On Sat, Nov 13, 2010 at 8:36 AM, Eli Billauer <[email protected]> wrote: > The truth is that I don't understand why people are so uptight about having > their original footage going directly into Cinelerra. I mean, it's nice that > Cinelerra supports several video formats, but somehow I'm only really calm > when I feed it with MJPEGs. Meaning, take the original video, convert it to > MJPEG using ffmpeg or mencoder and then use that file with Cinelerra.
The vast majority of digital video, uless you're a studio using cameras that cost more than most cars, is 8 bit. 8 bit is not quite enough dynamic resolution to avoid reasonably easy to see artifacts, one reason that pro production people are so concerned with dither and de-banding filters in production renders. The problem with MJPEG is that it uses a different color space than all other video formats, and the conversion isn't lossless. Going from any of the MPEG formats to MJPEG increases banding and quantization noise, and it is noticable. Every conversion from one format to another, even the uncompressed formats, is doing lossy colorspace conversion. You lose a fraction of a bit (out of only eight bits!) on every colorspace conversion. That doesn't even get into the fact that converting from lossy format to lossy format is also adding quantization noise and losing detail because each conversion is... well... lossy. There's no consumer camera out there using a bitrate high enough to be completely transparent as it is, and now conversion... plus conversion... plus conversion... each genration is losing more and more. Oh, and Cinelerra's colorspace conversion code is also subtly wrong at practically every step, so you're losing more than you would be otherwise because of that too... Monty _______________________________________________ Cinelerra mailing list [email protected] https://init.linpro.no/mailman/skolelinux.no/listinfo/cinelerra
