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.