May 07, 2013 8:00 pm

Usually when you have a anime episode you would have to convert MKV files to like a different format so you would be able to edit the clip in sony vegas or so. I used a convert program but I keep losing the quality and theres color issues. How does people do it anyways? I always see anime clips on youtube and they're such good quality. I'm wondering how they do it without loss of quality?

Mister Hatt
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Re: How do you keep the original quality for your video?

Post by Mister Hatt » Tue May 07, 2013 8:52 pm

There are two steps, first is to edit it without the drop in quality, second is to hack it so youtube doesn't shit all over it. The lack of the first one kind of makes the second work by fluke as well.

You have a few options for editing without a quality loss. You can remux into a container that Vegas understands (instead of re-encoding lossy like you're doing now) but this only works if the video format itself is understood. The other option is using Avisynth or a lossless codec. I'm not sure if Vegas can import avs but chances are you'd need to encode losslessly via it anyway. Avs will give you more options for processing your footage than straight transcoding will, but you'd need to know how to program a bit.

As for youtube, you need to understand how video compression works. The basic gist is the encode has a set amount of visual complexity or bandwidth to distribute. In youtube's case it is bandwidth. What this means is that for a given length of time, there is a maximum size the video can take up. To achieve this, the encoder uses a quantizer process to attempt the highest quality it can visually while remaining inside the bandwidth limits. There is a 3rd way to encode but it's stupid and nobody should use it so I won't go into detail there, this sentence is only here to get rid of nitpickers going "what about cq encoding?!". The more complex the content, the more space it needs generally. Youtube has hard limits on file sizes though so even if your content is quite detailed, it will get compressed less impressively (visually that is) to remain inside the bitrate limits. What this means is that higher quality video will look worse than lower quality video.

There are two ways to get around this, one optimal, one accidental. The accident is where low quality video is uploaded and just happens to not get overcompressed. The optimal situation is an intentional blur or smoothing of detail to allow the quantizer to be more efficient. If you're using HD it's not so much an issue, but for low resolutions youtube's quantizer has quite aggressive bitrate constraints.

I hope that answers your question. For information on lossless encoding and avisynth, see the guide or other threads in this forum section.

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l33tmeatwad
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Re: How do you keep the original quality for your video?

Post by l33tmeatwad » Tue May 07, 2013 8:57 pm

FlamingMangos wrote:Usually when you have a anime episode you would have to convert MKV files to like a different format so you would be able to edit the clip in sony vegas or so. I used a convert program but I keep losing the quality and theres color issues. How does people do it anyways? I always see anime clips on youtube and they're such good quality. I'm wondering how they do it without loss of quality?
First off, I would avoid these "conversion programs", from what I can tell you are recompressing using another lossy codec which is the reason why you are losing quality. What you really should do is convert the video to lossless AVI files to work with, as that will prevent any further reduction of quality. You can recontainer the footage (assuming it is not 10bit video), however that is less ideal to work with.

What software you will need:
UT Video Codec (Lossless AVI Codec)
VirtualDub
AviSynth
FFMpegSource2 AviSynth Plugin

You will create .AVS (AviSynth script) file that you will open in VirtualDub so that you can save the files to lossless AVI.
There are a few different guides you can use at this point to help you through the process, I will list a few.

A-M-V.org Various Media Formats Conversion Guide (Very long and detailed written guide)
Guide to Handling MKV & MP4 Files (Written step-by-step guide, also explain how to recontainer instead)
AMVGuide (Video Tutorials for using AviSynth)

Just try each of them and hopefully one of them is understandable enough to help you convert your footage properly.
Software & Guides: AMVpack | AMV 101 | AviSynth 101 | VapourSynth 101
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FlamingMangos
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Re: How do you keep the original quality for your video?

Post by FlamingMangos » Wed May 08, 2013 7:49 pm

I have a question. What if I wanted to keep the quality / subs / and audio? How would I do that?

Mister Hatt
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Re: How do you keep the original quality for your video?

Post by Mister Hatt » Wed May 08, 2013 9:16 pm

Then you demux the subs/audio and encode losslessly for the video as mentioned above. Then remux the audio. If you need to re-encode the audio for whatever reason, you'll need to encode it losslessly for while you work to reduce double-mastering and other bad things. If you need the subs hard-coded, then you'll need to load them into your avs script via one of the subtitling plugins, I like assrender but most people prefer textsub.

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