Quote:
Originally Posted by Emulgator
This is what I am trying too here, thanks johnmeyer, for your research, countless suggestions and precious time here and in other forums !
|
Thank you very much for that. It helps a lot. I don't usually don't get bothered by forum flotsam, but once in awhile, late in the day, I let it get to me. I guess I'm getting too old for this.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Emulgator
Not all DV implementations get everything right, but it is well possible now.
|
Your long discourse on DV is spot on and reminds me of something I used to point out: all DV is not created the same. When I first got started, not long after DV changed the entire video editing scene by letting you use common hardware to edit video (no SCSI RAID arrays required), I was using Pinnacle Studio and the big issue was the Microsoft DV encoder built into Windows which was absolutely pathetic. Everyone was complaining, and half the posts in the Studio forum were about how to replace it.
When I upgraded to VideoFactory (the little brother of Vegas) and then upgraded to Vegas, everyone was marvelling at the quality of the Vegas DV codec. One guy actually did a test where he made a copy of a copy, making a trivial change so the video had to be re-compressed. He did this
100 times and then compared the 100th generation to the original. They were visually almost the same. Here's a link to that test from back in 2003:
Multi-Generation DV Test
The MainConcept DV encoder, which is what I use for other apps (because the Vegas encoder is not installed in a way that can be used by other apps) is almost as good.
So when people start yapping about DV's compression artifacts, I no longer argue, because of course it does have artifacts, like any other lossy compression, but they are not as horrific as some of these uniformed people claim. My guess is that most of the people who complain are not using a professional encoder.
This same thing is true of other encoders: MPEG-2 quality from Procoder or MainConcept is vastly better than from freeware versions. H.264 is actually the other way around: the freeware encoders in Handbrake and MeGUI seem to be better.
I've spent countless hours comparing all sorts of codecs, restoration scripts, and other things that change video, always looking for artifacts, both within each frame as well as temporal artifacts between frames. Some things hit you between the eyes and are to be avoided. DV compression artifacts, when done with a good DV encoder are not that big a deal compared to all the other problems you see in video.