Notice considerable amount of video quality loss

[snapware]

I notice a considerable amount of loss of quality when rendering my .avi clip to .mpg2 (2 pass best video quality in Vegas)

Is there a better way to turn my avi clips to mpg2 clips with less loss of quality?

thanks

[redwudz]

You shouldn't have that much lose of quality if your bitrate is high enough. Are you resizing too? That can sometimes lead to quality lose. What format of AVI are you starting with?

[guns1inger]

What sort fo AVI ? Is this downloaded low res, ultra-compressed video, ot DV avi from your own camera ?

What are you doing to the avi ? Filters, resizing etc ?

What bitrate are you using when you output from Vegas ?

Describe the quality loss as you percieve it - is it soft, are there artifacts ? What are you seeing ?

[snapware]

I see Softer looking video and i think the color isn't as good when i watch the mpg2. I am not resizing or anything like that, i tried 2 pass vbr with avg of 6000000

Original .avi is a HuffyUV .avi and it's dvd quality and high qualty.

thoughts? thanks

[edDV]

I see Softer looking video and i think the color isn't as good when i watch the mpg2. I am not resizing or anything like that, i tried 2 pass vbr with avg of 6000000

Original .avi is a HuffyUV .avi and it's dvd quality and high qualty.

thoughts? thanks

What was the capture hardware and source of the HuffYUV file. You need to tell us the gory details. Also, what project setting did you use for Vegas?

[lordsmurf]

Simple question: Is there a better way to turn my avi clips to mpg2 clips with less loss of quality?

Simple answer: Yes.

[snapware]

So which way is better papa smurf?

720 x 480, the original AVI was created from using decrypter to extra the clip from a dvd, then import the .vob to VirtualDub and then save as .avi using HuffUV

[guns1inger]

How did you arrive at 6000kbps as your bitrate ? Was this calculated based on running time and space constraints, or suggested by the software using an arbitrary quality scale ?

[snapware]

I believe that was the default in Vegas

usually mpg2 works well for me, but with this particular video it just looked real soft for some reason

[lordsmurf]

Soft? Sounds like a well-known inherent flaw of the MainConcept encoders. I export to Procoder, not a big MC fan due to it's softening. Although Vegas tends to be one of the better MC engine uses.

[guns1inger]

6000kbps is getting a bit low for CBR encoding IMO. If you don't need to go that low, push it up and see if you like the results better.

[edDV]

I agree, quality sources should use higher average bitrate if quality is the main concern. Dual layer DVD-9 media solves the length issue.

The MPeg2 decompression to Huffyuv and re-encode will degrade the image somewhat. I trust your Vegas project setting was uncompressed "NTSC Standard (720x486, 29.970 fps)"*. If you had DV as the project setting, there would have been an additional unnecessary compression.

If filtering+effects wasn't the goal, better results would be obtained using a MPeg2 native editor with "smart" encoding. That would preserve first generation quality for the unfiltered frames.


* with 486 changed to 480 for DVD or ATSC sources. Or for a progressive DVD it would be 23.976 uncompressed 720x480.