Final output Codec

andyrpsmith wrote on 8/31/2022, 4:27 AM

After using optical media for the last 20 years to archive & play on the TV my edited output, I now wish to choose a 4K output codec to replace Blu-Ray disc.

Tried the Magic AVC on a 1min 50 sec project which took 4min 25s to render (using Nvidia GPU 1080Ti) and produced a 522MB file with bit rate of 39Mbit/s. Great looking file. Voukoder with a 15 quality setting which took 2min 8 sec, 2.33GB file size, bit rate of 183Mb/s. Great looking but ever so slightly less saturation (noticed this before with Voukoder). Best match to the Magic was Voukoder with setting of 23 taking 2min 14 s, size of 566MB and a bit rate of 43. Magic HEVC took 2min 58s, size 318MB, bit rate of 24.5 MB/s and great quality and same slightly higher saturation (and I mean slightly) as Magic AVC. I'm tempted to go with HEVC as a final output codec which can by saved to USB flash drive and plugged into 4K Oled TV. My media is Sony XAVCS 4K.

Grateful for any advice please.

Enjoying using V20. It threw up a couple of white screen tantrums for no reason. One was while just playing the timeline where the video froze while the sound continued. The other was when I enabled live save just went into non responding. It continued just fine on restarting - strange.

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Comments

Howard-Vigorita wrote on 9/5/2022, 3:02 PM

@wwaag Multi-pass is in the Voukoder x265 ABR options but I just tried it and cannot get it to emit an output file. Maybe I'm doing something wrong.

Also did a few renders with Voukoder x265 hevc followed by quality analysis with ffmetrics and only see a very slight improvement comparing crf and abr. But get a much more significant improvement from Magix presets across the board.

All these renders are with hevc-lossless media captured as zraw from a zcam and output from their zraw converter. Voukoder settings were cut and pasted from their dialog box.

@Musicvid sorry for my earlier crf dyslexia... fixed it.

wwaag wrote on 9/5/2022, 3:05 PM

@Howard-Vigorita

Where did you find the multipass settings?

Howard-Vigorita wrote on 9/5/2022, 3:17 PM

You have to first select ABR as the strategy. Just tried it with x264 and cannot get that to work either.

john_dennis wrote on 9/5/2022, 4:33 PM

@wwaag @Howard-Vigorita

I couldn't get a rendered file, either. It did seem to be writing a temp file.

wwaag wrote on 9/5/2022, 5:50 PM

2-pass still works in HOS for both x264 AVC and x265 HEVC encoding, so at least it's not the latest FFmpeg version that's the problem.

andyrpsmith wrote on 9/5/2022, 6:05 PM

Just for completion my final choice after looking closely (2 feet away) at the 65in screen small artefacts disappeared with 60/120 file size 437Mb per min. MSE= 31, PSNR=33. The 2.2GB final video looks amazing.

Howard-Vigorita wrote on 9/5/2022, 8:37 PM

Just ran a few transcodes with ffmpeg v5.1 which I think is the same version in Voukoder. Results are better:

To get the bottom entry, had to write my own PowerShell script because the Linux stuff online doesn't apply to Windows. Btw, single-pass always comes in high and 2-pass always comes in low... I had to run the multi-pass script multiple times to come close to the bitrate I got from crf. The ssim for both perfectly matched while psnr and the vmaf quality came in a smidgeon lower... if you believe in either of those. Here's my PowerShell script:

$in =  "hevc-lossless-an.mov"
$out = "D:\temp\ffmpeg.mov"
ffmpeg5 -y -i $in -c:v libx265 -b:v 24.9M -maxrate 49.8M -bufsize 49.8M -x265-params pass=1 -an -f mp4 NUL
if($?) {
ffmpeg5 -y -i $in -c:v libx265 -b:v 24.9M -maxrate 49.8M -bufsize 49.8M -x265-params pass=2 -an $out
}

Howard-Vigorita wrote on 9/5/2022, 8:46 PM

Just for completion my final choice after looking closely (2 feet away) at the 65in screen small artefacts disappeared with 60/120 file size 437Mb per min. MSE= 31, PSNR=33. The 2.2GB final video looks amazing.

My zcam shoots 4k 29.97 4:2:0 hevc at 60 mbps which is its minimum rate and I'm pretty happy with that.

Former user wrote on 9/5/2022, 10:17 PM

HEVC hardware encoding via Voukoder doesn't use B frames which reduces efficiency(quality at a given bitrate) using any of it's presets, you have to manually create your own profiles. This is not going to be a problem with OP's gtx1080, as (from memory) it is not capable of B frames for HEVC.

3POINT wrote on 9/6/2022, 12:57 AM

My camera shoots 4kp50/60 at 100mbps, with Voukoder HEVC CFR28 I get final bitrates and filesizes I normally used for FHD. I watch my content on a 4kTV 65" at a normal viewing distance, which is more than 2 feet...and I'm more than content.