Which format produces better quality overall MPEG-2, MPEG-4 or .x264?

[Canon GL-2 Guy]

Considering upgrading to Premiere CS 4 which has more encoding and exporting options.

Curious what forum members think & have experienced and the reason for thier views.

Thanks in advance.

[creamyhorror]

Quality/efficiency-wise, MPEG4 AVC > MPEG4 ASP > MPEG2. x264 is just an encoder for AVC (albeit an excellent one).

What's more important is what your final intended output format is.

[Canon GL-2 Guy]

My intended output is DVD.

What program here works best to create an MPEG4 "AVC" from a standard mini-dv .avi file?

Willing to try it, see what happens and directly compare it to what Premiere Pro CS 3 does.

[edDV]

Which format produces better quality overall MPEG-2, MPEG-4 or .x264?

All are capable of equal quality. MPeg4 AVC h.264 and .x264 are capable of holding quality with greater compression but the opposite is true if you need to recode.

DVD is MPeg2 by definition so avoid MPeg4 or .x264.
https://www.videohelp.com/dvd

[manono]

Yeah, if the intended final output is for DVD, then this is a more than pointless thread because you have no choice but MPEG-2.

[creamyhorror]

MPeg4 AVC h.264 and .x264 are capable of holding quality with greater compression but the opposite is true if you need to recode.

H.264 is certainly much more CPU-intensive to decode, but other than that it holds quality just fine whether you need to re-encode or not. Or maybe I'm misunderstanding you.

[edDV]

MPeg4 AVC h.264 and .x264 are capable of holding quality with greater compression but the opposite is true if you need to recode.

H.264 is certainly much more CPU-intensive to decode, but other than that it holds quality just fine whether you need to re-encode or not. Or maybe I'm misunderstanding you.

I'm suggesting

DV -> MPeg2 (DVD)

is less lossy than

DV -> h.264 -> MPeg2 (DVD)

[guns1inger]

The more highly compressed the intermediate format (especially if it uses temporal compression), the faster it degrades with subsequent re-encoding. If you are working purely in a simple cut-edit mode then this isn't as big an issue, however if you are doing any sort of transition or video processing, you will suffer badly. Even having to re-encode to another lossy format (such as H264 -> Mpeg-2) will do more damage than going from a lesser compressed source.

[creamyhorror]

I get what you mean now, Ed. Thanks.

The more highly compressed the intermediate format (especially if it uses temporal compression), the faster it degrades with subsequent re-encoding.

I understand what you mean - intermediate codecs need to use only intra-frame compression to preserve maximum quality. However, leaving aside intra-frame compression, at any given bitrate, a more advanced codec will preserve more information than a less advanced one. That's really all I was saying.

Introducing additional re-encode steps is obviously another matter altogether.