getting the best footage on Vimeo

[jagnje]

Hello, I mostly film skateboarding and i just can`t get the footage to look as good as I would want it to look on vimeo. It looks good on my PC but the vimeo compression kills it.

The workflow I use is:

550d, superflat profile->davinci resolve for grading, export to RGB 10bit->adobe premiere for edit, export h264 custom preset.

As I said, it looks good on my pc, then all of the detail is gone.

this is a quick clip I did for testing the other day. The second part of the clip is ok-ish, but the first is alot worse then it should be.

advice needed.

cheers

[richg101]

overlay a fine 4k grain.  gives vimeo something to bite into and it sees the grain as detail that needs to stay.

[richg101]

the guy you're filming is a madman.  i had sweaty palms watching it.  i'd love the guts to do that.

[Musty]

Vimeo accepts ProRes and DNxHD files, although Vimeo then transcodes it to H.264, its the best route to keep some of the quality in your video file.

[Sean Cunningham]

None of the presets that ship with editors or compression packages are actually adequate for high quality results with VIMEO or Youtube.  They all seem to make the mistake of targeting too close to the actual streaming bitrate used by the services, based on bad suggestions all over the internet and old, incomplete and poorly written upload advisories that the sites themselves do not actually recommend any longer (and never did to their high-value customers).

 

I'd make the h.264 upload at between 20-25Mbit/sec for something like this.  Professional content providers often upload double that and are encouraged to, even by  Youtube themselves.  I know this is VIMEO but if Youtube is advising folks to upload at four times or more current streaming quality then that applies to VIMEO as well which is generally a higher standard to begin with even though they both stream at similar bitrates.

[dbp]

Yeah, Youtube and Vimeo compression rates are pretty low so it's best to feed it as high quality a source as you, your internet and your time frame can muster. 

 

I try to do 15-20mbps h.264 for 720p videos, and 30+mbps h.264 for 1080p videos. I've experimented with DNXHD sources which look even better but those can get up to 10gb or more. So it's all about trade offs.

 

I can say that IMO, the presets in Premiere are way too low. 10mbps minimum is what I would want. 

[jagnje]

the guy you're filming is a madman.  i had sweaty palms watching it.  i'd love the guts to do that.

the guy skating in the video is actually me :) 

ok, so I should just up the bitrate to about 30mbs when exporting. I don`t understand the 4k fine grain, sorry I`m not that good at editing yet. Does this mean to upres the footage to 4k and add grain to it?

Would upressing footage do any good?

Thanx for all the advices so far.

Cheers

[Sean Cunningham]

You wouldn't uprez your footage you would overlay the 4K grain on top of your footage after scaling it down to something between 4K and 1080P until you got the look you wanted.

 

Upping the bitrate will mean when VIMEO goes to re-compress it has room to work and then room to improve later as internet speeds and compression schemes improve.  It goes towards "future proofing" your content, though I'm sure that's not a consideration for everyone.

[Ergo Zjeci]

this looks like my country Slovenia :D nice ride ..

[jagnje]

it sure is Slovenia :)

Ok, I reuploaded the video. What I did was export out of premiere same as sequence settings and ended up with a 10GB file. The max limit I have on vimeo is 5GB a week. I then sent the video through handbrake and the result was a cca. 500MB video with no noticable loss in quality...at least I couldn`t notice it. I added a bit of grain with  magic bullet before exporting.

Video that is now online is noticably cleaner then the past one, but still quite worse than the original.

If anyone would take the time to download the original clip and give me some more pointers I would really appreciate it.

Cheers 

[Sean Cunningham]

Export from the editor to a Prores (or DNxHD), high quality, uncompressed file.  Check out MPEG Streamclip.  It gives you more control and better results than Handbrake.  This way you can tweak your settings without having to constantly render from your editor and you can have more control over your codec.  

 

Re-compressing an MP4 to a smaller MP4 is you killing your quality before they can kill your quality.  500MB for a file of your length is way smaller than I'd expect for a quality upload master.  I don't want to speculate on what it should be but 500MB is small for this length, for an upload master.

[jcs]

Last I checked both YouTube and Vimeo use customized ffmpeg (with x264) to transcode. x264 has been the best H.264 encoder for a while now. Thus if you want the most efficient upload you could use any tool which uses a recent version of ffmpeg (rendering out ProRes/DNxHD then using Handbrake is a decent way to go).

The challenge with your footage is high detail, fast motion. Adding grain or more detail (by itself) can make it worse. In order to help H.264 compress more efficiently in this case you need less detail in the high motion areas. You can achieve this by first shooting with a slower shutter speed (1/48 or even slower if possible). Next, use a tool in post which allows you to add motion blur. In this example you could cheat and use tools to mask off the skateboarder and car and Gaussian blur everything else in motion (mostly the sides but not so much the center/background). You could also apply Neat Video to remove noise and high frequency detail (in the moving regions only) and not use any additional motion blur as this will affect energy/tension of the shot (through adding more blur to motion will help the most).

Once you have effectively lowered detail in the high motion areas (however achieved), H.264 will be able to better preserve detail for the lower motion areas- the skateboard, car, and distant background.

[jagnje]

thank you, this is some good advice!

I knew that the problem is fast motion and that most of the ugly blocks happen on the sides of the shot. In order to preserve detail I actually shortened the time to 1/100 or so, but doing it the other way around seem like a very logical step.

[jcs]

A quick test could be to blur the sides in Resolve.

[Bioskop.Inc]

You can use x264 in MPEGstreamclip & i did have a list of settings somewhere, to fine tune it.

Also, can't remember but i think if you upload an MP4 x264 file its better than .Mov x264.

If not find someone with FCPX, import your full res version into it & get them to export it directly to Vimeo - works better than anything else i've tried.

[jagnje]

I would gladly do such things, but my internet here is not very fast...500mb takes a few hours to upload, and I`m limited to 5GB per week as a vimeo plus user.

and...in any of the programs I have I can`t find anything x264...do I have to download the codec first?

[Bioskop.Inc]

I would gladly do such things, but my internet here is not very fast...500mb takes a few hours to upload, and I`m limited to 5GB per week as a vimeo plus user.

and...in any of the programs I have I can`t find anything x264...do I have to download the codec first?

Google is always your friend, so do use it.

I would strongly suggest using MPEGstreamclip, lots of professionals use it & is hands down one of the best converters out there.

x264 - just put the codec where your others are on your computer.

Here are some useful links (all free):

 

MPEGstreamclip (mac or win):

http://www.squared5.com/

 

X264:

http://www.videolan.org/developers/x264.html

 

Interesting thread from REDuser about encoding:

http://www.reduser.net/forum/showthread.php?69957-The-Art-of-Compression-and-Encoding/page3

[FilmBrute]

noise is not really a big deal. macroblocking and loss of dynamic range is the big issue. upload a bunch of diff compression versions of your file and see what size Vimeo compresses it down to on average. Then you will have the bitrate you should aim for. When I did a test it was around 7,000 kbps for 720p iirc... So once you have your target bitrate, compress it to that size with whatever software you think is best, and then upload it to Vimeo, and vimeo won't ruin it by compressing further.

 

if you want original quality its not gonna happen, so just bite the bullet.

[Sean Cunningham]

...So once you have your target bitrate, compress it to that size with whatever software you think is best, and then upload it to Vimeo, and vimeo won't ruin it by compressing further...

 

This is 100% not true.  VIMEO and Youtube will always recompress what you upload and uploading to their target streaming rate is not how to get the best quality out of their services.

[jcs]

That's right- all the online services recompress to guarantee the videos being streamed are valid formats (and perhaps won't do anything malicious by exploiting a browser/Flash bug).

 

x264 is part of ffmpeg command line, MPEGStreamclip, Handbrake and many other tools (nothing extra needed to install).

 

At lower bitrates, H.264 will remove a significant amount of high frequency detail, especially grain or noise. Car/racecar POV shots are especially challenging due to the way the image data is changing through time. The less detail present in the motion areas, the less H.264 will have to steal from the static/low-motion areas to maintain the target bitrate.

 

I did some noise sweep tests where noise is progressively added, sweeping across the frame. It's quite a challenge to get decent film grain, for example, to survive intact after H.264 compression for web streaming. Using larger 'grains' helps (lower frequency).