ATEM Mini Pro Stream Artifacts

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EpicNativeDude

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ATEM Mini Pro Stream Artifacts

PostTue Apr 28, 2020 7:31 pm

Hi there, I'm new to the forums and recently picked up the ATEM Mini Pro. I started streaming with it to test before I started working with client work and I found that I'm getting artifacts on high motion scenes. I've been testing it via my Twitch channel. I have also used other forms of software encoding such as OBSs' different software filters and the motion artifacts have not been this messy. This product has been marketed towards game streamers and if you can't see what's goin on it doesn't make sense to use it for this purpose. I'm using the native settings for the switcher, the "Streaming Medium" preset (6mbps) because my internet can handle 10mpbs but I leave some overhead for gaming and such. I've used 6mbps on the built in software encoders in OBS without such artifacts. Why am I getting so much artifacts in high motion scenes?

FYI I'm going through the hardware encoder in the ATEM mini Pro direct to ethernet.

Thanks!

Lindsay
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Roman Pytkin Pekarek

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Re: ATEM Mini Pro Stream Artifacts

PostTue Apr 28, 2020 11:24 pm

What resoluition fo U used ? 1080p50/60 ? im not sure if AMP half fps for streaming ..
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EpicNativeDude

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Re: ATEM Mini Pro Stream Artifacts

PostWed Apr 29, 2020 1:54 am

The FPS seems fine, which makes kinda weirder. 1080p60, camera and computer monitor are both set to 60p (Camera 60p and monitor 60hz)
The stream is fine when I run console through USB-C (shows up as webcam in OBS studio) it's only when using the encoder.
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Roman Pytkin Pekarek

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Re: ATEM Mini Pro Stream Artifacts

PostWed Apr 29, 2020 8:43 am

And is Atem streaming at 30fps ? Because for 60fps is 6mbps very low ..
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EpicNativeDude

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Re: ATEM Mini Pro Stream Artifacts

PostWed Apr 29, 2020 5:46 pm

Hi there, 6mpbs is what Twitch maxes out on when you're an affiliate or regular member, and is the recommended bitrate for 1080p60. I have posted two different examples as well, I tried posting links earlier but it wouldn't let me post links. The "Overwatch" ( twin shotguns) screenshot is from the ATEM Mini Recorder direct to Twitch, while the "Battlefield" screenshot is encoded on my computer through OBS, both at the same bitrate and resolution/framerate of 1080p60 6mpbs. Ignore my derpy face.
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Roman Pytkin Pekarek

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Re: ATEM Mini Pro Stream Artifacts

PostWed Apr 29, 2020 10:43 pm

Uhh .. Lots of artifacts and pixelation .. It looks wery bad ..
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Dave Del Vecchio

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Re: ATEM Mini Pro Stream Artifacts

PostThu Apr 30, 2020 3:42 am

I would suggest doing some tests with the local recording (to a USB-C drive) of the H.264 encoded stream of the ATEM Mini Pro. This will eliminate any network related issues from the equation and will allow you to test encoding at different bitrates. So, you could compare the different streaming data rates (low, medium, and high) to the much higher bandwidth HyperDeck encoding bitrates (also available in low, medium, and high settings).

This might help narrow down the source of the problem and whether it is related to the encoding bitrate, the frame rate, the amount of action in the scene, etc.

Scenes with a lot of fast action in them (which is common in a lot of video games) often present a challenge for a lot of hardware video encoders, as it becomes tricky to determine where to allocate the video data to maximize video quality. And while hardware encoders have improved somewhat in this area, they still often lag the best software video encoders.

Blackmagic claims to have improved their H.264 encoder somewhat in the ATEM Mini Pro, so that the video quality is better at the same data rate than the original implementation in the HyperDeck Studio Mini. But I know that it took companies like NVidia and Intel several iterations to improve their hardware H.264 encoders to at least be somewhat competitive with software encoding (and both of those companies are much larger and with more resources than Blackmagic Design). So it wouldn't surprise me if there are still some areas of improvement in Blackmagic's second generation encoder.

The one thing that's nice, is that it doesn't seem to be a fixed function hardware H.264 implementation that Blackmagic is using (in contrast to the NVidia and Intel chips), but they are likely using some kind of FPGA implementation instead. Which would mean that it might be possible to improve the encode quality with a firmware update. The HyperDeck Mini, for example, got the second generation encoding logic that was added to the ATEM Mini Pro via a firmware update.

The best way to do these kinds of encoder tests is usually to start with a single high quality master recording (that is either uncompressed or with a high quality codec like ProRes HQ), and then feed the video of that master recording through the H.264 encoder. That way it is possible to do comparisons of the exact same video sequences to see where the encoder does better or worse.
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Re: ATEM Mini Pro Stream Artifacts

PostFri May 01, 2020 4:42 pm

There's something slightly mushy about the output of the Mini Pro both using the hardware encoder and the USB connection. Compared to my camera connected directly via the UltraStudio Mini Recorder the ATEM Mini Pro has quite a bit more moire for example...

Need to try to record using the usb-port. but only have compatible drives with important stuff on them and I'm scared the Mini Pro will overwrite something!
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Re: ATEM Mini Pro Stream Artifacts

PostFri May 01, 2020 7:26 pm

dmitrizigany wrote:There's something slightly mushy about the output of the Mini Pro both using the hardware encoder and the USB connection. Compared to my camera connected directly via the UltraStudio Mini Recorder the ATEM Mini Pro has quite a bit more moire for example...

Comparing compressed video to uncompressed video...and you saw a difference? Really? :lol:

Sorry, couldn't resist but that's basically it. I think people expect way too much from the $600 little engine that could. I know the first round of shows that came out of the E-Sports Arena in Vegas suffered a similar pixilated fate. Those standalone hardware encoders were several thousand dollars each, and were quickly replaced with even more expensive encoders to make the gaming look good.

I'm not saying you can't get decent performance with the Mini here, but I think expectations should be managed. If you can pull off enough bandwidth to stream the Hyperdeck med/high rates I think it looks pretty good-but that's streaming 25-50Mb upload...sometimes software encoders at this level have an advantage of having much more horsepower from the host computer than something like the Mini, and if its streaming the game on the same host it's a direct connection with more pixels to crunch to begin with.
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dmitrizigany

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Re: ATEM Mini Pro Stream Artifacts

PostFri May 01, 2020 7:47 pm

MambaFiber.com wrote:Comparing compressed video to uncompressed video...and you saw a difference? Really?

I meant after going up on YouTube...
So going from ATEM Mini Pro to YouTube or from camera via UltraStudio/Wirecast to YouTube... Also compared the USB out of the MINI Pro to YouTube... a bit more Moire and artifacts when going via the Mini Pro...
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Dave Del Vecchio

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Re: ATEM Mini Pro Stream Artifacts

PostTue May 05, 2020 1:19 am

dmitrizigany wrote:I meant after going up on YouTube...
So going from ATEM Mini Pro to YouTube or from camera via UltraStudio/Wirecast to YouTube... Also compared the USB out of the MINI Pro to YouTube... a bit more Moire and artifacts when going via the Mini Pro...
Looking at the video on YouTube is not a great way to evaluate the quality of the video encoder itself. Because everything you view on YouTube will have also passed through YouTube's encoder (either H.264 or VP9 encoding depending on where you are watching). So since everything will be encoded twice, you won't know for sure at that point where any video artifacts came from, it could be coming from either of the two encoders or even the interaction between the two encoders.

If you want to fairly evaluate the performance of an encoder, you should start with high quality (preferably uncompressed) source video file and then feed that through each encoder you want to compare using some local recording mechanism. Then you can compare each of the encoded files with the original source file.

There are also various encoding metrics that can be used such as SSIM, PSNR, Netflix VMAF. Most of these can be run using ffmpeg or other free utilities to do objective comparisons between different encoders. And generally it is good to use several different source videos and compare the encoders for each, because some encoders are better at certain types of video content than others.

This kind of information is generally much more useful in evaluating a video encoder than just saying "it looks bad."

It would not surprise me if it turns out that the ATEM Mini Pro is not as good as the best software encoders like x264 (most hardware encoders are not), but it's helpful to know how big of a gap there is. Given a high enough data rate to work with, most H.264 encoders will do a good enough job such that the differences are not detectable to most viewers. But I'm sure it would be useful for a lot of people to know how the ATEM Mini Pro compares to some other hardware encoders or the various x264 presets (slow, fast, veryfast, etc.) at different bitrates.
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Roman Pytkin Pekarek

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Re: ATEM Mini Pro Stream Artifacts

PostTue May 05, 2020 10:41 pm

U can compare it by recordings into Harddisk .. AMP use one encoder for streaming and recording ..
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Re: ATEM Mini Pro Stream Artifacts

PostTue May 05, 2020 10:51 pm

Which is input-1 and which is input-2. Input-1 is 'special' as it determines the base rate. You might try switching the two and see if there is any difference.
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Re: ATEM Mini Pro Stream Artifacts

PostFri May 08, 2020 9:20 pm

Dave Del Vecchio wrote:Looking at the video on YouTube is not a great way to evaluate the quality of the video encoder itself. Because everything you view on YouTube will have also passed through YouTube's encoder

My normal gig is making music videos and films. Believe me, I know the horror of YouTube's compression/encoding. I feel like killing myself every time I see my work on YouTube, where music videos always end up as that's where the audience is.
But for a thing like the ATEM Mini Pro, it's sole purpose is to get stuff onto sites like YouTube so I feel that is what is interesting, seeing how it looks at it's final destination.

That said, I just did my first real stream with the ATEM Mini Pro yesterday and I have no complaints in regard to the quality of the Mini Pro. And it performed flawlessly in all other regards. Did a post about that in the "Off Topic" section if anyone is curious.
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Re: ATEM Mini Pro Stream Artifacts

PostSat May 09, 2020 2:58 pm

Dmitri : What resolution and bitrate do U used ?
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dmitrizigany

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Re: ATEM Mini Pro Stream Artifacts

PostSun May 10, 2020 1:41 pm

Streaming High and 25p...
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Re: ATEM Mini Pro Stream Artifacts

PostSun Jun 20, 2021 7:58 pm

Hi,

i got the exact same problem:

Fresh new Atem Mini Pro, streaming via direct ethernet to twitch, 1080p60 is defined in ATEM Software C, streaming high with theses xml presets:
Code: Select all
<name>Streaming High</name>
            <config resolution="1080p" fps="60">
               <bitrate>8500000</bitrate>
               <audio-bitrate>128000</audio-bitrate>
               <keyframe-interval>2</keyframe-interval>
            </config>
            <config resolution="1080p" fps="60">
               <bitrate>6500000</bitrate>
               <audio-bitrate>128000</audio-bitrate>
               <keyframe-interval>2</keyframe-interval>
            </config>
         </profile>
         <profile>


I'm streaming video games and i got A LOT of artifacts no matter the game: FPS (counter-strike or Tarkov), Music Games (Unbeatable) or Fighting Games (GG Strive)...

twitch.tv/videos/1051957549?t=2h28m10s -> Here's an example
I KNOW THIS IS NOT TRULLY REPRESENTATIVES FOR SPECIALIST

But i have a 800mbps fiber internet connexion and with OBS with the same bitrate i have a truly 1080p60.

I think i understand "hyperdeck presets" makes a better video quality, but Twitch server don't allow 70mbps streams but 6-7mbps max.

Is there a way to keep video quality from "hyperdeck high" and lower the streaming's bitrate ? If not, what is the purpose of direct streaming via ATEM mini pro ?
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Re: ATEM Mini Pro Stream Artifacts

PostSun Oct 10, 2021 1:37 am

My understanding from talking with others is that this has to do with the AMP doing variable bitrate encoding vs constant bitrate. I haven't really studied the algorithms behind VBR but believe it lowers quality when lots of detail between frames change significantly.

I've noticed that long cross-fades/dissolves suffer from this same problem when streaming from the AMP.

And yes -- identical thing observed in the saved PGM output on the locally-connected USB hard drive (same encoding).

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