Quality of movie rendering - Live 7.14

[mortenm]

I recently edited a movie using iMovie -09 on my mac. Since this program is lacking a bit, especially when it comes to sound editing (not even featuring av eq), I decieded this was an opportunity to try out Live's movie support. I exported my movie in a high quality .mov file from iMovie, and imported it into a new Live set. All well so far.

When the import was finished, I was a bit suprised to see that that the quality of the movie appearing in Live was quite bad compared to the one I exported from iMovie. But I did my sound editing - which of course was really easy having all of Live's features at hand - and then went on to render the movie with the same quality settings as I previously choose in iMovie. But the finished result was just as bad as the preview window in Live unfortunately...

Any suggestions why this happens?

[uku]

You are recompressing the movie which was already compressed when you imported it into Live. That's why it looks bad in comparison. I don't know if there's a way to tell Live to "pass through" the video portion of the movie without recompressing. What you want Live to do is basically make a duplicate of the video that you imported - same file size, not recompressing anything - and just add your new audio to it. Unfortunately it can't do that (not that I can tell anyhow - it would be great if someone knows otherwise!)..

My workaround requires QuickTime Pro. If you have Logic Studio you might already have this?

In Live, render your audio as if you don't want to include the video - just a straight aiff file, or aac, mp3, etc. Then open the file in QuickTime Pro. Set your in and out markers to the first and last frames of the file in the timeline.

Then, duplicate the original movie file that you imported into Live. Don't work with the original, because you will overwrite the audio and you want to be able to revert to the original if needed. Open the duplicate in QTP, and set the in/out markers for the first and last frames again (like you did for the audio).

Copy the audio from the audio file. Then after selecting the window for the video file, click the menu Edit > Add to Movie.

You should see everything synced up and with the video quality you expect. Good luck!

[mortenm]

Hi uku, thanks for your fast reply and explanation. However, I'm still a bit confused... The quality of my movie already seem to be bad after importing it to the Live set (the preview - window in the Live set shows about the same quality as the rendered result). I would believe that the movie hadn't been compressed after import, since it is not rendered yet?

As for the rest of your explanation, I'll give it a try, thanks!

[snakedogman]

What encoder settings are you using on export from live exactly?
For best results try something like Quicktime Animation (which is lossless) or maybe photo JPEG at 75-80% quality.
It might also be that even the "high quality" export from iMovie is already compressed to something like H.264/mpeg4 which is definitely not what you want.

[mortenm]

These are the settings I used, both when exporting from iMovie and from Live. The exported file from iMovie is 2,42GB. So it's already compressed using H.264 before going into Live. But when watching the result from iMovie in quicktime player, it looks very smooth and nice. The quality loss appears to happen already when importing the compressed movie to Live.

[uku]

Sorry if I misread your original question. From what I can tell, we don't really have any control over the way that the video quality appears once its already within Live. It is possible (though I'm not sure) that Live might employ some kind of on-the-fly preview compression. Video preview windows are really just that - meant to give an adequate reference while using as low overhead (processor, RAM, etc.) as possible. At least that's my understanding. (I have my manual packed away for a move so I can't look it up at the moment!)

I wouldn't recommend importing something hi-res like an Animation codec file. Those are much too large and they contain too much information for just a score reference. Final Cut Pro can't even play those files back in realtime without a Kona card (at least not on my 8 core 2.8Ghz Mac Pro w/ 6 GB RAM)! Even if Live were to employ some kind of on-the-fly preview compression, I'd guess that the processing hit would be unacceptable. IMO its better to start with H264 or similar - fairly small files and good quality.

You can always marry your final audio to the hi-res picture in a dedicated video program (iMovie in this case, or QuickTime Pro, etc.) once you're finished.

[snakedogman]

well on-the-fly compression would actually take a lot of processing power. Uncompressed generally takes very little cpu power but a lot of load on your harddisk.

It seems unlikely that live would (re)compress video on import, but the manual doesn't really go into any kind of detail regarding video amd personally I've never used it.

The correct workflow depends on what you want to achieve.
If you're just using video in live as a reference there really isn't any need to export video at all since you would combine the audio and video in a video editing program later.
If you want to export your final product with video and audio directly from live, you want to get the best quality video in and export as uncompressed/amimation. This will give you a high quality "master" that you can then use as a source for compressed versions for web or dvd publishing.

[scientist]

You can always marry your final audio to the hi-res picture in a dedicated video program (iMovie in this case, or QuickTime Pro, etc.) once you're finished.

+1. i use quicktime pro for this, simply because its the easiest method to get from point a to point b. but if you want to work 100% within live, another option is to use a low-res proxy for all your work and simply swap in the uncompressed version for final rendering. just make sure your proxy doesn't introduce any frame rate issues.

ifaik (99% sure), live depends entirely on quicktime for playback, so any strange artifacts should reside with quicktime at fault. i've never had h264 issues, but know that dv footage looks decidedly worse in quicktime playback than it does from tape.

[blackboab]

just don't compress it.

In the above dialog box screenshot there is a drop down menu for compression type. One of the options is 'none' ... choose that and you'll have pristine quality video the same as what you put in (although a huge file size).

I do it all the time without quicktime pro, always with excellent results ...

OK, you can't tell with youtube quality, but check these out:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2YCVGWngp4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L316v5ArDJ8

These are two recent projects of mines done in ableton, and the output of my video sequence was fantastic when choosing the uncompressed quicktime option.

My advice would be to work with uncompressed formats in both imovie and ableton live and only compress as the absolute last step.

Like others have hinted at though, it depends on your worklow. If you only want to edit audio, then the video is only really a 'placemarker' and the quality doesn't matter as you will only output the audio from ableton and recombine in a dedicated video app. However, if like me you are warpiing and cutting video files along with the audio, the it is more or less essential to work with uncompressed files

[mortenm]

Thanks for all your input guys! I now have several solutions and options to try out thanks to you

The reason I wanted both movie and audio to be rendered was just motivated by simplicity - that the result from Live should be the final one, so that no further editing in other apps should be necessary.

[JoshR]

A side question: Is anyone using live to compress video files for the web? I just posted a video, but the large file size sure is slow to load. I'm about to try and compress the video with live, and hopefully won't get terrible quality...

[JoshR]

Maybe I'll try posting this as a post of its own, but does anyone know how to render a video in live that is under 15MB? I've tried every quality setting and the files are still large (and look terrible). Yet when I create a movie using windows movie maker I can compress the file (which is 26MB when compressed in quicktime in live) to 8MB, and it looks pretty good. Can someone explain this? I'd much rather skip the extra steps and simply export the compressed video in Live, but I can't do that with it looking so bad....
Thanks!

-J