Ballet Dancer Needs Smooth Video Clip

[dancermom]

I have a Mac OS X 10.6.8. My daughter's teacher created a blu-ray video of her performance and now she needs to create a small clip (with the teacher's prior permission)to use for auditions to ballet companies. Currently, the clip I created doesn't handle motion all that well - I took out most of the combing, but a dancer needs for the clip to flow smoothly. Right now, it is a little jagged and doesn't reflect the smooth, flowing performance quality captured on the original Blu-ray.


I am very low-tech (and I know my Macbook is ancient). I have struggled with Handbrake for a few years and managed to come up with sort of okay clips for her. However, the quality really needs to be good this time. We need to upload to Vimeo. I have an external Blu-ray player that allows me to work with it on my Mac, and a Passport for Mac on which to store the files. I have tried to follow the Vimeo recommendations for uploads. So my Handbrake ( Version 0.10.5 x86_64 ) settings are set to:
MP4
Web Optimized
H.264 9x264)
FPS - Same as Source
Constant Framerate
RF Quality 20
Average Bitrate (Kbps) 20,000 [I just wildly guessed on this since one Video I uploaded to Vimeo said they usually recommend a minimum of 10,000, but they don't give a sense of the best range]
Two-pass encoding; Turbo 1st pass

I didn't change any of the Encoder options but it lists: x264 Unparse: level=4.0:ref=1:8x8dct=0:weightp=1ubme=2:mixed-refs=0:trellis=0:vbv-bufsize=25000:vbv-maxrate=20000:rc-lookahead=10 and the default settings are:
Tune - none
Profile - Main
Level 4.0
Preset slider sits at 3rd notch from left

The audio settings are the ones recommended by Vimeo (Samplerate 48; bitrate 320) AAC Core

I set the picture filter settings to
Detelicine - Default
Decomb - Default

because I wanted to get rid of the combing due to continuous rapid motion in the 3 minute video clip.

Source is listed as 1920x1080, Anamorphic: 1920x1020, Loose, Modulus: 2, Crop: Auto 8/60/0/0

I don't care so much about the ultimate clarity and focus - but the movement has to be as true to the original as possible.

If you can recommend any tweaks to my settings I'd appreciate. I also have to do this very fast - by the end of today. So I would even be willing to pay for a reliable alternative to Handbrake if you can recommend one.

Thank you and please go slowly as technology isn't my first language!

[jagabo]

Start with your interlaced video, then:

Deinterlace: Bob
double frame rate, 59.94 fps for NTSC

[dancermom]

Thanks so much! Will give this a try.

[dancermom]

I think that made it worse. And it just freezes entirely on my Android tablet and Mac.

Can anyone recommend some reasonably priced software to download that will walk me through it, as clearly I'm missing at step here, and running out of time.

Thanks for trying to help, though.

[pandy]

I would go for ffmpeg (not sure how it works on mac), jagabo proposed Bob i would advise something like yadif, side to this if video will be uploaded to Vimeo i think that vimeo policy is same as youtube - video is re-encoded thus dual pass have no sense, also slow settings have no sense (but they may have sense if you mark your source video as downloadable then AFAIK vimeo provide link to your source thus best quality settings may be beneficial).

I think that made it worse. And it just freezes entirely on my Android tablet and Mac.

Can anyone recommend some reasonably priced software to download that will walk me through it, as clearly I'm missing at step here, and running out of time.

Thanks for trying to help, though.

It's not about software as there is no cost software that doing this very well - problem is in your players - seem they are not capable to decode level 4.2 correctly - most of older devices has up to level 4.1 decoding, side to this software players are NOT recommended as they may give incorrect results (suffer from jitter in time domain that may be perceived as not smooth motion) if you have some TV capable to decode file from USB then i would advise to use a TV to inspect quality of motion, consider to use 1280x720p as workaround for level 4.2 limitation (anyway accordingly to you spatial resolution is not important as temporal).

Sorry for tech jargon but sometimes it is difficult to not use it.

[dancermom]

No, thank you - that is appreciated. It is difficult because in this situation we have to hope that whoever is receiving it (on another continent) will have a device that it works well with. I played the original clip I made on my husband's and son's newer laptops (Microsoft) and they worked fine. My daughter's android phone and my tablet (Chrome) had big issues with buffering. But once I embedded the clip in my daughter's website portfolio (weebly) things seemed to resolve a bit. So could have been just the time of day and what the local internet connection was up to most of the morning. I've created DVDs before without a hitch, but quality is lost on the web.

[jagabo]

jagabo proposed Bob i would advise something like yadif

I think Handbrake's bob is Yadif. Or something very similar.

I think that made it worse.

I wonder if Handbrake got the field order backward. If you step through the resulting video frame by frame do you see back and forth motion with each frame when there is motion? I don't know of any way to "fix" that in Handbrake. If the video doesn't have this problem you'll to describe the jerkiness better. If you step through frame by frame do you see duplicate frames? Can you see that frames are missing?

Some other things to try in Handbrake:

Try the same bob and 2x fps, but use a frame size of 1280x720 (again, no cropping).

Don't let it crop the video. Set Custom Cropping and change all the crop values to 0.

Use one of the lower device profiles. Like AppleTV or iPod.

I played the original clip I made on my husband's and son's newer laptops (Microsoft) and they worked fine.

Just saw this. Then you have a playback problem. In Handbrake try just reducing the frame size to 1280x720 and encode as you originally did.

[aedipuss]

first i'd figure out what you actually have for source material. it can't be 1920x1020 if it came off a blu-ray it's not an allowed resolution and i've never seen any video with the vertical res squished called anamorphic, it's always the horizontal. try using mediainfo on a source file.

[pandy]

Safe option is to stuck with H.264, High profile, Level 4.0 (yes i know but some HW decoders struggle also with 4.1 - there is plenty silicone errata when specification drops suddenly from 4.2 or 4.1 to 4.0) - use 1280x720p - motion should be intact and overall file way easier to decode on typical players (also due reduced bitrate easier to pass over WLAN interface). I would go for CRF (quality) based encoding - valid for x264 based encoders.

[smrpix]

In all likelihood you can just upload the original clip to vimeo without reencoding. Have you actually edited it? What software did yo use? What camera did you use?

And remember, ballet companies are used to seeing videos that are less than technically perfect anyway. So while I'd always encourage you to make it look as good as possible there's no need to over-obsess.

[dancermom]

Wow! Thanks for all the great input! A lot to work with here.

For now, we had to make do with whatever we had prepared. Story was that daughter was asked to send materials for consideration on Saturday afternoon. Later that day, her teacher who just arrived from Russia (where he lives with his family) unexpectedly gave her a copy of a Blu Ray movie he had created last year of a performance she was in. Since he is a dance pro himself, and obviously a pretty good amateur videographer, his video was awesome. So, having just sent out some less than great clips to the companies who had requested them, she was then scrambling to send one of these clips to replace the ones she had literally just sent out, hoping to get them there before Monday morning in Europe, since the difference really would make the difference between being seriously considered for employment, or just thrown onto the reject pile of 1000s of wannabees.

However, I will definitely take all your recommendations and see if we can create a more reliable segment. Definitely know not to over obsess. That said, my daughter's best quality as a dancer is her fluid transitions - for the contemporary parts this is less of an issue, but for some of the really classical dancing the fluidity is everything - they look like they're supernaturally floating through air, when in reality, they are killing themselves!

Thanks again. I'll take all your recommendations so far, experiment with them and let you know where it takes me.

[pandy]

made some brief tests with few real interlace HD streams and all provide correct results:

@SET x264opts="crf=16:vbv_maxrate=62500:vbv_bufsize=62500:level=4.2:keyint=120:cabac=1:threads=auto:sliced_threads=0:slices=-1:no_psnr=1:no_ssim=1:bluray_compat=1:open-gop=0:pic_struct=1:aud=1:nal_hrd=vbr:force_cfr=1:colorprim=bt709:transfer=bt709:colormatrix=bt709:fullrange=off"
@ffmpeg.exe -y -hide_banner -loglevel 32 -stats -i "%1" -c:v libx264 -preset fast -tune film -profile:v high -level:v 4.2 -x264opts %x264opts% -x264-params %x264opts% -vf yadif=mode=1:parity=-1:deint=0 -c:a aac -b:a 256k -movflags faststart -y -f mp4 "%~n1_vimeo.mp4"

Have no clue how this will work on mac as i'm ignoring Apple by principle.

[JVRaines]

Another thing to try: turn off Detelecine and Decomb and turn on Deinterlace. I use "slower."

[johnmeyer]

I have a Mac OS X 10.6.8. My daughter's teacher created a blu-ray video of her performance and now she needs to create a small clip (with the teacher's prior permission)to use for auditions to ballet companies. Currently, the clip I created doesn't handle motion all that well - I took out most of the combing, but a dancer needs for the clip to flow smoothly. Right now, it is a little jagged and doesn't reflect the smooth, flowing performance quality captured on the original Blu-ray.

It is not clear to me, after reading all the posts in this thread, what exactly you did to create the clip from the Blu-Ray. You may not need to do any of the things suggested here. Instead, you may be able to go back to your original work, and make a different selection for how your software creates the clip. This final step, after you have edited your video, is called rendering, and most software programs give you an array of options of what codec (coder-decoder) to use to create the new pixels for each frame in the video clip, and then within that codec, you generally have many additional options you can choose.

Your description sounds to me like you may have taken a 30 frames-per-second (fps) interlaced clip (which actually contains 60 fields per second) and perhaps rendered it to 24 fps progressive. If so, this would definitely destroy the fluidity that you desire. Another possibility is that you followed someone's recommendation to deinterlace the video and ended up with 30 fps progressive. This has half the original's events per second (only 30 instead of 60), and will definitely impart a completely different feel to the performance.

So, the simplest solution to your problem may be to go back to your saved video edit, go through the same initial steps to render the video clip, but before you click on the button to start the render, look for buttons that lead you to options dialog boxes where you can alter some of the settings. You want to render at something that will give you a result that matches the fps and interlaced properties of the original. If you don't know exactly what they are, you can download Mediainfo (freeware program) and drop the video file onto it. That program will give you lots of details about the video.

FWIW, I'm married to a ballet dancer and have filmed several hundred ballets since I got my first video camera in 1981. Here is a link to the highlights from this past year's Nutcracker (I've filmed over fifty of these):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQaX3CZEV3o

This is only 30 fps, because of limitations of YouTube's ability to play 60 fps on some connections and computers. I also just created the funeral video for my wife's ballet instructor who passed away at the age of 104. She escaped from Russia with her parents during the revolution (yes, in 1917), toured China, India, and Europe as a ballet dancer, and ended in Paris during the early 1920s where she appeared, as a teenager, dancing in French silent movies.

So if you need any other help that relates to producing video highlights of ballet performances, just let me know.