Artifacting/pixelating for action camera footage?

HeroDanny wrote on 4/28/2025, 7:38 AM

Someone please help, I am trying desperately to improve the render quality of my action camera footage. This is footage from me riding my motorcycle and the camera on my helmet. For some reason every time I render it out the footage gets pixelated. Most notably in the white clouds, green leaves, and grey pavement. It's not super noticeable right away but it's a massive difference from the raw footage. I paid a lot for the setup and am disappointed that the quality matches that of a much cheaper camera. Below is my details on the setup.

 

 

Footage: From DJI Action Pro 5 (Action Camera) MP4 Format, 3840 x 2160 resolution, 59.94 fps. Data rate 109,868 kbps. total bitrate 110,185 kbps

Vegas 22

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Project Settings: [screenshot of my project settings] https://ibb.co/vvQgp0c9

3840 x 2160, 59.94 FPS.

Full res Render quality: Best

Resample: Disabled

Deinterlace method: Interpolate fields

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Render Settings: [screenshot] https://ibb.co/qL22zmJy

MAGIX AVC/AAC MP4

UHD 2160 (3840 x 2160)

Frame Rate: 59.940

Number of reference frames: 2

Max Bps: 120,000,000

Avg Bps: 80,000,000

Encode Mode: Mainconcept AVC (I also tried NV encoder)

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No edits at all on my video, all I did was disable resample. I render out a portion and it just gets blurry. It's not terrible with these settings but it's still there and noticeable and I know Youtube will just add more onto it when I upload, any idea what I am doing wrong??

All render options were set to best in the project tab

Comments

Dexcon wrote on 4/28/2025, 7:48 AM

The links are dead links. Please upload images to the forum via the upload button when posting or making a comment:

Cameras: Sony FDR-AX100E; GoPro Hero 11 Black Creator Edition

Installed: Vegas Pro 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21 & 22, HitFilm Pro 2021.3, DaVinci Resolve Studio 19.0.3, BCC 2025, Mocha Pro 2025.0, NBFX TotalFX 7, Neat NR, DVD Architect 6.0, MAGIX Travel Maps, Sound Forge Pro 16, SpectraLayers Pro 11, iZotope RX11 Advanced and many other iZ plugins, Vegasaur 4.0

Windows 11

Dell Alienware Aurora 11:

10th Gen Intel i9 10900KF - 10 cores (20 threads) - 3.7 to 5.3 GHz

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C drive: 2TB Samsung 990 PCIe 4.0 NVMe M.2 PCIe SSD

D: drive: 4TB Samsung 870 SATA SSD (used for media for editing current projects)

E: drive: 2TB Samsung 870 SATA SSD

F: drive: 6TB WD 7200 rpm Black HDD 3.5"

Dell Ultrasharp 32" 4K Color Calibrated Monitor

 

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Dell Inspiron 5310 EVO 13.3"

i5-11320H CPU

C Drive: 1TB Corsair Gen4 NVMe M.2 2230 SSD (upgraded from the original 500 GB SSD)

Monitor is 2560 x 1600 @ 60 Hz

HeroDanny wrote on 4/28/2025, 8:02 AM

The links are dead links. Please upload images to the forum via the upload button when posting or making a comment:

Ahh, thanks. All fixed.

Howard-Vigorita wrote on 4/28/2025, 10:45 AM

@HeroDanny What were the camera settings and the media info that resulted? I don't have footage from that camera but I thought it shot h265/hevc. If so, you might get better results with hevc rendering. Also, if you set the camera for hlg, you might also need to use aces 32bit project settings for best results. If you set up to use dlog-m without hlg, I think you'd need to use an appropriate lut instead of aces.

fifonik wrote on 4/29/2025, 6:26 AM

I suspect MAGIX AVC/AAC is the issue.
You can try legacy Voukoder (with x264 or x265 encoder) and I believe you will get much better results straight away.

 

P.S. The reasons why I suspect the Magix AVC encoder are here: https://www.vegascreativesoftware.info/us/forum/quality-issues-with-mainconcept-magix-avc-encoder--110377/

P.P.S. If you want to compare different encoders with different settings you can use my free program FFMetrics.

Last changed by fifonik on 4/29/2025, 6:36 AM, changed a total of 3 times.

Camcorder: Panasonic X1500 + Panasonic X920 + GoPro Hero 11 Black

Desktop: MB: MSI B450M MORTAR TITANIUM, CPU: AMD Ryzen 5700X, RAM: G'Skill 32 GB DDR4@3200, Graphics card: MSI RX6600 8GB, SSD: Samsung 970 Evo+ 1TB (NVMe, OS), HDD WD 4TB, HDD Toshiba 4TB, OS: Windows 10 Pro 22H2

NLE: Vegas Pro [Edit] 11, 12, 13, 15, 17, 18, 19, 22

Author of FFMetrics and FFBitrateViewer