H.264 ruins my video

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hikingutah

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H.264 ruins my video

PostMon Jan 23, 2023 8:01 pm

All default settings seem to default to H.264 so that's what I've been rendering to.

But I was just looking at one of my videos and the quality is just terrible. I'm seeing a lot of artifacts that I don't recognize. This is 4K video! (I tried attaching a short clip but it says the file is too large.)

Then I tried rendering using H.265 and the quality is many times better.

I didn't realize there was a small setting like this that could totally ruin my video.

Is H.265 that much better? I'm uploading to YouTube. Does YouTube care if my video is H.264 or H.265?
http://www.youtube.com/@hikingutah. Dell XPS 8940 i7-11700 8 core, 32GB RAM, Windows 11.
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hikingutah

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Re: H.264 ruins my video

PostMon Jan 23, 2023 8:37 pm

http://www.youtube.com/@hikingutah. Dell XPS 8940 i7-11700 8 core, 32GB RAM, Windows 11.
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hikingutah

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Re: H.264 ruins my video

PostTue Jan 24, 2023 12:23 am

Well, I'm not sure why H.265 made a difference here. I found a quality setting that was limited to 10,000 Kb/s. Changing this to Automatic and Best quality seems to have significantly improved my video quality (and made my output file around 25 times larger--around ~600 MB vs 16 GB).

Now if I can just find a way to save these settings so they're the default across projects.
http://www.youtube.com/@hikingutah. Dell XPS 8940 i7-11700 8 core, 32GB RAM, Windows 11.
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Charles Bennett

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Re: H.264 ruins my video

PostTue Jan 24, 2023 10:33 am

Quality, and size of your render is very much governed by bit rate, especially h264. Low bitrates will produce that blocking. For UHD(4k) I set a minimum rate of 80Mb/s. I have found h265 produces much better renders.
Do remember that YouTube re-encodes every upload so the higher quality of your original the better. I never worry about file size as it's what the final render looks like on YT that's important to me.
Have a look at the Deliver section of the Reference manual starting on page 3876.

As an example, this is one of my uploads. Shot in HD at 50fps MP4, upscaled to UHD when rendering to h265 in a .mov file with Linear PCM audio. The 11.5 minute video produced a file of 10.8GB.
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hikingutah

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Re: H.264 ruins my video

PostTue Jan 24, 2023 3:50 pm

Charles Bennett wrote:Quality, and size of your render is very much governed by bit rate, especially h264. Low bitrates will produce that blocking. For UHD(4k) I set a minimum rate of 80Mb/s. I have found h265 produces much better renders.
Do remember that YouTube re-encodes every upload so the higher quality of your original the better. I never worry about file size as it's what the final render looks like on YT that's important to me.
Have a look at the Deliver section of the Reference manual starting on page 3876.


Thanks, but so what is the takeaway?

For reasons I don't know, YouTube prefers H.264 (https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/1722171?hl=en). They also seem to prefer MP4. And I guess large videos are okay, but it's taking me around 15 hours to upload.

So you recommend H.265? And you're setting your quality 80 Mb/s?

I'm using 30 FPS.

Is there any advantage to MOV?

(And, BTW, I'm truly amazed that the defaults offered by Resolve when I select YouTube, and how absolutely terrible they are. Makes me wonder what I'm doing.)
http://www.youtube.com/@hikingutah. Dell XPS 8940 i7-11700 8 core, 32GB RAM, Windows 11.
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Charles Bennett

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Re: H.264 ruins my video

PostTue Jan 24, 2023 4:48 pm

YouTube only recommends MP4 as it is such a common format, but they are happy with most formats such as Quicktime .mov, ProRes, DNxHR, h265, etc.
I've found h265 to have far fewer compression artifacts compared to h264. Yes, I set my bitrate to 80MB/s as a minimum.
The main benefit with .mov files is the ability to render with Linear PCM audio instead of highly compressed AAC. Remember, MP4 and MOV are just containers for the codecs.
Wow, 15 hours! Your internet connection must be really slow. :o
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Eric-Jan

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Re: H.264 ruins my video

PostTue Jan 24, 2023 8:48 pm

The OP has very fast movements in his image, is there any difference using VBR or CBR ?
i noticed with sound it's always best to use CBR to keep quality.
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Charles Bennett

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Re: H.264 ruins my video

PostWed Jan 25, 2023 9:13 am

I've used both Variable and Constant bitrate with h264 and found little difference. I have found that YouTube with h264 at 1080p and that most challenging to video compression, moving foliage past the camera, produces blocking artifacts. I put this down to the re-encoding to a lower bitrate by YT and an inferior playback codec. Uploading UHD and YT using the VP9 codec for replay, eliminates almost all of the artifacts.
With h265 I've tried both Constant QP and Variable Bitrate both with equal success. H265 is definitely a much better codec compression wise.
Audio is not affected by either bitrate type. I always use Linear PCM. 16bit 48k is always 1536kb/s, and 24bit 48k 2304kb/s regardless of h264 or h265 and Variable or Constant bitrate.
Resolve Studio 18.6.6 build 7
Dell XPS 8700 i7-4790, 24GB RAM, 2 x Evo 860 SSDs, GTX1060/6GB (546.01 Studio Driver), Win10 Home (22H2), Speed Editor, Faderport mk1, Eizo ColorEdge CS230 + BenQ GW2270 + Samsung SA200, Canon C100mk2, Zoom H2n.

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