Soldato
- Joined
- 14 Mar 2011
- Posts
- 5,438
First time posting in this section I think - hello!
Couple of questions which have come up in the course of a video project I'm editing, it's for a gaming youtube channel (yes *yawn* another one, but that's besides the point!). So...
1. I sourced some intro music from a royalty-free site, downloaded it and extracted a couple of bars to use in the intro from the song in Audacity. I've then also done some frequency isolation on it to extract some key sounds like the kick, snare etc. and used some plugins alongside the "Bake sound to F-curves" option in Blender (which is what I'm editing in) to drive some animations in the intro sequence.
All fine and dandy... however when I did a test render I noticed that the audio sounds just awful, I mean really awful - horrible over-compressed and saturated sounding. I hadn't realised but I think the downloaded file is an .mp3 (so not lossless) and I suspect that's probably the issue - recompressing the audio when rendering. Does that sound correct?
I went back to the author's page to see if they offered a lossless download instead of the .mp3 and they do (a .wav) but it looks like they want $40 for it, which seems odd (why say the music is free to use in video projects as long as the original author is credited, and then not offer a lossless download?). But I already spent a bit of time getting the audio + animations sync'd up to this particular track so I'd rather not start again. Is there anything I can do? If I transcode the file from .mp3 to .wav in Audacity could that "trick" the rendering into not over-compressing it? (I know I won't gain any fidelity back by transcoding obviously)
p.s. my render audio settings are "AAC" codec, 384 for bitrate which sounds perfectly good quality for the (lossless) game + voice audio after rendering.
2. I have an image which is being used as the background for the video intro - it's pretty much just a flat top to bottom colour gradient image. However in some of my test renderings of the intro sequence it kind of almost looks like there is some artifacting or almost like a striping effect which changes randomly frame-to-frame. It's clearly also related to the video compression as it changes if I mess with the encoding settings.
I was planning to go with H.264 in an .mp4 container, with AAC audio as described above, my other key settings are FPS: 60, GOP: 30, Video Bitrate: 15,000... but with this the effect seems worse than if I keep the same settings but use Xvid in a .avi container. (Although I must confess I don't fully understand why there seem to be 2 settings for the codec/container in places... like you seem to be able to select "Xvid" for the encoding and "H.264" for the container
).
Can anyone shed any light on either of the above for me? Or if anything above sounds completely wrong or like a bad idea any tips or suggestions would be a huge help!
Couple of questions which have come up in the course of a video project I'm editing, it's for a gaming youtube channel (yes *yawn* another one, but that's besides the point!). So...
1. I sourced some intro music from a royalty-free site, downloaded it and extracted a couple of bars to use in the intro from the song in Audacity. I've then also done some frequency isolation on it to extract some key sounds like the kick, snare etc. and used some plugins alongside the "Bake sound to F-curves" option in Blender (which is what I'm editing in) to drive some animations in the intro sequence.
All fine and dandy... however when I did a test render I noticed that the audio sounds just awful, I mean really awful - horrible over-compressed and saturated sounding. I hadn't realised but I think the downloaded file is an .mp3 (so not lossless) and I suspect that's probably the issue - recompressing the audio when rendering. Does that sound correct?
I went back to the author's page to see if they offered a lossless download instead of the .mp3 and they do (a .wav) but it looks like they want $40 for it, which seems odd (why say the music is free to use in video projects as long as the original author is credited, and then not offer a lossless download?). But I already spent a bit of time getting the audio + animations sync'd up to this particular track so I'd rather not start again. Is there anything I can do? If I transcode the file from .mp3 to .wav in Audacity could that "trick" the rendering into not over-compressing it? (I know I won't gain any fidelity back by transcoding obviously)
p.s. my render audio settings are "AAC" codec, 384 for bitrate which sounds perfectly good quality for the (lossless) game + voice audio after rendering.
2. I have an image which is being used as the background for the video intro - it's pretty much just a flat top to bottom colour gradient image. However in some of my test renderings of the intro sequence it kind of almost looks like there is some artifacting or almost like a striping effect which changes randomly frame-to-frame. It's clearly also related to the video compression as it changes if I mess with the encoding settings.
I was planning to go with H.264 in an .mp4 container, with AAC audio as described above, my other key settings are FPS: 60, GOP: 30, Video Bitrate: 15,000... but with this the effect seems worse than if I keep the same settings but use Xvid in a .avi container. (Although I must confess I don't fully understand why there seem to be 2 settings for the codec/container in places... like you seem to be able to select "Xvid" for the encoding and "H.264" for the container
).Can anyone shed any light on either of the above for me? Or if anything above sounds completely wrong or like a bad idea any tips or suggestions would be a huge help!
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