@Musicvid

My source video is 4K HEVC 200 Mbps bitrate 50p and I always render it to 4K 25p, sometimes I slow it down and sometimes don't.

What settings for x265 HEVC do you recommend me to get best quality and not so big file size?

Start at 40 Mbps and work your way down. Use a Render Quality Metrics tool, there are a couple offered on the forum.

I use always the default Voukoder X264 CRF 23 (CPU only) setting for my final renders, mostly a FHD downscale of 4k content. The final bitrate and the final filesize depends mostly on the amount of details and movement in your video. Sometimes I even have higher bitrates and filesizes with Voukoder than rendering with Magix AVC. Nevertheless I always have a visible better quality, that's why Voukoder is my favourite render for my 4k homeTV.

@Musicvid

I forgot to add that my sources videos are SLOG3 flat profile files.

Are FFMetric render quality metrics tool able to process SLOG3 files?

I used FFMetric tool and I got:

- PSNR: 15.638 - crossed line

- SSIM: 0.6861

- VMAF: 7.1219

What do these values mean?

Do these values are avg bitrate in Mbps to set up in render settings?

I used vmaf_4k_v0.6.1.json.

I use always the default Voukoder X264 CRF 23 (CPU only) setting for my final renders, mostly a FHD downscale of 4k content. The final bitrate and the final filesize depends mostly on the amount of details and movement in your video. Sometimes I even have higher bitrates and filesizes with Voukoder than rendering with Magix AVC. Nevertheless I always have a visible better quality, that's why Voukoder is my favourite render for my 4k homeTV.

@3POINT

I also downscale to FHD from 4K, but this is because I still have a 65 inch last gen plasma TV from Panasonic. But I was just wondering why you downscale to FHD to watch it on a 4K TV?

I use always the default Voukoder X264 CRF 23 (CPU only) setting for my final renders, mostly a FHD downscale of 4k content. The final bitrate and the final filesize depends mostly on the amount of details and movement in your video. Sometimes I even have higher bitrates and filesizes with Voukoder than rendering with Magix AVC. Nevertheless I always have a visible better quality, that's why Voukoder is my favourite render for my 4k homeTV.

@3POINT

I also downscale to FHD from 4K, but this is because I still have a 65 inch last gen plasma TV from Panasonic. But I was just wondering why you downscale to FHD to watch it on a 4K TV?

I have also a 65 inch 4k TV and at my viewing distance (about 10 feet), I don't see a difference between the original 4k media (DJI Osmo Pocket 2160p50 100 Mbps) and a downscale and render with Voukoder to FHD 1080p50 mostly less than 10 Mbps. But I see a lot of pumping artifacts when I do the same with Magix AVC 1080p50 20 Mbps.

I have to shorten my viewing distance to about 3 feet to see a slight difference between the original 4k and the FHD downscale. For me, a good quality downscale to FHD from 4k is hardly to distinguish from the original 4k at normal viewing distance.

@Musicvid

Why do you think that x265 HEVC is better than HEVC (NVENC) in Voukoder to get the best quality?

What are the main differences between these two encoders?

@GJeffrey

Your first link you shared is broken. Can you check it?

@marcinzm HEVC is not better quality than AVC. HEVC needs just less bitrate for the same quality as AVC.

But I see a lot of pumping artifacts when I do the same with Magix AVC 1080p50 20 Mbps

@3POINT I'm curious. What does a pumping artifact look like?

@marcinzm HEVC is not better quality than AVC. HEVC needs just less bitrate for the same quality as AVC.

Yes, I knew it, but why x265 HEVC is better than HEVC (NVENC)? I only know that rendering to HEVC (NVENC) takes a much less time to get the final output.

But I see a lot of pumping artifacts when I do the same with Magix AVC 1080p50 20 Mbps

@3POINT I'm curious. What does a pumping artifact look like?

@EricLNZ a short example of a rendered downscale with Magix HEVC and Voukoder HEVC (I took HEVC because I have a limited internet upload speed), look at text on the fountain.  

Ofcourse there is some further degradation due to the re-encode of the uploads in this forum. If necessary I can upload original 4k media and renders on dropbox.

@3POINT Thanks. Now I know what you mean and yes it's far more noticeable with the Magix HEVC render.

I have to shorten my viewing distance to about 3 feet to see a slight difference between the original 4k and the FHD downscale. For me, a good quality downscale to FHD from 4k is hardly to distinguish from the original 4k at normal viewing distance.

@3POINT Indeed, screen size and viewing distance can make or break 4K, but if I get it right you downscale 4K to FHD and view it on a 4K TV - which upscales it again to 4K? Or do you force FHD viewing on the TV? I am a bit curious as my TV is still only FHD, and I am wondering about a future 4K TV upgrade. I will certainly switch if and when the regular TV channels on the cable start broadcasting in 4K in Belgium. Still I do not see that happening anytime soon and it is already 2023...

@bitman Before I had a 65" 4k TV, I used to have a 55" FHD TV. That's about 4 years ago now. But I started already filming in 4k about 7 years ago, so I was used to downscale 4k to FHD and was surprised about the good quality on my FHD TV. It was much better than my FHD videos I made before with my FHD (AVCHD) Camera. After purchasing a 4k TV, I was surprised/disappointed that 4k video looks just minimal better than downscaled FHD on that TV and especially at normal viewing distance, I couldn't see a difference. For this reason I still downscale 4k to FHD, but as said before it's important to use Voukoder for this purpose and not Magix AVC/HEVC.

I suppose that my 4k TV automatically upscales FHD to 4k, because I don't know a setting to change that.

I did some testing with Voukoder recently. First I couldn't get two-pass encoding to actually output a file. It seemed like it was going through the render process but the output file was nowhere to be found.

Second, I generally use HOS Render Plus to output x265 on the "Slow" setting. Sometimes using two-pass sometimes constant quality with Q between 22 and 24. I have found that for equal bit rates I get better video from Render Plus. When Vegas used to be able to frameserve to Handbrake that used to be my preferred output workflow. I find Render Plus and Handbrake the same. I'm pretty sure they are using the same encoding algorithms.

So my advice is if you want the best quality video for the least data go with Render Plus in HOS.

@marcinzm

I'm using these presets when using Voukoder.

CRF 22 or 21

GOP = (the framerate equivalent of one second)

GOP Minimum = (the framerate equivalent of one half second)

B Frames = 0

Highly complex video with high action produces these FHD Mediainfo results:

General
Complete name                            : C:\Users\John\Desktop\Render\2015-07-11 Swim Rusch Park v19.mp4
Format                                   : MPEG-4
Format profile                           : Base Media
Codec ID                                 : isom (isom/iso2/avc1/mp41)
File size                                : 910 MiB
Duration                                 : 7 min 0 s
Overall bit rate mode                    : Variable
Overall bit rate                         : 18.2 Mb/s
Writing application                      : Voukoder (VEGAS)

Video
ID                                       : 1
Format                                   : AVC
Format/Info                              : Advanced Video Codec
Format profile                           : High@L4
Format settings                          : CABAC / 3 Ref Frames
Format settings, CABAC                   : Yes
Format settings, Reference frames        : 3 frames
Format settings, GOP                     : M=1, N=24
Codec ID                                 : avc1
Codec ID/Info                            : Advanced Video Coding
Duration                                 : 7 min 0 s
Bit rate                                 : 17.9 Mb/s
Width                                    : 1 920 pixels
Height                                   : 1 080 pixels
Display aspect ratio                     : 16:9
Frame rate mode                          : Constant
Frame rate                               : 23.976 (24000/1001) FPS
Color space                              : YUV
Chroma subsampling                       : 4:2:0
Bit depth                                : 8 bits
Scan type                                : Progressive
Bits/(Pixel*Frame)                       : 0.359
Stream size                              : 894 MiB (98%)
Writing library                          : x264 core 164
Encoding settings                        : cabac=1 / ref=3 / deblock=1:0:0 / analyse=0x3:0x113 / me=hex / subme=7 / psy=1 / psy_rd=1.00:0.00 / mixed_ref=1 / me_range=16 / chroma_me=1 / trellis=1 / 8x8dct=1 / cqm=0 / deadzone=21,11 / fast_pskip=1 / chroma_qp_offset=-2 / threads=18 / lookahead_threads=3 / sliced_threads=0 / nr=0 / decimate=1 / interlaced=0 / bluray_compat=0 / constrained_intra=0 / bframes=0 / weightp=2 / keyint=24 / keyint_min=12 / scenecut=40 / intra_refresh=0 / rc_lookahead=24 / rc=crf / mbtree=1 / crf=22.0 / qcomp=0.60 / qpmin=0 / qpmax=69 / qpstep=4 / ip_ratio=1.40 / aq=1:1.00
Codec configuration box                  : avcC

Audio
ID                                       : 2
Format                                   : AAC LC
Format/Info                              : Advanced Audio Codec Low Complexity
Codec ID                                 : mp4a-40-2
Duration                                 : 7 min 0 s
Source duration                          : 7 min 0 s
Bit rate mode                            : Variable
Nominal bit rate                         : 315 kb/s
Maximum bit rate                         : 320 kb/s
Channel(s)                               : 2 channels
Channel layout                           : L R
Sampling rate                            : 48.0 kHz
Frame rate                               : 46.875 FPS (1024 SPF)
Compression mode                         : Lossy
Source stream size                       : 15.8 MiB (2%)
Default                                  : Yes
Alternate group                          : 1

Another advantage of Voukoder is that you don't have to struggle with dozens of rendertemplates, there is a "one size fits them all" rendertemplate that will give you already superior results. Ofcourse you can create your own spezialised rendertemplates for special cases, but a good start is to begin just with the default rendertemplate.

@Hulk

I'm currently rendering old projects for posterity. This morning, I was working on a project that was originally rendered using Vegas2Handbrake. Here is a quality comparison using my preferred settings in Vegas2Handbrake, Voukoder and HOS R-Plus.

Date: 2023/01/18  07:04:56  
Description: Voukoder
Frames Processed: 4645
Processing Speed: 516.11 fps
Mean Squared Error: 1.405
Peak Signal to Noise Ratio: 47.519
Structural Similarity Metric: 0.9316

Date: 2023/01/18  07:07:01  
Description: Vegas2Handbrake
Frames Processed: 4645
Processing Speed: 516.11 fps
Mean Squared Error: 1.691
Peak Signal to Noise Ratio: 47.315
Structural Similarity Metric: 0.9349

Date: 2023/01/18  07:24:54  
Description: HOS R-Plus
Frames Processed: 4645
Processing Speed: 516.11 fps
Mean Squared Error: 1.336
Peak Signal to Noise Ratio: 47.681
Structural Similarity Metric: 0.9408

I'm happy with the results from any of the methods.

@marcinzm Here's an online quality analysis I did with ffmetrics:

https://www.rtpress.com/ffmetrics.htm

If you are interested in hevc rendering, click on that and sort on one of the metric columns. I got the highest quality measurements from ffmpeg's x265 direct implementation but somewhat lower from the Voukoder Vegas and Resolve plugins even though they use ffmpeg libs. If you want to see the exact render settings used for each measurement, hover over the Notes column or click on it to copy to the clipboard. Btw, if your source material is hevc, checking off the Legacy-Hevc box in Vegas i/o yields the highest quality across the board, even if it takes longer using the cpu on systems with no Intel igpu... with 11th gen and later Intel igpus, it is both the highest in performance and quality.

@Hulk

I'm currently rendering old projects for posterity. This morning, I was working on a project that was originally rendered using Vegas2Handbrake. Here is a quality comparison using my preferred settings in Vegas2Handbrake, Voukoder and HOS R-Plus.

Date: 2023/01/18  07:04:56  
Description: Voukoder
Frames Processed: 4645
Processing Speed: 516.11 fps
Mean Squared Error: 1.405
Peak Signal to Noise Ratio: 47.519
Structural Similarity Metric: 0.9316

Date: 2023/01/18  07:07:01  
Description: Vegas2Handbrake
Frames Processed: 4645
Processing Speed: 516.11 fps
Mean Squared Error: 1.691
Peak Signal to Noise Ratio: 47.315
Structural Similarity Metric: 0.9349

Date: 2023/01/18  07:24:54  
Description: HOS R-Plus
Frames Processed: 4645
Processing Speed: 516.11 fps
Mean Squared Error: 1.336
Peak Signal to Noise Ratio: 47.681
Structural Similarity Metric: 0.9408

I'm happy with the results from any of the methods.

Thank you for taking the time to perform this analysis. I would definitely put more weight in this objective analysis rather than my subjective one. I'm going to reinvestigate this. What application did you use to obtain these quality metrics? I'd like to check it out.

Mark

@Hulk

"What application did you use to obtain these quality metrics?"

Wayne Waag wrote Render Quality Metrics which integrates into Vegas Pro.