Video quality issues

[mars-red]

I'm currently trialing VideoStudio 2019 Ultimate and have worked past some initial stumbling blocks but am still having issues. I make machining/workshop videos for youtube, and am looking for a more reliable alternative to the extraordinarily full-featured, yet unstable, Kdenlive. I keep hearing about crashing and reliability issues with the Adobe products, so really don't want to go that route either (plus I'm not a fan of the subscription model). VideoStudio is so close to being what I need, but I just can't get a decent quality render out of it.

I target 1920x1080, 60fps (one slight concern of mine is that there seems to be no option for this in the project settings, even though it IS an option when encoding - closest I can get is 59.9xxx FPS in the project settings), using VP8 (VP9 would be great but seems that not an out of the box option for any software I've used so far). The poor quality I'm getting is nowhere near the sort of thing you could write off from me being picky, the video chatter and compression artifacts are just horrendous and I think anyone would agree.

My test render is really simple - a file directly from my DSLR, 1080p, 30fps. Video clip is trimmed on either end, then sped up by 500%. That's it.

One lesser concern I have is with performance - during my render, I'm only getting maximum about 25% CPU utilization (it's an 8750H, 6 physical cores and 12 threads). With the nvidia GPU hardware acceleration enabled, the GPU is also only at about 20% utilization (my card is a GTX 1070). With hardware encode acceleration turned off, GPU usage varies between 10%-20%, and CPU utilization barely hits 28% occasionally. I get basically the same render time whether hardware acceleration is turned on or off. Two questions I have related to that are: 1 - Is there a way for me to specify a number of CPU threads to utilize during rendering? 2 - Is it normal for the nvidia encode hardware acceleration to have so little effect?

Apologies if my information isn't clear or if I'm getting terminology wrong, let me know if I can clarify anything. I really just need something that works out of the box, and is reliable (doesn't corrupt my projects, doesn't hang or crash), and I really want VideoStudio to fit the bill because I *love* the interface and usability.

Thanks in advance for any ideas anyone has about things I can try to troubleshoot the render quality issues.

-Max

[canuck]

Technically there is no such setting as 60fps (or 30fps) since the actual fps is 59.997 (or 29.997). The 60 and 30 are simply round-off numbers.

Also, you should know that the trial version has many features disabled or missing.

[mars-red]

Technically there is no such setting as 60fps (or 30fps) since the actual fps is 59.997 (or 29.997). The 60 and 30 are simply round-off numbers.

Also, you should know that the trial version has many features disabled or missing.

Ah interesting, thanks! That sets my mind at ease about the 59.9xxx FPS thing.

The reason I'm trialing the software is to figure out how well it will meet my needs, so I need some way to know if the the issues I'm running into are related to features missing from the trial. The "data rate" in the custom output options dialog is capped to 15000kbps. I don't get any sort of message indicating a higher cap would be available in the full version. I've never had to work with quality settings in terms of kbps so I can't even take a guess whether that could be related to the quality issue.

One thing I can offer, is that the preview window in the editor shows the same compression artifacts. Proxies are turned off as far as I can tell.

[mars-red]

I've been playing around with different output formats and options, hardware acceleration for decoding / encoding do not affect the quality issues in the preview area or the final render. The Data Rate is capped differently depending on which output encoding I choose. I found that MPEG4 using H.265 Main Profile allows up to 65000kbps, and although H.264 and H.265 both render lightning fast on my system (utilizing nearly 100% CPU, which is awesome!), I get the same poor quality render. I really think there's something going on with the way my input clips are being decoded, but I don't know what else to try, having already tried with and without hardware accelerated decoding.

EDIT: Here's one frame of the test render output, H.265 Main, 65000kbps. The garbled areas are where there is motion in the video.

EDIT: I just noticed an additional behavior that might be related. When I drag the scrubber along my timeline, I can hold the scrubber on a garbled frame and when I release the mouse button the preview shows a different frame, always a frame that's slightly behind what was shown in the preview while scrubbing. I see the distortion when scrubbing along or when playing back realtime in the preview window, but if I place the current frame marker on an area that would be distorted, it's rendered perfectly in the preview window. It definitely seems related to motion.

[mars-red]

Ok, everything is great now!! I re-installed the Quicktime codecs (my camera outputs Mpeg4 wrapped up as MOV files), and now it works perfect! I'm stoked.

Sorry to come in here and spam you all with my saga, but hopefully this will help somebody else if they run into the same issue. I'm off to play around with some more serious editing, so far I seriously can't say enough good things about the user interface, compared to what I'm used to it's been a joy to use.

[lata]

Hi
Thanks for the update on this issue, sure it will benefit others
As for editing / rendering options
1 / try to match the Project Properties (alt-Enter) to the same as your video Mov properties, the frame rate is important as is the frame size.
Video Studio will match the properties for most / some video files, where a popup window asks you to match the properties.
Test that on a new project as it activates once using the first clip added to the top timeline

2 / From Share top left there is an option for Same as project properties / same as first clip
The latter should render the project using the original video properties retaining the best quality.
Increasing the frame rate especially after applying Speed options I would not think is gonna help and may impact on quality.


Increasing Speed will remove frames, duration shorter playback will be faster.
Increasing the render frame rate will add frames, playback will remain the same speed

[mars-red]

Hi
Thanks for the update on this issue, sure it will benefit others
As for editing / rendering options
1 / try to match the Project Properties (alt-Enter) to the same as your video Mov properties, the frame rate is important as is the frame size.
Video Studio will match the properties for most / some video files, where a popup window asks you to match the properties.
Test that on a new project as it activates once using the first clip added to the top timeline

2 / From Share top left there is an option for Same as project properties / same as first clip
The latter should render the project using the original video properties retaining the best quality.
Increasing the frame rate especially after applying Speed options I would not think is gonna help and may impact on quality.


Increasing Speed will remove frames, duration shorter playback will be faster.
Increasing the render frame rate will add frames, playback will remain the same speed

Thank you Trevor, I appreciate the tips!