Poor quality after cropping and resizing

[Sempervivum]

Hallo,

with my last video I encountered the problem that the quality after cropping and resizing ist very poor.

The original video is Full HD. I cropped an area of aspect ratio 4:3 and about 70 % height and checked "Zoom to cropped area". When exporting I choosed a size of 640x480 px.

 

This is a screenshot of the resulting video:

 

 

You can see that the picture is strongly pixelated.

 

For comparison I did the same procedure with my image processing software (Paintshop X5):

 

 

You can see that the quality is much better.

 

This is a link to the video created with Videopad:

http://www.ulrichbangert.de/heimat/mediaelement/2014-10-03_Braunschweig_Oktoberfest_Feuerwerk.php

 

Is there a way to improve this?

 

I'm aware that rezising always results in a loss of quality but Paintshop X5 shows that the result can be much better than Videopad achieves.

 

Best regards - Ulrich

[borate]

Did you experiment with the ENCODER OPTIONS for Mp4? (Click the button to see the options box.)

[Sempervivum]

Did the export resolution match that of the original clip?

No, the original clip was Full HD and I exported to 640x480.

Did you experiment with the ENCODER OPTIONS for Mp4

I used H264 at a quality level of 20 which produces an excellent quality in other videos. The poor quality is already visible in the sequence preview of Videopad, thus it is no issue of exporting

[Nationalsolo]

Hi

 

I just checked out a few settings using a similar firework clip of mine in 1080 MPEG4 H246.

Using crop to reduce the frame to 4:3 with zoom and about 70% height and your settings for output, the resulting output did look pixelated.

I suggest that you still crop to your 4:3 ratio (if that is what you want) but output at a larger 4:3 setting using custom resolution of 1600 x 1200 (at least as near to the original as possible) instead of 640 x 480. I think you should find the result much better.

If you still find it pixellated more than you would like then set the quality value lower...say around 10. It will lengthen the rendering time however...always a tradeoff.

 

Note that If your initial clip was 16:9 and you crop to 4:3 you will have bars to each side of the output as VP still outputs your image in a 16:9 frame.

 

Nat

 

Nat

[borate]

I exported a 1280X720 to 640X480 and couldn't see any difference on the PC monitor. However, I did not crop.

Try "10" for quality, as Nat suggests.

 

I wouldn't put much emphasis on the preview res. Change it under OPTIONS|DISPLAY. Export is what counts, of course.

[Sempervivum]

Thank you for further answers and to Einstein for testing it so detailed.

In the meantime I installed and tested Magix Video Deluxe and the result is much better:

 

 

Procedure was the same: Cropping to about 70%, "Fill image" checked, Export to 640x480.

 

Poor performance of Videopad! I liked and buyed it because it is so easy to handle but no I encounter its limits.

[borate]

That's a shame. I ran another test on the video mentioned in my earlier post, this time cropping as shown...

 

Here is the original...

 

Here is the crop...

 

And here is the NCH return policy...

http://www.nch.com.au/general/refund.html

[ConnorBrendish]

I found that the "Zoom to cropped region" option on the Crop effect was not using a smooth image scaling method. The next version will do a bilinear scale.

 

In the mean time you could get around this issue by not checking the "Zoom to cropped region" option and instead applying an additional Scale effect after the Crop to scale it up manually.

[Sempervivum]

Thank you for this reply.

 

The next version will do a bilinear scale.

That reads good! Can you already tell when the next version will be available?

 

instead applying an additional Scale effect after the Crop to scale it up manually.

This was a little complicated as my cropping region was at the bottom, so I had to apply a "Position" effect additionally. But the result is fine!

 

Are you a member of the development team?