- Post
- #438039
- Topic
- Gaffer Tape's YouTube Reviews of Awesome Candy-Creating Goodness! (The Facts of Life/Star Trek III Conspiracy!)
- Link
- https://originaltrilogy.com/post/id/438039/action/topic#438039
- Time
I have to address one of bkev's YouTube comments here because I simply don't have enough room to do so on that format. Basically, he asked if the video quality (at least I assume and hope he meant video quality rather than, say, quality of the editing) was lower than in my previous videos.
Well, I have a few things to say to that. First off is that I just spent five videos in a row sourcing poor-quality YouTube clips of Power Rangers. I would certainly hope the quality at least seems better than that!!!
However, there is a more technical answer because, as everyone knows by now, I'm always struggling with my low-powered computer and consumer-grade editing software. And that's why I'd been doing still-image videos of late and been putting off Wonder Woman. I was afraid to try. And I admit I had reason to. Because converting this thing into a useable form was a bitch, and I was plagued with all the same problems I'd had for the past year... all the stuttering and pops and timing being ruined. Of particular note was the "...such pertinent information as..." lasso of truth scene, which came out as, "'What doeswhatdoes' and 'God, your daughter'sgod your daughter's.'" Obviously that was not going to fly.
So I experimented with different codecs, and nothing worked well. There were fewer jitters like that, but they'd always leave out huge hunks of audio. For some reason they were particularly adverse to that very first stock footage segment from the previous video. It was almost always silent.
Finally, I came to the conclusion that my computer just can no longer handle having to write a file for three video tracks, three audio tracks, transitions, and effects, so, with time running out to meet my anniversary deadline (I planned it to make sure it would come out on this day, and damn it all if I wasn't going to succeed) I decided I would have to make things easier for it. I remembered that I had an option to simply convert the audio by itself. And I realized that in my previous conversion attempts, the video came out perfectly. It was only the audio that was crap. So I decided that pre-mixing everything might make it come out alright. So I converted the audio to MP3, made a new timeline, and paired that with one of the already-converted video tracks, so that I only had one video, one audio, no transitions, no effects. The audio, though much better, still wasn't perfect, but I was able to fix most of the stutters, although I still find myself cringing at the pops and stutters that remain, particularly Hippolyte's line to Persephone ("You were given a lifelife..."). But I couldn't get it any better, and there wasn't anything too bad this time.
And like I said, I experimented with a lot of different video codecs. The .mov was the best-looking of the bunch, but its animation was not very fluid, which was especially noticeable in the comic page pans, which were so jumpy I almost got motion sickness. So even though the .mp4 wasn't that great-looking, it was the most useable of what I had. And I also had to use that file type in order to upload because it was small enough for my sitting-in-my-car-at-the-park-sapping-wi-fi connection to not take two hours.
So to finally answer your question, I don't know if converting an already-converted mpeg4 into an mpeg4 results in generational loss, but if it does, that probably accounts for any noticeable dip in quality, although I much prefer a slightly fuzzier image to having it appear that I'm just a sloppy editor. That said, I probably had no business zooming in as much as I did on some of those comics pages. My scanner is broken, so I had to take those images with my digital camera, so they weren't that amazing to begin with. I take full responsibility for that...
