HandBrake

Hello

I'm very impressed with the quality which Handbrake delivers. I'm using handbrake for a long time and it's a very easy program to produce high-quality MP4's.

For my work I'm using Premiere CS5 since last month. I have a lot of movieclips which show the company logo in the right corner. When I output the clips to MP4 using the builtin codec H.264 (from Mainconcept), the result is quite good.

As an experiment, I exported some clips from Premiere to Uncompressed avi (HB doesn't support Lagarith / Huffyuv) to process them with HB (default: Normal) profile.
WOW, the company logo in the right corner looks much sharper!!! (not the fuzzy, bleed-like edge with the Premiere export)

How is this possible?
I've spent quite some time to try almost every H.264 parameter in Premiere but I can't get the static logo in the corner to look as sharp as the export from HB.

Anyone can tell me which magic parameter Handbrake has under the hood?

Regards.

It's no parameter, it's an entirely different encoder (x264 vs MainConcept).

Try the High Profile preset for even better (quality per bit) compression.

The stripped-down version of Mainconcept in Premiere simply can't match x264's quality or compression efficiency. Mainconcept's advanced encoders can, but they're not commonly available in consumer video applications.

x264 is the leading commonly available encoder, and can easily match even specialized multi-thousand-dollar studio encoders at the bitrates most people encode at. But it doesn't get included in the more established consumer video apps, possibly because it's open source and licensing issues are involved (?).

... possibly because it's open source and licensing issues are involved (?).

Hopefully that will change ...
http://mailman.videolan.org/pipermail/x ... 07508.html

Thanks for the info!

It's unbelievable that this free encoder/codec is superior to commercial encoders. I even tried Broadcast Suite from Maincincept and couldn't get the sharpness of text which Handbrake (x264) delivers...I'm very impressed....

Any advice what's the best way to encode my Premiere clips with HB?
I now export them as Uncompressed AVI files and process them with Handbrake because HB doesn't support Huffyuv or Lagarith. Are there other intermediate codecs I can use to import the lossless clips into Handbrake?

Regards.

flat_be wrote:Any advice what's the best way to encode my Premiere clips with HB?
I now export them as Uncompressed AVI files and process them with Handbrake because HB doesn't support Huffyuv or Lagarith

Handbrake uses ffmpeg for decoding input and it appears ffmpeg claims to support Huffyuv but I've not tested it myself and the devil is always in the details, it may not handle ALL cases.

You've not mentioned what version of Handbrake you use, if it's 0.9.4 it's probably worthwhile to check the latest nightly to see if it can read your Huffyuv files, see the top of all forums for instructions and download link. It has a much newer ffmpeg (which may have added Huffyuv), improved h264 encoder and many bugfixes.

flat_be wrote:Anyone can tell me which magic parameter Handbrake has under the hood?

x264 + some amazing developers.

But "Shhhhh," don't tell anyone, its a secret.

tlindgren wrote:You've not mentioned what version of Handbrake you use, if it's 0.9.4 it's probably worthwhile to check the latest nightly to see if it can read your Huffyuv files, see the top of all forums for instructions and download link.

+1

It's entirely possible that the issues you're having with HuffyYUV is due to a bug related to some ffmpeg decoders that was fixed last April.

http://trac.handbrake.fr/changeset/3262