Does a better video card improve the quality of video when rendering?

[raysolomon]

I use Sony Vegas 8 and Adobe Premier Pro CS4 to render videos.
I hear that high end GPU's and multi-core CPU's improve rendering speed of videos.
I was thinking of getting the latest ATI video card (HD 4870 X2)

Do you think a high end GPU will improve the quality as well?
Or is the quality all dependent on just the application itself?
Or, is the quality dependent on just the codec?

Also, if anyone has been able to get near-DVD quality at low bit rates(192-300kbps), please let me know what software you used.
To my knowledge, only Camtasia 6 is able to get near-dvd quality at 192kbps.

[guns1inger]

At the moment GPUs have very little impact on rendering. They can make real-time previews of effects etc much smoother and allow for more effects to be previewed together, but at the moment they are not used by the major render engines. Expect this to change over the next 12 months.

Quality comes down to how well you tweak your encoder, what compression you apply, and how much you squeeze the crap out of your video. There are other factors as well - quality of source, type of source (e.g. handheld DV in low light is not good at all), and the number of times the video has been encoded prior to editing.

Most modern encoders are multi-core aware, and will make good use of multiple cores, hyper-threading and multiple CPUs. Don't necessarily expect 100% across all cores, but 80%+ still makes a huge difference.

I have not seen anything give DVD quality at those bitrates. I assume, when you save DVD quality, that you also mean DVD resolution.

[poisondeathray]

I'm going to reply to your post from this other thread, since Baldrick locked it:
https://forum.videohelp.com/topic364930.html

I am baffled. I need some expert advice.

I created a video using Camtasia 6 and it does not allow the movie to be exported to FLV because FLV has become deprecated in favor of the MP4 format.
This is fine and I understand why MP4 is a better codec.

However, I have a client that absolutely needed the video to be in FLV format for a website, so I used SUPER to find out the details of the Camtasia video so I could render the MP4 using Adobe Media Encoder CS4 into an FLV format using the same audio and video details.

I adjusted the settings properly to match the original MP4 video and audio and rendered it, but the resulting FLV file is very poor quality with moving objects in the video.
I did this many times and tweaked the settings again and again, but I still get poor quality using Adobe Media Encoder CS4.

I went back to Google for more research and I found a blog post about using FFMPEG to convert MP4 to FLV, so I gave it a try.
ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -f flv -s 640x556 -r 10fps -b 600kbps -g 100 -acodec libmp3lame -ar 44100 -ab 93000 -ac 1 -y output600.flv

OMG, I was amazed!
The quality of the FLV was nearly identical to the original MP4 and the file size was almost the same.
It only took less than a minute to encode the 10 minute MP4 video into FLV.
The only downside was I has to go from 192kbps to 600kbps bit-rate in which I am trying to avoid.


Questions:
* How can ffmpeg, a free GPL software out-perform a $700 Adobe product in this scenario?
* How come I could not produce a high quality FLV from Adobe Media Encoder CS4 without making the video bit-rate very high (1mbps+)?
* How do I achieve the same high quality (near DVD) Camtasia 6 MP4 video in Sony Vegas, Adobe Premiere or Adobe Media Encoder at such a low bit-rate (192kbps)?

The attached image shows the output of Camtasia 6. Its quality is near-dvd. crystal clear with no artifacts.

1) .mp4 is just a container and it can "hold" different formats. Similarly .flv is just a container; it can "hold" different audio & video formats. The specifc format that you used for the Camtasia output was h.264 or AVC, which offers high compression for video , and aac audio - providing high compression for audio

2) the h.264 part of ffmpeg is based on x264 encoder which is the open source implementation for h.264. It is constantly being refined and developed, improved. The Adobe product is licensing Mainconcept h.264 encoder, your Camtasia 6 output also uses a licensed Mainconcept h.264 encoder. Theoretically, if you used the same settings for Adobe Encoder and Camtasia 6 you should get the identical output. No offense, but there must be user error on your part. Mainconcept's encoder has not had much development over the last year, it is pretty much the same. Mainconcept was bought by DivX and the Divx 7 encoder is based on the Mainconcept h.264 encoder, just re-wrapped.

3) If you want to, you could export a lossless intermediate (e.g. huffyuv, lagarith) from Vegas, Premiere and then encode using Camtasia 6 - but again, that would be useless because they use the same encoder. (assuming you have the mainconcept plugin for Premiere, it's an addon, not included)

4) Find out WHY your client "needs" .flv wrapper, because you can just losslessly re-wrap your Camtasia 6 output with ffmpeg (no re-encoding, same quality, same filesize) - i.e. is it because s/he cannot use h.264 or aac audio because of their application? Is it incompatible with some formats? Because all applications based on Adobe Flash for streaming can use the h.264/aac/.mp4 format ever since 9.3... So there must be a reason

You can use the following:

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -vcodec copy -acodec copy output.flv

[J. Baker]

Upgrading you're graphics card could be good for a few things. If you're editing HD footage or using an editor that uses Direct X or OpenGL for special effects in some it's filters. If you ever plan on editing HD, I would suggest a graphics card with 512MB or more. Some editors and players use hardware acceleration for playback and the more memory on your card the better. Now if you're just editing DVD quality, a card with 128MB would be just fine.

Quality depends on the codec used and bitrate.

[raysolomon]

@poisondeathray

The other post is here and open to comments:
https://forum.videohelp.com/topic364931.html

The video not rendering properly would appear to be a mistake on my part, but as Baldrick stated, I am inclined to believe Adobe's H.264 encoder is just crap.

I think an expert here should give it a try and create a screen capture of a presentation in camtasia 6, then output it as MP4 @ 192kbps.
Then try to replicate that same high quality in another video editor.

[poisondeathray]

OK he unlocked it...I swear it was locked LOL

Perhaps Baldrick or a mod can move my post over to that thread?

[poisondeathray]

@poisondeathray

The other post is here and open to comments:
https://forum.videohelp.com/topic364931.html

The video not rendering properly would appear to be a mistake on my part, but as Baldrick stated, I am inclined to believe Adobe's H.264 encoder is just crap.

I think an expert here should give it a try and create a screen capture of a presentation in camtasia 6, then output it as MP4 @ 192kbps.
Then try to replicate that same quality in another video editor.

I use camtasia 6, and several versions of Mainconcept h.264 encoder, and the SDK version which has more control and unlocked options. If you understand what I said above, you should understand why you are getting those results. If you want even better quality, learn to use x264 and what to use in the encoding options.

[raysolomon]

@guns1inger

Not DVD resolution, but near-dvd quality meaning how clear and almost zero artifacts present with moving objects.
I have a presentation created with Camtasia 6 and the output was unbelievably great for such a low bit-rate.
It is almost difficult to tell the difference between a dvd video in my opinion.

[raysolomon]

If you want even better quality, learn to use x264 and what to use in the encoding options.

Okay, I will do that. Thanks.