Jimellow

A few friends and I recently filmed a short video, and after editing was completed on his iBook (Mac) the quality looked great. However, when the footage was converted to usable formats (AVI, MPEG4, etc.) the resulting product was very grainy, and noticeably inferior to the superb quality that was visible in the editing software.

The details I have in regards to the process are limited, as I am not the one doing the editing, but I wanted to post here in the hopes of possibly finding a few thoughts or suggestions in regards to what the problem might be.

After filming, we hooked the camcorder up to a high definition television and it looked great, and I'm told it looked just as nice when edited and finalized on the computer. Yet, when converted the resulting video is very grainy and disappointing.

Any thoughts, comments, suggestions, or anything else that could be suggested would be greatly appreciated. Due to being distanced from the actual process, I don't have many details, but I'd like to contribute to a solution in any way I can.

Thanks!

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Hain

All I can do is agree with you: the raw video data in iMovie (or whatever iFuckYourProjectUp product Macs come with) looks great. Converting it made it looks like absolute shit, even burning it to DVD was a waste of DVDs--it still looked like shit. I was doing the editing and a "professional" walked me through the numerous crashes I experienced. He was baffled why I needed to convert the video to anything but the raw video, as he just saved the raw data and played it fine in his iBook.

My recommendation: use Avid. A team of students at my university put together a great video using it. I don't know if it was the free or "bought" version. They had a lot of problems importing various video clips into the program, but once they figured out some magic process that let them import the videos, they said they had no problems. And their video looked fairly clean once exported to DVD.

Personally, I used a combination of Windows Movie Maker, DVD Flick, DVD Shrink, Windows Media Encoder, Paint.NET and Audacity to make all my movies. The look just as clean but with a bit more time spent converting things with WME.

I am currently running Kubuntu OS, and haven't had the need to make movies.

Jimellow

This is disheartening, but good information nonetheless.

If the editing has been done and is available in raw format, could it be accessed by other programs, or would everything have to be re-done/edited again with the new software?

Perhaps it would even have to be "ripped" again from the camera with the new software, so that it is recognized and able to be manipulated?

Thanks for the reply. I gather quite a bit of time/effort went into the editing process, and thus it's been a bit of a disappointment to come across this issue, but ultimately it should become a learning experience for future films if nothing else.

Thanks again, and if you have any further thoughts or answers to the questions above, I'd appreciate it.

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vanblah

Are you absolutely certain that the video was captured to the computer in "raw." Are you sure it wasn't compressed? If you capture a video to a compressed format, do your editing to that video and then render to yet another compressed format you will get all kinds of artifacts. My suggestion is to see if you get the same results with a different computer using Final Cut (or some other pro-sumer level software).

In the PC world you want to stay in AVI format (uncompressed to be exact) until the final render. I'm not sure if this is true for Macs. Just be absolutely sure that your video is in an uncompressed format while editing.

Cynthetiq

I've been working on something on the side with respect to video compression. It is all about the rendering codec and how much you're squeezing out to get a good file size.

If you'd like to test your raw footage in a conversion I'm happy to help out. PM me and I'll send you a link to a site.

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Hain

@ vanblah: Pretty sure iFuckUpYourProject imported things into raw. Not sure about the OP, but the cameras I used (when hooked up to the Mac), the Mac seemed to play the file from the cameras---I watched the file in nearly real time. The files on the camera would be short clips, a few MB, but then turned into something much larger on the Mac. The editing in the Mac looked awesome---until I had to convert it to anything. I would not only get blurs and "wandering pixels"*, but also just blank white pixels would appear in the final encode.

@ Jimellow: I looked around on my site, VideoHelp.com - Forum, Guides, Tools and hardware lists , but didn't turn up anything that I could use. Granted the things I found seemed to be harder than Chinese math to use, so I didn't have time to try them out given the time tables I was on.

Unless you have luck burning it to a DVD (which I didn't), I think you are kinda screwed,


* I think good compressors search for groups of images that move in order to better the compression. In my case, these groups of random pixels would move and completely ruin the movie when I converted it to anything.

Jimellow

I received an email from the friend that is doing the editing, and he forwarded to a post he made at a forum in the hopes of gaining further help. I am going to quote it below in the hopes that someone here might have some additional feedback:

In regards to the programs mentioned in previous replies here, it seems they are quite pricey, and likely not realistically affordable for us at this point. Thus, it would be nice if there could be a more affordable solution, but even some additional thoughts or feedback in regards to the new information I posted would be appreciated.

__________________
Desperation is no excuse for lowering one's standards.