I am working on making short software tutorials, each video is 1-2 minutes long with no audio. Having never used any type of video editor before I found Shotcut to be surprisingly easy to figure out. But I cant seem to get the quality I expect. Since these are not heavy 4K movies I am making, but simply short screen recordings of me clicking around on a webpage, I expected the quality to be crystal clear. After trying to upload to Youtube and Vimeo, the videos are blurry and not very nice to look at.
Does this have something to do with the import/export settings in Shotcut? Or is it related to the screen recorder I am using? Or perhaps the quality is reduced when uploading to youtube/Vimeo?
what screen recorder are you using becase it can depend on the screen recorder and your quality on the codec tab or the resolution or the deinterlacer or interpolation. shotcut automatically chooses the settings so you may need to change them
Thank you! I managed to get much better quality on the youtube upload by using your suggested settings. Except for the codec, when I tried h264_amf, it simply wouldn’t export, it stopped at 1 % finished. When I changed codec back to default libx264 it worked fine.
Another thing that surprised me was that the source quality was better when recording on my laptop screen, instead of my external screen.
I’m wondering why you suggested 85%? Would not 100% produce a better result in terms of quality?
What I’ve noticed is that when you turn hardware rendering on, and after clicking the configure button, Shotcut ticks the codecs available. Maybe amf isn’t one of them. That’s all I can think of.
Greater than 97% with H.264 and possibly HEVC produces a file that is not playable in some media players and is discouraged (same goes for lossless/H.264) unless you understand that limitation. With that said, anything over something like 85% and less than 99% is commonly considered visually lossless if not truly lossless. This means, you are not really gaining much improvement if your goal is to share it on YouTube.
Maybe amf isn’t one of them.
Of course, that depends on your hardware. “amf” for AMD, “nvenc” for NVIDIA, and “qsv” for Intel.
Thank you for the explanation. That helps, so why are all of the H264 profiles’ default quality settings set at 59%? Is that a minimum acceptable quality?
Always keep in mind that YouTube, Vimeo et al. resample/transcode all uploaded video. There is no way around that, period. So you lose a generation right there.
I’ve had good luck with HuffYUV. It gives accurate colors and performs well. The upload will be long. Just start your upload and go to bed and let it upload while you sleep.
You can torture test an encoder by using Shotcut to generate some white noise and see how it plays back in a video player such as VLC.