I have problems when creating videos. I always get some fuzziness on the output video even when I use the project properties, so the quality is lower. I have made the simplest case, taking one file from my GoPro, importing it in Edit more, selecting the option to set the project properties to the imported video and checking that they match, then when I Share, making sure that I select "Same as Project Settings". When the video is generated, I checked the file properties in WIndows Explorer, and see that there is one difference; the original input file has data rate of 44876kbps and the generated output file has a data rate of 40927kbps. The frame width / height are the same, 3840x2160, and the frame rate is the same at 29.97.
This problem is causing me lots of challenges to get good quality videos onto YouTube. I hope that there is something simple that I am missing!
I have a GoPro Hero 9 and like you have it set to record in HEVC/H.265 4K. The only difference is that I live in a PAL country, so it is set to record in 25 fps instead of 29.97 fps. I have inserted one of my clips into the timeline, got the message to match the Project Settings to those of the clip. And I went to Share and selected Same As Project Settings. The resulting video is still excellent quality, though there is a very minor difference in the data rate/bitrate. The original bitrate is 60393 kbps and the new rate is 59982. But this difference is so tiny that I can't see any difference in the quality between the two clips.
I am tempted to suggest that the difference in the bitrates that you get are also fairly small at around 4000 kbps -- though I don't know why you are getting this difference. I would think that in practice you would not be able to notice any difference in quality either. But it is obviously distressing you. I don't post anything to YouTube, so I can't really help there, but I understand YouTube usually converts incoming video to their own standards. Do you get any message from them when you submit your video?
The only other thing I can suggest is that instead of using Same As Project Settings, you set a Custom profile. On the Share page, select Custom, then click on the little silver cog icon beside the box for Format. A dialogue box should appear with two tabs: General and Compression. You can change the settings to make sure they are identical or pretty close to what you want. On the Compression tab, make sure you select H.265-MAIN as the Video Type. Then OK out of the box and produce your new video. See if that makes any difference.
Thanks for the quick response. Yes, I also tried a custom profile with the same settings and got the same result. If you forget about YouTube but just look at the input and output videos, which have nothing to do with YouTube, I hope that you can see the problem. The input video is straight from my GoPro Hero 10, and the output is just the input loaded into VisualStudio and immediately created without any alteration.
OK. Thanks for providing those videos. I can clearly see why you would be unhappy with the Output video. Played on VLC Player full screen on my 32" 4K monitor, your face looks a bit ragged where it does not in the Input clip; and some of the bushes in the background are definitely blurry. That's the two main things I notice though there are probably more. But I can't explain why it happens or why you get that 4000 kbps drop in the bitrate.
Using your Input video, I inserted that in the VS 2021 timeline, and got the message about matching the Project Settings to it. I went to Share and chose to output Same As Project Settings. The resulting video showed a bitrate of 43739 compared to the original 44658 kbps which my computer shows. So a much smaller diminution than yours of a little over 900 kbps.
More importantly, when I played the new video in VLC Player, the original quality of your face and the background appeared, at least to my eyes, the same as the original i.e. no raggedness or blurring. That pretty obviously must be explained by the significantly lower bitrate of your output, though as I said above, I would not have thought it sufficient to cause the loss of quality which occurred for you.
I also tested going to Share > Custom. The Properties box showed the same settings as the Project Settings, but I nevertheless clicked on the cogwheel icon and found the settings in both the General and Compression tabs were also matching the Project Settings. I produced a new clip which had exactly the same properties, including bitrate, as my earlier clip produced with Same As Project Settings, and the quality was again, for me at least, identical to the original in VLC Player.
You will note that below the Start button there are three boxes: (1) Create Preview Range Only; (2) Enable SmartRender; and (3) Enable Hardware encode acceleration. The first box is not ticked -- leave it that way. In my first Custom Output the SmartRender box was ticked, as was the Hardware acceleration box. I decided to untick the SmartRender box because some people have found that either enabling or disabling it can affect the quality of their output. But in fact I got exactly the same Properties including bitrate for the new clip as I got for the original Custom clip. And the quality of that clip also remained the same as the original.
However, given that some people have difficulties when they either enable or disable SmartRender, you might want to see whether either of those options affect your output Properties, and particularly the bitrate, more significantly than it does for me. You might want to play also with the Hardware acceleration option, though you will find that without that box ticked, rendering will probably be very slow. It was in my case with, I would estimate, rendering being 5 or 6 times slower. That might, in my case, have been caused by the fact that my computer is a fully Intel NUC and disabling hardware acceleration disables Intel Quick Sync Video which actually works with VS 2021.
This was an interesting one. After the long wait for the new clip to render without using hardware acceleration, I was completely astonished to find that the new clip had a very high bitrate of 73092 kbps. Again I can only say I have no idea what caused that increase. I also can't say that I could see any improvement in quality when playing this clip back in VLC Player. But then again, rendering could not make the original clip better than it originally was. The impossibility of making a silk purse out of a sow's ear springs to mind -- though in this case the result is a long way from being a sow's ear! And you might therefore want to try rendering without hardware acceleration enabled... Just note, however, that an increased bitrate also increases the size of your overall video. In this case the other options produced clips of 322 MB, but this one produced a 538 MB clip.
Just a little footnote for future reference, our program is called Video Studio, not Visual Studio. That is a Microsoft program relating to the development of new programs, websites and apps etc and has nothing whatsoever to do with video!
Firstly, thanks so much for all your efforts, and sorry for the mental slipup over the product name!
I repeated the experiments. Without Smart Rendering I got the same results, but without hardware acceleration I also got a higher bitrate! Data rate jumped from the input file of 44876 kbps to a whopping 73695 kbps. That video looked much better quality on my monitor, I can't really tell if there was any degradation in the visual quality from the original input file. The file size also jumped from 300K when using hardware acceleration to 540K when not using it. So for currently unknown reasons it looks like I need to generate the files without hardware acceleration and put up with the much longer rendering time and much larger file size.
Any idea how of the best way to provide these unusual results to the development team for their consideration?
I'll find a way. As you may know, I don't actually work for Corel, but am just a user like you who volunteers his time to try to help others.
Mind you, the use or non-use of hardware acceleration and SmartRender has been discussed here for several years now. The problem is that it affects only some people, and sometimes in opposite ways e.g. having SmartRender or hardware acceleration enabled might work for some, while having them disabled might work for others. That tends to suggest that questions of different computer architecture might come into it.
But I'm very glad our "accidental" solution might provide an improvement for you. One thing I am wondering about is whether using the Custom approach, but modifying the bitrate down in the dialogue box might influence the bitrate used and thus lower the end size of the clip. But if you are happy enough with it as it is and size is not an issue, then you probably don't need to try this approach... And I guess size will not affect the You Tube approach since they will apply their own compression if the incoming video is too large by their standards...
Actually I had the same thought last night about setting the bitrate via the custom settings. I tried a couple of values, setting it to 60Mbps resulted in a file of 54362Mbps, setting it to 50 resulted in 45559, pretty close to the input 44876. However both still came out a bit fuzzy, so there must be something else going on. I might try another program (maybe try a free trial of Adobe) to see if that has the same problem or not, but I'd rather stick with what I know and continue with Corel.
One last test I did was not using hardware acceleration and setting the bitrate to the input value using the custom settings. This seemed similar visually in quality to the one using project settings and no hardware acceleration that resulted in the very large file. So at least I can get better quality than I have had in the past without increasing the file size, as long as I manually set the bitrate and do not use hardware acceleration. I still don't think it's quite as good as the input file, but it's the best I seem to be able to do.
