I have always liked Studio 9 because it left my videos relatively untouched. But even using an uncompressed or lossless codec in 10 or 11, the resulting video shows it has gone through some sort of compression. The fine details and gradients are blocky. This doesn't happen in 9, but since I now need HD, 9 is not an option?

• Is there some control over the internal compression that Studio 10 and 11 are (apparently) using, some way for us to turn it off so the resulting video does not show compression artifacts. It seems a waste since the export is in uncompressed format, but the results clearly show some compression has occurred somewhere.
• Is there any way to use 9 to export HD? There seems to be a hard coded 1024x768 maximum resolution. If there was some way to override this, I could use 1920x1080.

Any help on this is greatly appreciated.

You cannot do HD in Studio 9, Studio 10 and 11, have a different underlying method to render, in the early days of 10 people did complaining about the quality not being as good as 9, but most of these issues have been resolved since about 10.7.

With that being said, were is you video coming from, and in what format? and what output format are you trying to use now. This would be a good starting point on to figuring out what your seeing.

What I'm doing is pretty simple. I have an uncompressed AVI (1920x1080) from film that I put into Studio 11. I then go right to "make movie" (no editing, titles, etc) choose AVI uncompressed 1920x1080. And the results show artifacting (blockyness) where there was none in the source. Studio 10 did the same thing, although the artifacts were a little worse.

I will say that most of the picture was fine, but in the lighting (fine detail areas going from dark to light) both 10 and 11 show artifacting. Studio 9 did not do any artifacting, but of course I could not choose 1920x1080.

I wouldn't have thought the picture would change at all, since I chose uncompressed and didn't even edit anything. Am I missing something?

How and where are you viewing the edited media?

vDub, both before and after

Full uncompressesd HD uses 50mbs data flow or more,   4:4:4 sampling.

That is out of the scope of Studio, the hardware needed for such workflow runs into thousands of dollars and
requires Media Composer with its dedicated hardware, or Liquid Chrome XE.

If you are refering to the import of AVCHD, HDV, they are compressed formats.DV as in tape based , also compresses.

This should not be the case. Studio makes an "alias" (for lack of a better term) video that is quick for editing and previewing, even with my uncompressed HD source. Then, when 'make movie' is chosen, Studio should go back to the original uncompressed AVI to create the best result. Of course this takes some time, but that is fine.

I just don't understand why the uncompressed and unaltered (in Studio) AVI would show signs of compression when outputting uncompressed. In fact, what I have described above (in my not so technical way) is very similar to how Ulead describes their Media Studio product.

Am I the only one who can import an uncompressed AVI, output an uncompressed AVI, and see compression artifacts?

What is your import codec setting in Source, and how is the media being imported into Studio?

I am not familiar with an "import codec setting". I just select the video by choosing the browse button, drop it on the timeline, then make movie. Is there a step I'm missing?

The timeline has specific 'properties' that can be set in the source tab. I do not  recall an 'uncompressed YUV' setting in Studio. I will check later.

There is no uncompressed YUV option in Studio. That domain resides with upper level applications like Liquid.
Can you please set the description of the thumbnail view to "details". that should tell you what type of video file you are importing into Studio.

How does Liquid compare with Pinnacle Studio? I have been using Ulead Media Studio since it can handle the HD uncompressed no problem. But it does not work as naturally (to me) as Pinnacle Studio. Is Liquid like Studio with more features, or is it a totally different workflow?

I tried Studio 12 with my uncompressed source, uncompressed output, and had the same compression artifacts in the result. It may have been slightly better than 11, but the results were absolutely compressed somewhere along the way.

I was happy to see that they fixed the transitions. The fade in and out worked perfectly, whereas in 10 and 11 the fade jumped the video to the wrong spot.

But the fact that the compression artifacts are there in 10, 11, and now 12...I have to switch to Ulead. Ulead VideoStudio and MediaStudio both were able to output my uncompressed source 1000% the same as the input. Sorry Pinnacle. I really liked Studio.

Liquid can work with uncompressed.

You have never stated the source of your uncompressed video. Studio does not apprecably degrade the normal camera based sources that it imports.

I use a Philips data grade 31" CRT with the Liquid ProBOB and do not see any significant degrades with DV >AVI or HDV2 timelines.

When I first got Studio 11 I imported HDV2 from my camcorder, edited the shots and exported the result back to tape. It wasn't rendering AVCHD so everything was pretty quick apart from the realtime import and write back to tape.

 I've put the captured camera stream on a disc and played it back alongside the Studio edited tape on a plasma, switching sources between edited output replayed from the camera and disc replaying the HDV mpeg stream in a Playstation. Apart from 50i motion judder (PS is 60i), detailed still frames were identical.

 I think the only point about uncompressed HD, is if you have kit and Goliath storage to process and capture it, you might want to keep it uncompressed. But just to put some numbers on this, take a 1440 X1080 jpeg at around 160Kb. Open it up (uncompressed) and it will be 4.5Mb as bitmap pixels. 25 frames per second, that's a stream rate of 113Mb/s. That's nearly 500 Gb storage for an hours vid. and I bet you can't afford the computer to capture and stream it!

The only time Studio seems to decode and re-encode lossy is when you tell it to make movie output in a different format to the capture. So if you said make dvd and fit this movie to a disc, then you'ld expect a long movie to come out with more artefacts. Just 'make dvd' and you've dropped in quality.

Just rough figures, but I think that's why MPEG was invented!

As I stated in a post above, my source is uncompressed AVI (1920x1080) from film. The problem is I hear all the time "does not apprecably degrade" and "That's nearly 500 Gb storage for an hours vid."

They are both true, but not good enough reasons. My video could be 10-30 minutes, and yes it is huge in HD (about 80GB) I like it that way. And in Studio 9 and both of the Ulead products I tried - the output was pixel for pixel indentical. In Studio 10-12, I can see compression artifacts outputting in uncompressed RGB...maybe they are not "appreciable" but they are there.

Should we be satisfied with this mystery compression even though the chosen format is uncompressed? Then once output I can take it to my preferred encoding program and compress it again? How about again and again? I think Studio should be able to output without compressing the input (maybe with an option to improve or remove the compression) or state somewhere on their product that an internal compression is taking place.

OK I can see an important point here because many convert compressed to AVI and export to AVI for archive so they only get 1 set of decode errors if they need to go back and re-edit or export to something else.

 Here's a test I did on S11.1.2 (Sorry I don't have a reference uncompressed AVI source file). The scientific way to investigate possible codec errors like this (more strictly transfer or transcoding errors) is pass iterations of the file back through the codec and look for degradation after each pass.

I took the first sequence from the Studio MBYC sample (MPEG) and converted that to uncompressed AVI producing a file size of 1,143,641Kb. This of course has artefacts but is still ok for this test.

I then imported the file above and re-exported it an uncompresed AVI to a new file name. I repeated the import using the above AVI file to a third uncompresed file. I did not add any effects or transitions.

 Windows reported all three files dentical size. Then I compared all three files in a Hex editor. That was interesting, there were 129 byte differences between file 1 and 2 and 132 byte differences between files 1 and 3. That isn't a lot when you consider the lengths of the files. When I looked for the errors they were all in a contiguous section at the end of each file and not randomly distributed. I don't know the format for AVI files, but it's quite common to find file specific information in file headers or footers.

I haven't tried really big AVI files, so perhaps you could try repeating my method.

But on this simple test, S11.1.2 did appear to me to be lossless importing and exporting the same file in AVI uncompressed formats based on 3 iterations of the same short file. If you use this method rather than viewing pics, you will eliminate any issues connected with decoding and streaming. As far as I'm concerned, if the file bytes are the same after multiple passes then there is no compression change taking place. Once you add assets, clips, other effects and transitions things might change because then you are saying how well does the Studio codec deal with these for uncompressed AVI.

Your test was very interesting and useful. However, if yours was not compressed by studio the only conclusion I can come up with is that my input uncompressed AVI is somehow different than yours. Maybe my colorspace, framerate, filesize, or something else is one that Studio does not like...because my output shows artifacts.

But keep in mind that uncompressed means just that, no compression. The filesize should always remain about the same. Take 5 uncompressed frames, compress them, change the color, convert to MPEG, then back to uncompressed. The filesize should be the same because it was uncompressed, however it will show much artifacting.

kinglerch:

But keep in mind that uncompressed means just that, no compression. The filesize should always remain about the same. Take 5 uncompressed frames, compress them, change the color, convert to MPEG, then back to uncompressed. The filesize should be the same because it was uncompressed, however it will show much artifacting.

Would this be another test (or definition) of "no compression"?

• A 60-second video of a pure black background should be the same filesize as a 60-second video with lots of color and motion

After all, it's the same number of pixels, right?

That's right, and that's exactly the problem with Studio. Instead of getting an uncompressed output, Studio is outputting "uncompressed". The filesize is the same, but there are artifacts not previously in my source.

Perhaps I'm being a bit thick here, but an AVI file contains a stream of bytes which just represents pixel values and their colors with data for frame rate. There shouldn't really be any coding issue since an AVI stream is just bytes read into the graphics card. There are forms of 'compression' using RLE - but these are lossless, not like MPEG or AVCHD which is using all the interpolation and motion estimation tricks.

I took Studios demo file which was already compressed as MPEG2 and used this as the source. It's not just the file size that's important but the data within it. If colors are being somehow translated or converted then there would be thousands of bytes different when 2 files are compared byte for byte.

I found there were relatively few bytes different at the end of the AVI file.

Kinglerch, you have your own uncompressed files, so why not output one as AVI uncompressed in Studio using the same frame rate and res. as the input and compare the input and output files in Winhex like I did?

I don't know how anybody can stream HD as uncompressed AVI files. I tried it and the stream rate had to be about 350Mb/s. That's far too high for any of my drives and even 4Gb installed memory isn't going to go that far for cacheing.

 

In uncompressed form, the AVI content (colors, etc) does not change the filesize. I could try other (probably poor) explanations, but that is the bottom line.

When I tried to output the AVI file in uncompressed form in Studio, I got an uncompressed file...but it had artifacts. This meant that Studio used some sort of internal compression before re-outputting it in an uncompressed format.

I have been using Ulead MediaStudio and it deals with HD uncompressed very simply. It creates a proxy (alias) AVI for the HD AVI in a very small compressed form. This way you can do all your editing with a quick, compressed, temporary version. Then when you create your uncompressed output, MediaStudio goes back to the original HD uncompressed for the best possible output.

I am not shilling for Ulead. In fact, I much prefer the workflow of Pinnacle Studio. But this compression problem has existed for the last 3 versions of Studio, and I hope they find some way to fix it...otherwise, I have no choice but to use Ulead.

I don't know if this would help, but change the project format to HD 1080 or 1280. Create a new test project. I just tried it and it seems ok.

DOES THIS WORK ??? Sorry to shout, but I have been butting my head up against this problem for months, to the extent that I have gone and bought a Macbook under the mistaken apprehension that iMovie etc could handle uncompressed footage....

 

Let's get this absolutely clear - are you saying that Studio 12 allows you to set a project format of 1080 or 1280, and that you can import, edit and export uncompressed HD footage with NO compression artefacts visible, ie each frame in your final cut video is IDENTICAL to its original frame (notwithstanding filters etc) and the perceptible quality is exactly the same ???