Re-render question

Lili wrote on 10/18/2005, 7:25 AM

I have a 3 minute video that was put on my website about a year ago that was encoded WMV at 267kbps. Since that time, I always encode at 512kbps because it looks so much better.

Question is: If I re-render the WMV file from the web and encode it at 512kbps, will it end up looking better or worse when streaming? I would re-capture and re-edit it if I still had the originally tape, but don't.
Thanks all.
lili

Comments

Chienworks wrote on 10/18/2005, 7:26 AM

It will look *much* worse! There is no way to regain quality that has been lost. Rendering a low-bitrate video to another low-bitrate format merely compounds the loss.

Lili wrote on 10/18/2005, 7:59 AM

You say "another low-bitrate "

This will likely sound lame, but does that mean that if I re-render the 267 kbps vid to a really HIGH bitrate, it may look better? Or does re-rendering in ANYthing else look worse?
lili

Chienworks wrote on 10/18/2005, 8:03 AM

In general, re-rendering to any lossy format will always look worse. At best, even if you rendered your 256Kbps file back to DV .avi or even uncompressed AVI, it would look no better than it did at 256Kbps. With that in mind, rendering to 512Kbps would look as bad as 512Kbps does, in addition to how bad 256Kbps looks. It would be awful.

johnmeyer wrote on 10/18/2005, 8:14 AM

Every time you re-encode, you lose quality, no matter how high quality an encoder you use, and no matter how high a bitrate.